That Feeling When AI actually saves energy
By
Kiana Kazemi
At Harvest, we spend a lot of our time thinking about thermal batteries—how to store heat, move it around, and use it more efficiently. But every now and then, a breakthrough in another corner of the battery world makes us raise our eyebrows.
That’s how we felt reading about the latest leap in zinc-ion batteries. Researchers at Brookhaven National Laboratory and Stony Brook University have just achieved a remarkable feat: they used artificial intelligence to decode why these water-based batteries perform so well in extremely salty conditions. Not only does this unlock a safer, cheaper, and more stable way to store clean electricity, it opens the door to storage that’s less toxic, less flammable, and more scalable.
Now, you may now be asking: why should I care?
Energy storage is what makes clean power useful when the sun isn’t shining and the wind isn’t blowing. Whether it’s in a grid-scale battery, a home heating system, or a neighborhood of all-electric buildings, storing energy well is the linchpin of decarbonization.
The research focused on how zinc-ion batteries behave in a concentrated zinc chloride solution (which you might know as saltwater.) The team used AI to simulate what happens at the atomic level—something that would’ve taken years to compute the old-fashioned way. What they found was deceptively simple: the salty solution keeps water molecules from breaking apart into hydrogen gas, a common failure point in aqueous batteries. With that reaction blocked, the batteries stay more stable, more efficient, and more powerful.
And zinc brings big perks. It's cheap, widely available, nonflammable, and—unlike lithium—not mined under intense geopolitical or ethical scrutiny. It’s also far less likely to catch fire. All that makes zinc-ion tech a compelling candidate for grid-scale storage, emergency backup, or anywhere reliability and safety come first.
The common thread with Harvest is the smarter storage. Whether it’s zinc batteries stabilizing the grid or a Harvest Pod optimizing your heat pump’s energy use, we’re seeing a new era of flexibility and resilience take shape. Slowly but surely, the building blocks of a resilient, reliable grid are coming into place
This isn’t the last word on battery innovation—far from it. But it’s one more sign that clean energy isn’t just catching up - it’s leaping ahead.
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