"A new type of battery storage is about to be deployed on the Midwestern grid for the first time," reports Electrek: Sodium-ion battery storage manufacturer Peak Energy and global energy company RWE Americas will pilot a passively cooled sodium-ion battery system in eastern Wisconsin on the Midcontinent Independent System Operator network — the first sodium-ion deployment on that grid. Peak Energy says its technology is specifically designed for grid-scale storage and leverages sodium-ion chemistry's inherent stability. Unlike many lithium-ion systems, sodium-ion batteries don't require active cooling and can operate over a wide temperature range without losing performance. That simpler design could make a meaningful dent in the cost of storing electricity. According to Peak Energy, its system cuts the lifetime cost of stored energy by an average of $70 per kilowatt-hour. That's roughly half the total cost of a typical battery system today. The company says it achieves those savings by removing energy-hungry cooling systems, eliminating routine maintenance requirements, and reducing the need to overbuild storage capacity to account for battery degradation over time... If the Wisconsin pilot proves successful, it could open the door to wider adoption of sodium-ion batteries for large-scale energy storage across the US.

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The UK's science minister is announcing details of a five-year, £2.5 billion investment in nuclear fusion, reports the Times of London, "including building one of the world's first prototype fusion power plants in Nottinghamshire and developing a UK sector projected to employ 10,000 people by 2030." Despite the potentially transformative impact of fusion, which in theory could provide limitless clean energy and create a £12 trillion global market, no country has managed to use this fledgling technology to generate useable electricity... [T]he UK is backing a spherical tokamak design... investing an initial £1.3 billion into a prototype fusion power plant called Step (Spherical Tokamak for Energy Production) on the site of a decommissioned coal-fired power station at West Burton in Nottinghamshire. Paul Methven, chief executive of the government-owned UK Industrial Fusion Solutions, which is delivering the Step project, said the aim is to get the reactor operating early in the 2040s. "It's quite an aggressive programme," he said. "We need to show that we can achieve genuine 'wall socket' energy — which has not been done before." On Monday, [science minister] Vallance will also announce £180 million for a facility in Culham, Oxfordshire, to manufacture tritium fuel and £50 million for training 2,000 scientists and engineers in fusion-related disciplines. The government is also buying a £45 million fusion-dedicated AI supercomputer called Sunrise to model plasma physics. Scientists at the UK Atomic Energy Authority last year developed an AI model that can rapidly simulate how the ultra-hot fuel in a fusion power plant will behave, cutting calculations that previously took days down to seconds... Vallance will also announce new support and collaboration for the many fusion, robotics, engineering and AI start-ups working in Britain, to develop a strong supply chain for a new fusion sector. One of those companies, Tokamak Energy, which spun out from the UK Atomic Energy Authority in 2009, has already built a smaller reactor that has informed the Step design. In March 2022, it became the first private organisation in the world to surpass 100 million degrees Celsius in its reactor.

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