Inside Europe’s high-tech scramble for better energy storage

A “metal sock” in the ground stuffed full of hydrogen. Vats of scorching sand. Huge weights moving very, very slowly up and down old mineshafts. Is this the future of energy? This menagerie of strange machines and heat-retaining vessels is poised to emerge across Europe as the continent seeks ways of storing the surplus energy produced by renewables. The UK, for example, wasted half a billion pounds’ worth of wind energy in 2021 because it had nowhere to store it. Without such storage, electricity must be used at the very moment it is generated. As wind energy continues to go…

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