Night Into Day
- 2 hours ago
- 8 min read
The thing changing the world this year is...batteries.
by Bill McKibben
Mar 30, 2026, https://substack.com/home/post/p-192627249
Reprinted by permission. Edited for length.
Today, I’m going to talk about what technology can do when we aim not for destruction but for progress. In particular I’m going to talk about batteries. If the last three years were about solar panels and wind turbines, this year—and the next few years—are going to be just as much about the storage systems for the energy they produce.
Back when the car was invented, people understood immediately that in most ways electric vehicles were superior to their gasoline counterparts—quieter, cleaner, cheaper to run. The trouble was always the battery: it was hard to store more than about fifty miles of driving, whereas a tank full of gas was energy deeply concentrated: 20 gallons could drive you Boston to New York no problem. In 1914 Henry Ford confirmed that he was working with Thomas Edison to develop a cheap electric car. “The problem so far has been to build a storage battery of light weight which would operate for long distances without recharging,” he said—and he never figured it out. In fact, the range of electric vehicles stayed pretty much the same throughout the century. Some people had ideas, but they didn’t get too far, at least not quickly. If you really want to feel sad, here’s the story, from Charles J. Murray, of the original lithium-ion battery.
The first iteration, developed by M. Stanley Whittingham at Exxon in 1972, didn’t get far. It was manufactured in small volumes by Exxon, appeared at an electric vehicle show in Chicago in 1977, and served briefly as a coin cell battery. But then Exxon dropped it.
But others kept beavering away—an Oxford boffin, John Goodenough, figured out some new chemistries in the 1980s, and a Sony scientist, Akira Yoshino, figured out how to make it much safer, allowing his company to launch the first commercial version in 1991. By 1996, they were partnering with Nissan on the first EV with a lithium-ion battery, good for about 124 miles of range. (In 2019, Whittingham, Goodenough, and Yoshino shared the Nobel Prize in Physics; at 97, Whittingham was its oldest recipient).
Since then, steady improvements in lithium-ion batteries have been at the heart of the energy storage revolution. They’ve gotten much much much cheaper, and much much much lighter, so now it’s not at all odd to have cars that can drive from New York to Boston and back on a single charge. David Fickling has a good metric to show the progress: the price for storing four hours of electricity is now well below $100 a megawatt, even as oil surges above the $100-a-barrel line.
In recent years those gains have been coming fast and furious, but it’s not just lithium. The Chinese (who are the masters of the battery game) have figured out how to do the same tricks with sodium: Marija Maisch was reporting in January that these salt-based batteries are nearing price and performance parity, if not for cars then for utility scale batteries.
The first commercial utility-scale battery energy storage facilities are now being constructed and commissioned, including projects at the 100 MWh scale.
Meanwhile, the possibility of a solid-state battery seems to be becoming a probability. I reported in January on the news that another Finnish team had announced they’d be producing motorcycles with this kit before the first quarter of the year was out. The announcement was met with skepticism, which has continued. But the reason for the excitement is clear. As Dan Neil said last week in the Wall Street Journal, a battery like this would end once and for all the talk of “range anxiety” that still prevents some from jumping in the EV parade.
The talk of the CES 2026 in Las Vegas, in January, Donut Lab says its battery has an energy density of 400Wh per kilogram—roughly twice that of typical lithium iron phosphate (LFP) batteries in production. The Donut battery can charge to full in five minutes, says the company; has a practically unlimited lifespan (100,000 charging cycles); is unaffected by heat and cold (-30C to 100C); and contains no rare earth, precious metals or flammable liquid electrolytes. With all that, Donut Lab says it will be cheaper to produce than conventional lithium-ion batteries…
If, as a thought experiment, we plug Donut’s nominal values into the battery pack of a current-model year Tesla Model 3 RWD Long Range, for example, we get a midsize EV sedan with a nominal range of 870 miles, compared to 363 miles for the Donut-free version.
No one knows yet if Donut Labs has cracked the case—it’s released a series of engineering reports, but according to Fred Lambert at Electrek they haven’t yet proved their most consequential claims of energy density and long life. But even if the Finns don’t pull it off in 2026, similar solid-state batteries are not far off. The big Chinese firms—CATL, and BYD—have in recent weeks announced that they’ve begun testing solid-state batteries in cars that can go 800 miles on a charge. As Peter Thompson reports,
Changan Automobile said it will begin trial installations before the end of Q3 2026. With an energy density of 400 Wh/kg, the company claims its “Golden Bell” all-solid-state battery can deliver over 1,500 km (932 miles) CLTC driving range.
Chery, another leading Chinese car manufacturer, revealed its all-solid-state battery that can also achieve a range of over 1,500 km (932 miles) during its “Battery Night” event on Wednesday.
And though China has the lead, it’s not just China.
In September, Mercedes drove a modified EQS over 1,200 km (745 miles) using 106 Ah solid-state battery cells supplied by US-based Factorial Energy. Factorial launched the first commercial solid-state battery program in the US through a collaboration with Karma Automotive earlier this year.
