The last six months have seen a step change in the deployment of long-duration energy storage, as both lithium-ion and non-lithium technologies have put steel in the ground. According to the latest data from energy intelligence platform Currence, the global LDES sector is on track to bring hundreds of megawatts online this year, as compared to 33 MW in 2025, which was a breakout year for the industry.
Just a third of that expected 2026 capacity will come from non-lithium-ion batteries, analyst Lukas Karapin-Springorum told Latitude Media. That’s because lithium-ion makers are the ones winning bids for government procurement in places like Australia and California, where the priority is generally lowest-cost and technology readiness.
But large loads are increasingly eyeing non-lithium storage solutions as well, for contexts where supply chain stability and scalability are more important. The carbon-dioxide battery maker Energy Dome again tops Currence’s leaderboard of non-lithium ion batteries for the second half of this year, thanks to a cluster of high-profile offtake agreements, including with Google.
Form Energy, the iron-air battery marker that is reportedly eyeing an IPO, ranks lower on the list for now, largely because of cost. But Form has been rising through the report’s ranks, Karapin-Springorum said, thanks to a drop in the estimated capital cost of its large Pine Island project with Xcel and Google.
(In addition to how the tech costs pencil out at scale, Currence also ranks companies based on deployment track record, which is one of the best indicators of whether a vendor will be able to scale to meet demand, he explained.)
Those two companies represent the leading edge of non-lithium LDES, Karapin-Springorum said. They’ve become “known quantities” for utilities and hyperscalers that want non-lithium LDES now; as a result, the contracts they’re developing are paving the way for using LDES to help meet data center load growth.
But they aren’t the only players, and with so much of their near-term capacity under contract, they’re unlikely to be able to satisfy the coming demand on their own.
The next wave of non-lithium LDES capacity
The companies best positioned to capitalize on a follow-on wave of hyperscaler and utility deals, Karapin-Springorum said, are those that already have a credible pipeline with at least a few projects moving toward final investment decision, as well as a business development strategy that’s already focused on the United States, where the power crunch is the most acute.
He pointed to HydroStor, a Canadian company developing compressed air energy storage solutions, as a top contender. Hydrostor is at a potential credibility inflection point, with a development pipeline the company puts at seven gigawatts, and multiple projects in early- to mid-stage, Karapin-Springorum explained. Willow Rock, the company’s flagship, 500-MW project in California, has reached final stage permitting and some offtake, but hasn’t yet reached final investment decision.
“If they can reach FID at Willow Rock, they’ll have a big credibility boost, and boost their megawatts out in the field,” he explained.
There’s also Invinity Energy Systems, a British vanadium-flow battery company that, like Form, is slowly climbing the Currence leaderboard. The company recently won its largest contract to date, a 43-MW deal with a utility in the Midwest, and is setting up U.S. manufacturing, positioning itself as a local option for North American buyers. Invinity has been around for more than a decade, and while it has been operating at a relatively small scale, Karapin-Springorum said the company is poised to expand quickly if demand shows up.
Sage Geosystems, meanwhile, is a bit of a wildcard. The company operates at the intersection of geothermal and long-duration storage, using curtailed renewable energy to inject water into fractures that operate as storage tanks until the well is opened, and that water flows through a turbine to produce electricity. Sage, though one of the top players in the (relatively small) advanced geothermal sector, doesn’t yet have the same level of contracted storage capacity as Hydrostor or Invinity. That said, Sage is positioned to benefit greatly as buyers start to care less about absolute cost, and more about things like duration and supply chain stability, Karapin-Springorum said.
