77
‘World’s largest battery’ to provide 100-hour iron-air storage for Google data center
(interestingengineering.com)
this post was submitted on 01 Mar 2026
77 points (96.4% liked)
Technology
81996 readers
3912 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Every week we can read about some new & exotic chemical processes that can (maybe, hopefully 😇) be used for batteries... but "the iron and the rust", that is old.
So: Why haven't we heard of any iron-rust-batteries before?
Oh. Damn.
So, that's why, I guess. 50% sounds terrible.
Oops? Now we are in business again? Maybe, hopefully 😇
I really find it interesting.
It's also clever politics. Minnesota has the largest iron mining operations in the entire United States, so choosing iron as your core battery technology is a smart (albeit cynical) way to drum to some local support with the promise of bringing new demand back to the taconite mines.
Whether that will be strong enough to overcome the extreme negative sentiments around datacenter projects? Who knows...
I hope tf not.
Well, if you want to argue against it, you could use the above-mentioned 50% as your argument.
These 50% can be spelled out as "inefficiency".
These 50% mean that the whole thing needs to build twice as many wind turbines and twice as many solar fields in the first place. They need to generate twice the energy only for satisfying the inefficiency of their battery.
(No, it is not exactly true. They generate the better part of the wind and solar energy for feeding the data center, and only a fraction of the generated energy goes into the battery)
Hear hear.
The came out with vanadium batteries for some heavy industrial operations as well a number of years back.