Rethink Energy Podcast

Flying cars are being brought to market by several major EV manufacturers in 2025 and 2026 - and their demand for weight efficiency will boost adoption of autonomous driving and all-solid-state batteries, even if those technologies are too expensive for standard EVs.Chinese OEMs have unveiled a new tranche of proton exchange membrane (PEM) electrolyzers as the SNEC exhbition - bringing cost-effective green hydrogen one step closer.Virtual Power plant adoption is heading towards a scale of perhaps 10% of grid generating capacity by 2030 and 20% by 2040 - with a mutually reinforcing relationship between VPP adoption, Vehicle-to-Grid (V2G) payments, and EV market penetration likely to manifest in future.

With Republicans sabotaging renewables and Democrats bound to push out fossil fuels, nuclear stands to benefit as the 'least interfered with' option. President Trump has signed a new EO upping the Biden 2050 target of 200 GW, to 400 GW of nuclear power - to include 10 constructions beginning by 2030, and this is backed by data center hyperscalers, which combine massive future electricity demand growth and the necessary private funds to support nuclear projects. California curtailed almost 1 TWh of wind and solar in the month of April, even as batteries ramp up to discharge 10 GW each evening.The China Hydropower Research Institute has released a sweeping report into renewable energy capex - in which the most surprising finding is that compressed-air energy storage is cheaper upfront than lithium energy storage batteries, if there's a natural salt cavern to use - and scarcely more expensive even with artificial excavation.

Both the EV power battery industry and the energy storage industry have grown over 60% year-on-year in Q1, according to various statistics - but even a fourfold growth in demand could be acommodated by the existing production capacity of lithium, as the energy storage segment can respond to future raw material price hikes by adopting alternative chemistries like vanadium-flow and sodium-ion.

South Korea is to develop a 3.2 GW, $13 billion offshore wind complex - which will also require transmission expansions to deliver power to load centers.Poland's nuclear development deal with Bechtel and Westinghouse has been renewed - with as much as $51 billion and six reactors at stake, with wind and solar possibly insufficient as the main national energy strategy.The US' battery supply from China is obstructed by tariffs - while US and Indian manufacturing efforts have yet to reach anything like the necessary scale to replace China.

Spain's massive blackout vindicates the investments being made into synchronous condensers and grid-forming inverters in Australia and northern China. While an official post-mortem has not been released yet for Spain's blackout, South Australia's 2016 blackout may provide a close parallel - including the policies adopted afterwards to stop it from happening again.Thermal energy storage is being adopted at scale in China in order to provide heat to industry - with molten salt tanks installed in pilots at coal power plants.The solar industry's silver paste consumption is roughly equal in scale to the global silver shortage - we discuss the prospects of adopting alternatives to intensive silver paste use.

Australia's pumped hydro fleet now promises over 500 GWh of storage capacity - meaning the county is set to be a world leader (or leader of the West) on pumped hydro, mostly with 10-hour duration, just as it was a world leader on BESS adoption.President Trump has mauled the offshore wind industry by calling Empire Wind 1's approvals into question - in an even harsher move than we'd expected.Solar manufacturing is down 45% year-on-year, as output declines back towards the 600 GW "plateau" value of demand - which the world will struggle to accelerate beyond.

Silver paste usage in solar cell manufacturing remains at around 10 mg/W, or 10 tons per GW, and the global silver demand remains elevated at 20% higher than supply even since 2021 - with the solar industry accounting for 20% of all demand for silver worldwide. This is causing a constant increase in the price of the metal, which has doubled from pre-pandemic levels and is still rising. There are negative feedback mechanisms such as adoption of copper electroplating, and recycling of lower-purity waste, but there's a lot more room for price rises before these are worth implementing in a way which would seriously alter supply or demand. The same supply-demand gap and constant gradual price rises can be expected to persist for some time.

Trina Solar has announced a 3.1 square meter, 808-Watt silicon-perovskite tandem solar module, which with 26% efficiency is better than any module on the market today - but extra manufacturing cost and a shorter lifespan means the upcoming semiconductor is not across the finish line yet.Texas has adopted a power market reform under which 50% of new power plant development in the state to be "dispatchable" - which in this case is defined to mean gas, not batteries. Utilities and power plant owners not complying with the 50% requirement will have to pay a reliability fee as compliance.

Spain's utility Iberdrola is upgrading its pre-existing hydropower reservoirs to pumped hydro - a huge potential storage reservoir for Western Europe. The UK has announced it will expedite offshore wind permitting times, potentially halving lead times in the world's second-largest market for such projectsSome perovskite solar manufacturers have raised the funding they need to fund mass production and commercialisation - but many others haven't yet, in the context of economic uncertainty and a looming recession.

German elections have seen the Green Party sidelined and a centre-right government taking power - but this seemingly won't be enough to prompt a restoration of mothballed nuclear plants, even as German industry shrank for the seventh quarter in a row due to energy costs. The IEA has published a report on the lengthening lead times and supply bottlenecks for transmission infrastructure - this problem will shape Western energy deployments for decades to come, skewing investments in favour of distributed resources and microgrids. Flexible solar panel products are appearing using silicon cells, demonstrating that the limiting technology is more the encapsulation solution rather than the need for flexible semiconductors such as perovskite. HD KSOE is exploring the development of a Small Modular Reactor (SMR) built into a container ship - and floating nuclear could be useful off US coasts as well.

China will switch its renewable energy power projects over to market-based pricing from June 1st 2025, while also abolishing battery co-location requirements, following on from ever steeper time-of-day pricing, and a 2024 reform which introduced capacity payments for coal and gas plants. China's reform parallel the more gradual reforms cutting Feed-in tariffs and Net Metering across multiple Western markets. The Trump Administration intends to boost domestic oil and gas production and exports - this is bad news for renewable energy investments worldwide, as would a loosening of sanctions on Russia, but transmission is the main limiting factor in many mature markets anyway. Compressed-air energy storage (CAES) is being built out in artificial excavations in China at prices which aren't wholly worse than lithium-ion BESS, considering the relative youth of the technology. Perovskites and solid-state batteries face the same problem - the mainstream technologies of silicon PV and LFP batteries are already cheap and high quality, and are also still improving their quality, preventing a 'moving target' to the more innovative future replacement.

In this episode of Rethink Energy Talks, we're joined by Jorg Heinemann, CEO of Enervenue - whose nickel-hydrogen energy storage batteries promise 30,000-cycle lifespan, enduring draining to zero, partial discharge, and potentially scaling to up to 12 hours of storage duration. So this is a long-duration energy storage battery product, with manufacturing now being scaled up, but with other points of appeal too, such as being made in the US.