Featured article

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

Ottawa, Ontario — June 2026 iQ-LOOP's CEO, Daniel Henbest, and Head of Americas, Turgut Abacioglu, completed a week-long market-entry mission to Ottawa, meeting with Invest Ottawa, Kanata North Technology Park, Area X.O, and Natural Resources Canada to lay the groundwork for the company's Canadian operations. The engagement confirmed strong commercial interest in iQ-LOOP's aluminium-based energy storage platform, particularly its ability to deliver dispatchable power during p

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