These in-their-own-words pieces are told to Patricia Lane and co-edited with input from the interviewee for the purpose of brevity.

Keith Cleland’s alchemy turns salt and water into affordable, scalable energy storage. This 31-year-old from Edmonton co-founded and runs Aqua-Cell Energy, producing affordable sustainable battery storage that can scale to stabilize the renewable grid.

Tell us about your project. 

Solar and wind are the cheapest forms of energy, and batteries make them reliable. While battery prices have been falling, conventional batteries rely on lithium, nickel and cobalt and other expensive and rare materials. If increasing demand for electricity is to be met, batteries will have to be made differently. 

We harness the use of novel membrane technologies developed for water treatment to store and retrieve electrical energy powered by simple, readily-available materials: salt and water. 

Each Aqua-Cell modular container contains battery stacks and storage tanks that pump salt water in a continuous, closed loop flow circuit. When electricity is applied to the salt water, if the battery stacks are charged, the........

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