The year is 2025. There was a bad storm last night, but it was okay because you have one of the new batteries that became popular recently. Since the local hospitals and schools started installing them, there have been no long-term power outages at all… in fact, critical infrastructure is healthier, and solar and wind power dominate as sources of electricity across the country.

Energy now costs less across the board. Businesses and private customers have seen their energy bills plummet. That’s because the solar and wind power that people make on-site is finally being stored for future use at scale, including when it isn’t being generated. Best of all, you finally got a new car. Not just any car, an EV… and it was cheap. All this thanks to the new batteries.

If we can solve one major problem, we’ll quantum-leap toward this future. The problem is long-duration energy storage. Basically, we can’t get renewable energy off the ground properly, at the scale we need to, until we have reliable long-term energy storage. That way, we can hold onto the power we make for on-demand usage. It’s like this… right now, we’re trying to collect water from the ocean using a sifter.

Long-Duration Energy Storage (LDES) technologies store energy over long periods for future dispatch. Automatically thinking about lithium for LDES? Fair enough… that’s probably for a few good reasons. After all, lithium has been dominant in the space for years… it’s “tried-and-true”, and you can’t argue with that. Also, it’s abundant… in a manner of speaking. Finally, lithium can store a lot of energy, which is the point.

Today, we’re here to tell you… that may be played out. For two main reasons: how painful it can be to mine lithium and issues around labor. Lithium is under fire for what some see as questionable labor practices… things that, honestly, they see as unbecoming to the space. Maybe uncouth would be the fitting word, and that’s not good when you have something that can be difficult to mine… regardless of how “abundant” it is.

So… how do we solve this problem? Maybe it’s time to rethink what we see as evil, because the answer to our problem may be CO2 itself, in the form of a CO2 battery. There’s nothing worse than looking a blessing right in the face and choosing not to see it, which we may be doing with carbon dioxide. Let’s stop seeing nails in need of a hammer everywhere, so we can see ourselves turning climate solutions into dollars.

Let’s talk about what a CO2 battery is, because the possible benefits could be the stuff of fantasy. First, they could help us solve our unreliable grid problems. Lives are on the line when we don’t have power. Biden is putting legislation in place to help with this problem further by bringing high-speed, high-bandwidth internet to every nook and cranny of the United States. CO2 could be key to decentralized power.

Apples to apples, per MWh, a CO2 battery could end up running you about the same as a meal for two at a fast-food joint. Compare that to lithium, which is more in the ballpark of a dinner for two at a nice restaurant (yes, we like to measure money in meals). And let’s talk about the elephant in the room, finally… CO2 batteries could be carbon negative. Lithium should run scared if this goes down.

And maybe it is… via an Italian startup called Energy Dome, which is entering the US market with the world’s first CO2 battery. There’s a clue to the secret sauce in their name. Their self-contained system takes CO2 gas, compresses it into a liquid, and stores it in a large, isolated dome. Then, when some power is needed, no problem. It heats the CO2 back up, converting it back into a gas, and that powers turbines for electricity. Done.

Some consider Energy Dome’s CO2 battery system a breakthrough for LDES, guess we’re about to find out. We like the idea… we want to see lithium fight for its life, because folks will be driven to root out solutions to our energy perils. We can picture these batteries being deployed all over the world, since these batteries use steel and water alongside the CO2. You can’t say that about lithium. Come back next week, we’ll have more from the green tech space.