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On 26 August 2026, a glacier collapse in Nepal's Langtang region dammed a mountain river with ice and rock. When the temporary dam failed, the surge travelled nearly 100 kilometres downstream, destroying homes, roads, a border highway, and several hydropower stations along the way.

What the Integrity Era of Nature Finance Means for Circular Energy Infrastructure Published as part of iQ-LOOP's Insights series. This week's Nature Premium newsletter — Elena Doms and Chris Winter's weekly read on natural capital markets — carried a headline worth sitting with: investors managing over €50 trillion in assets, through the Institutional Investors Group on Climate Change, have assessed UK nature markets and delivered a verdict. The foundations are there. The cap

Storing Surplus Renewable Energy in Aluminium — and Releasing It On Demand Published as part of iQ-LOOP's Insights series. On a windy day in Scotland, the grid can produce more clean electricity than the country knows what to do with — and pays wind farms to switch off rather than take it. Last year, more than 13% of Britain's potential wind generation was curtailed this way, costing billpayers over £1 billion, according to NESO, Britain's system operator. Its own forecasts p

Published as part of iQ-LOOP's Insights series. Every AI keynote this year has featured the same slide: soaring inference volumes, falling cost-per-token, a roadmap toward some greener, more efficient future. What none of them mention is where the electricity behind those tokens is actually coming from. Increasingly, in the United States, the answer is coal. The number nobody expected to go back up US coal-fired electricity generation rose 13% in 2025, according to the Energy

What physics tells us that mainstream economics forgot Published as part of iQ-LOOP's Insights series. Is it feasible for an economy to indefinitely expand on finite resources on our planet? It appears to be the type of inquiry a freshman might have, which a professor could dismiss. A recent dialogue between Nivi Jaswal-Wirtjes [1], and economist Professor Steve Keen [2] places that inquiry at the forefront, with ramifications for individuals engaged in energy, industry, or i

One of the curious things about Britain is that we can spend weeks complaining about the rain... Published as part of iQ-LOOP's Insights series. ...and then, a few months later, find ourselves under a hosepipe ban. It seems ridiculous. After all, the rain didn't disappear. We all remember it rather well. The problem wasn't that Britain ran out of water. The problem was that the water wasn't necessarily where it was needed, when it was needed, or in a form that could easily be

2026 A new peer-reviewed paper published in Advanced Energy Materials — authored by researchers at the University of Perugia, AIT Austria, and the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology's Helmholtz Institute Ulm — provides independent scientific validation of the core mechanism behind iQ-LOOP's platform: using aluminium as a circular carrier to store off-peak renewable electricity and release heat and hydrogen on demand. The paper highlights aluminium's exceptional volumetric ener

Every great leap in civilisation has begun with a breakthrough in how we store and move energy. Published as part of iQ-LOOP's Insights series. Wood tied settlement to the forest at its doorstep. Coal, moved by rail and by sea, let industry relocate to wherever capital and labour gathered, breaking the old link between power and place. Oil, carried by pipeline and tanker, built the first genuinely global energy market — and much of the last century's geopolitics along with it

For most of human history, energy didn't travel down a wire — it travelled as cargo. Coal, wood, and charcoal were carried to wherever heat or power was needed, then released on arrival. The electrical grid changed that: energy now moves instantly, but only where the wires reach, and only when the wires can carry the load. iQ-LOOP revives the older idea, with a circular, zero-carbon twist. iQ-LOOP's platform is made up of three components: (1) CREATE, (2) FuelPods and (3) RE

Published as part of iQ-LOOP's Insights series. A LinkedIn post by Prof. Steve Keen circulated widely this week, and it is worth engaging with directly because it identifies a constraint that much of the AI infrastructure conversation still skips past. Every discussion about the limits of the AI buildout eventually arrives at electricity: • Not enough gigawatts. • Not enough turbines. • Not enough grid capacity. • Not enough time. That conceptualisation

