Clean Power For all the excitement over the next big thing in lithium-ion batteries, the simple fact is that plain old water is the only large scale, long duration energy storage medium available today in the US and in many other parts of the world.

What do you see when you imagine a zero-carbon future? Electric buses zipping by? Rolling hills covered with solar panels? Offshore wind farms towering over the sea? If batteries are part of your vision, good thinking. But there's a promising, if whimsical, piece of the renewable energy puzzle that might be missing from your mental picture: the world of gravity energy storage.

The crypto mining industry is thriving lately with more and more nations joining the bandwagon. Just last month, Bitmain, the world's leading manufacturer of mining hardware, opened what is supposedly the world's largest crypto mining farm. The 33,000-acre facility holds a capacity of 300 MW in total.

DENVER - It's become a cliche to compare today's energy storage market to where the solar industry was a certain number of years ago. But storage's trajectory differs from the early growth dynamics of solar power in a crucial respect: It transcends the geographic boundaries, dictated by sunshine and policy, that constrained solar's rise.

They are the mini-computers being installed in 30m UK homes and businesses in an £11bn programme that will allow the energy companies to remotely monitor our gas and electricity usage. But could smart meters also become the new spies in our homes, raising fresh fears about a surveillance society as they track our daily activities?