In fact, America is not trailing China as badly in batteries as in some other technologies. Though the GOP managed to cancel most of the money in Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act, significant quantities made it out the door before Trump took office, and it has bankrolled, among other things, a useful number of battery factories, enough that, as Julian Spector reported last week,
“the country has made surprising strides in making those energy storage systems itself, rather than depending on imports from China.”
Already, the U.S. has enough capacity to meet demand for finished grid battery enclosures. That involves connecting battery cells to power electronics, controls, and safety equipment in weatherproof steel containers that are ready to install. By the end of this year, the U.S. will also achieve self-sufficiency in a higher-value part of the supply chain: the battery cells themselves. It’s a major industrial coup that is bringing thousands of high-tech manufacturing jobs to communities across the country.
“For the first time, the United States now has the capacity to supply 100% of domestic energy storage project demand with American-built systems,” said Noah Roberts, executive director of the U.S. Energy Storage Coalition, on a Wednesday press call. “That is a fundamental shift from where we were just a year and a half ago, when the majority of battery storage systems were imported.”
And here’s where things start to get really interesting, because those batteries are suddenly pouring into utility electric grids, and in the process making already-valuable solar and wind farms all the more powerful. In essence, they’re turning nighttime into sunny noon.
Which is why now is the time to scroll back up to the top of this article, and look at the graph there, courtesy of Nick Fulghum at Ember. It shows California’s electric grid yesterday. The huge yellow blob in the middle represents solar generation, the absolutely dominant source of supply from about 8 a.m. to 6:30 p.m. when it drops very quickly to zero. This is a phenomenon called sunset, which used to be the main argument against solar power.
But now look at the purple blob to its right—that’s battery storage coming online as the sun goes down. Those batteries spent the afternoon soaking up sunshine—cheap cheap sunshine—and now they’re distributing it back to the grid. As Californians get home from work, turn on lights, cook dinner, start charging their EVs, and run their frozen margarita machines (I may have an idealized idea of California life), batteries are providing most of the power, outstripping imported power (much of which is renewable too), natural gas, and other sources like nuclear. (You’ll notice wind picking up too, as the onshore breezes start to blow from the Pacific).
This is entirely different from how this graph would have looked even a year or two ago. Here’s how Fulghum explained it on Linked In, with some numbers that bear looking at
At 7pm, batteries reached 12.3 GW of output, meeting 42.8% of grid demand!
To put that kind of output during peak demand hours into perspective, it's equivalent to the output from:
15-20 combined-cycle gas plants
6 Hoover dams
More than the all-time peak demand of Portugal or Greece
And it's not just a short peak anymore. Batteries stayed above 20% of grid demand from 5.50pm to 9.35pm, almost four hours, and above
And here’s the thing: this has all happened in the blink of an eye
More than 90% of California's battery fleet was built in the last five years. Total deployment is now over 17 GW, up from just 1.3 GW in 2020.
This could happen anywhere in the U.S., and in the world—it is happening in much of the world, especially China, of course. As Ben Payton points out in Reuters, the race is on for “round-the-clock” solar power. He cites a big project in the UAE, which (assuming it escapes the current rounds of insane bombing) is
combining the solar array with a massive amount of battery capacity, the aim is to store enough power generated during daylight hours so that a minimum of 1 GW of electricity – enough to power between 500,000 and one million homes – is available 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.
Across the world in Chile
On the other side of the world, Chile is looking to scale battery storage. The South American country has 9 GW of storage capacity in operation, construction or testing, with a further 27 GW in the development pipeline, according to the industry association ACERA.
“Chile is a very long country, so we rely very much on transmission to move energy from the north, where we have a lot of solar, and also from the very south, where we have a lot of wind,” says María Teresa Ruiz-Tagle, executive director of the Corporate Leaders Group for Climate Action (CLG) Chile. “So, to have battery storage projects in different points of the country could also help the system.”
She adds that storage is key to tackling the problem of the electricity grid being unable to absorb solar and wind power at times of peak generation. This is a growing problem globally, including in Chile. In 2024, 19% of all solar and wind electricity generated in the country had to be curtailed.
And the technological miracles are only beginning. For instance, Christopher Mims reported last week in the Journal on a new round of “thermal batteries” that store solar power as heat instead of electricity, perfect for use in high-temperature industrial processes….
Meanwhile, last week in Australia researchers announced the first fast-charging “quantum battery.”
…Do I understand a quantum battery? I do not, really. But I get the general drift, which is that we have world-changing technical prowess coming quickly online from many directions, which could—if we devoted all our efforts to deploying it as fast as possible—give us some chance in the climate fight.
It would also give us some hope of liberating ourselves from that old energy storage medium, the barrel of oil, before more people die in the ugly wars being fought over its ownership. But of course that would challenge the power of the richest people in America, which is why our current government will keep funneling money to Lockheed instead, so it can figure out how to kill girls playing volleyball with tungsten pellets.
We have to make a huge choice about where to point our intelligence, our technology, our hopes. November 3 can’t come fast enough.