Most of our articles about green technologies often end with the same complaint: Where are the greenbacks? Profitability in the low-carbon, environment-first economy remains largely elusive. For example, everyone is suddenly interested in carbon capture after Elon Musk backed a $100 million XPRIZE for the best solution for mitigating emissions. But, as we’ve pointed out […]
Investing in lithium batteries is an easy-to-understand thesis. Electric cars use lithium batteries, so you’re investing in the Chevrons and Exxons of tomorrow by investing in companies that produce batteries. That’s a good theory, but it’s not so easily executed on. Do you invest in the raw materials like lithium? We’ve always advised against that, […]
In her award-winning documentary, The OxyContin Express, Mariana van Zeller showed the world the type of problems that fly under the radar in countries where everyone is consumed by politics. Now she’s back at it in a series called Trafficked. The first episode opens with her penetrating Jamaica’s multi-million-dollar scamming culture which preys on what they call […]
It seems everyone is chasing Elon Musk’s dream of electric vehicles in every garage, even as investors bet against the success of Tesla (TSLA) through short selling its stock. A big part of Musk’s strategy seems predicated on taking control of key parts of his supply chain, with energy storage obviously playing an outsized role. […]
We’ve recently begun the rather interesting exercise of going through and summarizing the more than 1,600 articles published on Nanalyze since we began waxing poetic almost seven years ago. We were surprised to see that when it comes to grid-scale storage, flow batteries just never really achieved the traction investors were looking for, with more […]
Back in 1969, the Apollo lunar module used 29 volt, 400 amp hour batteries during its historic moon landing. The cells responsible for the safe landing and subsequent return of the crew were 60 kg beasts with plenty of built-in redundancy to ensure the success of the mission. Today, you can order a battery pack with similar […]
We learned last month that we have about a dozen years or so left before this big blue ball goes up in flames. While we are stridently apolitical at Nanalyze, we also strongly believe in the power of science and technology to understand and tackle humanity’s biggest challenges (and to create a bit of wealth along […]
The term “grid energy storage” refers to the methods we use to store electricity at a large scale. One of the best examples of why you might want to store electricity is solar. When the sun shines, you’re making power, but when the sun sets, the power goes away. Why not use an energy storage solution […]
Elon Musk has dedicated a huge chunk of resources (not to mention a large area of the Nevada desert) to lithium-ion batteries, but even he thinks supercapacitors are the future of energy storage technology. Supercapacitors – also called supercaps or ultracapacitors – are similar to batteries in that they store energy through electrical charge and […]