Published as part of iQ-LOOP's Insights series. The technical case for aluminium as an energy carrier is well established — the question that determines whether it scales is cost. A growing body of independent techno-economic research is starting to answer it, and the numbers are more encouraging than sceptics might expect. One recent life-cycle and cost analysis found that hydrogen produced via an aluminium-water reaction, using recycled aluminium, waste-heat recovery, and b

For aluminium to work as a genuinely clean energy carrier, the production step has to be clean too. Conventional aluminium smelting uses carbon anodes, which are consumed in the electrolysis reaction and released as CO2 — meaning every kilogram of “green” aluminium made this way still carries a real carbon cost from its own production. Inert anode electrolysis solves that problem directly: it replaces the carbon anode with a non-consumable electrode, so the reaction releases

Renewable Metal Energy Carriers, or ReMECs, are metals used as batteries elsewhere in the energy system: charged by absorbing renewable electricity, then discharged on demand to release that energy as heat, power, or hydrogen. The mechanism is straightforward chemistry. A metal oxide is reduced back to pure metal using renewable electricity — the charging step. That metal is then transported and stored, sometimes for months, with essentially no energy loss. When energy is nee

Why closing the loop alone on materials, capital, and power might be the source of the same problem. Hayley Moffiet's latest essay, "The Coherence Economy," offers an argument that energy professionals will recognise despite the fact that it is not about energy at all. She contends that we don't lack ideas, wealth, or technology to develop a better economy; rather, we lack coherence among the components. Capital reward extraction. Even within dispersed structures, governance

Introduction - Storing Energy in Aluminium Why the next generation of energy storage looks like a bar of metal, not a battery pack. As civilizations climb the Kardashev Scale, the challenge shifts from generating energy to storing it. Harnessing ever greater flows of stellar or planetary power means managing intermittency at a scale no volatile chemical cell can support — the surplus has to be held as dense, inert, stable mass instead. Aluminium is emerging as the leading can

Every major economy is now confronting the same tension. The demand for firm, clean, deployable energy is rising sharply, while the infrastructure that delivers it — the grid — cannot keep pace. Data centres turn to gas because connections are delayed. Industrial sites stay on diesel and LPG because clean alternatives are too difficult to deploy. Renewable developers curtail output because there is nowhere for surplus power to go. Each of these is the same gap: clean energy e

Clean energy systems are not adopted because they are clean. They are adopted because they make commercial sense. iQ-LOOP is designed to compete on the one metric that decides whether a large energy user will engage: the cost of firm, dispatchable power. The benchmark is diesel. For remote sites, backup duty, and peak-demand periods, diesel remains embedded because it is reliable and deployable, despite being costly, carbon-intensive, and exposed to volatile fuel prices. iQ-L

The energy transition is usually framed as a generation challenge: build more wind, more solar, more clean capacity. But generation is increasingly the part that works. Renewable electricity is abundant — it is simply produced at the wrong time, in the wrong place, or behind grid constraints that take years to relieve. The real problem is delivery. Today, the only ways to move energy are to push electrons through congested networks or to transport compressed hydrogen and foss

The energy systems that will matter most this century share three properties: they are circular, they produce no emissions in operation, and they can be deployed wherever energy is needed rather than only where the grid reaches. iQ-LOOP is built around all three. At the centre is a simple idea: aluminium is one of the most energy-dense materials available, holding roughly 23.5 kWh per litre — close to ten times the energy density of liquid hydrogen. iQ-LOOP charges aluminium

For two decades, the limiting factor in technology has been compute, capital, or talent. That is changing. The binding constraint on the next wave of growth — artificial intelligence, advanced manufacturing, electrified industry — is energy, and more precisely, the ability to deliver firm, affordable power exactly where and when it is needed. The evidence is already visible. Britain's largest data centre, a £9 billion development in Bedfordshire, will run on its own gas gener