It's Friday. The metal being pitched as the grid's next big battery has been hiding in plain sight for a century, in galvanized nails, sunscreen, and the core of a penny.
In today's edition:
🔋 Zinc's bid to break lithium's grip on grid storage
⚡ Quick Hits: PJM's heat-dome emergency order, sodium-ion goes mining, and the US completes its July 4 reactor goal
💰 Capital: KKR's $4.2B renewables buy and a $1.5B zinc-battery vehicle
📋 Policy Watch: Canada prioritizes grid interties and the House passes four grid bills
📊 Chart: electricity demand outgrows the global economy
The Big Story
Zinc batteries stake a claim in the US storage buildout.
The zinc industry laid out a roadmap for pushing its batteries into mainstream grid storage, arguing the chemistry is ready to scale as lithium shortages loom and utilities hunt for domestic alternatives. In a June 30 white paper that grew out of an April meeting with West Virginia University, the International Zinc Association made the case that zinc's thermal stability, longer service life, and domestic supply chain make it a natural complement to lithium for longer-duration storage. The US has few grid-scale zinc installations today, most under 1 MW, though Eos Energy is aiming to double its production capacity to 8 GWh within two years. The pitch leans on a domestic-supply story: zinc was designated a critical mineral in 2025, and dedicating just 10% of US zinc demand to batteries would support 40 GWh of annual storage manufacturing.
"This is clearly a case where more incentives need to be put in place by [the U.S. Department of Energy] to help scale up manufacturing lines."
Zinc batteries skip the thermal-management and fire-suppression systems that add cost to lithium assemblies, and the group cites a roughly 25% longer service life plus better performance in extreme temperatures.
The chemistry is more economical than lithium for discharge durations longer than eight hours, and zinc-air variants can reach multi-day storage, a growing need on high-renewables grids.
The US imports about 77% of its refined zinc, but mostly from Canada and Mexico, and recent Mountain West mine expansions give the industry a domestic head start amid US-China supply tensions.
The roadmap asks DOE to fund pilot manufacturing lines and stand up an industry advisory board, arguing that awareness and utility comfort, not physics, are the main barriers to deployment.
Quick Hits
Small bites from across the grid.
Six milestones from across the stack, from a heat-dome emergency order to a home-battery fleet big enough to redraw a market.
PJM forecast a record 166,147 MW peak under a regional heat dome, above its 2006 record, as the DOE issued a Section 202(c) emergency order letting it maximize fossil output and, as a last resort, curtail data centers and large loads with backup generation, an early real-world test of large-load flexibility. Utility Dive
Alsym Energy signed a 9 GWh sodium-ion battery agreement aimed at global mining operations, pushing a non-flammable, non-lithium chemistry from a US startup toward large-scale off-grid deployment. Energy-Storage.news
Eversource launched two substation-targeted load-management pilots in Massachusetts, aggregating batteries, EVs, building systems, and thermostats to cut peak and high-solar congestion at specific nodes rather than system-wide. Utility Dive
Australia passed 450,000 home batteries installed one year into its Cheaper Home Batteries rebate, a residential fleet now shifting roughly three times as much power into the evening peak and helping push gas generation to its lowest quarterly output since 1999. RenewEconomy
Deployable Energy brought its Unity microreactor to criticality at Idaho National Laboratory in about 150 days, the third US advanced reactor to go critical under DOE authorization and the one that completes the White House's July 4 three-reactor goal. World Nuclear News
New Jersey unanimously passed the Garden State Balcony Solar Act, becoming the tenth US state to let residents plug in portable solar arrays up to 1,200 watts without a permit or utility sign-off. pv magazine USA
The Capital Stack
KKR buys EDF's North American renewables arm for $4.2 billion.
KKR agreed to acquire the entire US and Canadian business of EDF Power Solutions, a top-ten US renewables owner with nearly 40 years of operating history across solar, wind, and battery storage and an integrated development, construction, and operations platform. The deal values the equity at $4.2 billion, KKR's largest single clean-energy investment to date, with up to $390 million more in earnouts, funded from the firm's global infrastructure strategy. It is a sign that private infrastructure capital is moving from buying electrons to buying the platforms that source, build, and operate them, as AI data centers, reshoring, and electrification drive up US power demand.
Source: pv magazine USA
Also in the capital stack:
Eos Energy secured a $125 million investment, including $75 million from Hudson Bay Capital, that lifts its Frontier Power USA vehicle's equity base to about $375 million, structured to support more than $1.5 billion of deployable US zinc-battery projects, a capital proof point for the domestic non-lithium buildout. Eos Energy via GlobeNewswire
Policy Watch
Canada will prioritize financial and regulatory support for five interprovincial transmission interties, including a 2 GW Saskatchewan–Manitoba expansion and an 800-km BC–Yukon line, and will implement a Federal-Provincial-Territorial Framework on interties, a push to stitch together the country's fragmented grids as demand is projected to double by 2050. Natural Resources Canada
New Jersey lawmakers sent Gov. Mikie Sherrill a bill directing regulators to set tariffs for data centers of at least 50 MW, with 10-year take-or-pay commitments covering 85% of requested service and priority curtailment ahead of households, a framework the sponsor hopes other states will copy. NRDC
The US House passed four bipartisan bills aimed at grid resilience and cybersecurity, including the SECURE Grid Act and the Energy Threat Analysis Center Act, a federal signal on hardening and supply-chain security that developers will watch for how it flows into permitting and cost recovery. RTO Insider
Chart of the Day
Electricity demand is about to outgrow the global economy.
For the first time, global electricity demand is set to grow faster than GDP, with Bank of America projecting demand outpacing real economic growth every year from 2026 through 2028 as EVs and AI data centers drive a new wave of electrification. Data-center power use alone is expected to climb from about 55 GW today to 84 GW within two years.
Source: Yahoo Finance, data via Bank of America Global Research · July 2, 2026
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