The future leaves
signals in time.

Valo's Steve Merrick argues that accurate state of charge (SOC) estimation remains energy storage's 'unsolved problem'. According to the discussion, inaccurate SOC measurements can cost battery energy storage system (BESS) operators up to 15% in lost revenue, a persistent issue despite advances in monitoring technology.

The article examines silicon for space power. As background, it notes that multijunction III-V photovoltaic cells such as gallium arsenide and indium gallium phosphide have powered satellites since the 1960s, but rare materials and complex processing keep such devices in small, high-cost batches.

Form Energy is building iron-based batteries that can store energy for multiple days, and the company is ramping up supply at its factory while signing deals for commercial projects. The report notes new solar and wind installations produce electricity more affordably than fossil fuels in most places, but their output varies with season, time of day, and weather.

Energy Dome uses compressed carbon dioxide gas in its large grid-scale batteries, which the report says can deliver power for up to 24 hours, addressing the growing need for long-duration storage to balance renewables on the grid and meet energy demand.

Share listing news from three energy storage startups with different areas of specialisation, ESS Inc, ZincFive and InoBat, reflects the ups and downs of going public. The supplied context provides no further details on the individual listing outcomes.

Indian startup Macsen Energy claims its Prussian white-based sodium-ion battery cell has exceeded 1,500 charge-discharge cycles in laboratory testing, retaining 90% of initial capacity after 1,000 cycles. The company also plans to build a cathode material production facility and a cell pilot line, with construction set to begin in 2027. These figures are company claims.

OpenAI published a post explaining that it and Ironclad are training and evaluating AI agents on complex contracting workflows to advance computer use for professional work. No specific results are provided in the available context.

Kodiak Robotics and IKEA Supply are preparing to launch fully driverless freight operations in Texas later this year, building on a four-year autonomous trucking partnership. IKEA will become Kodiak's launch customer for driverless freight, with trucks operating without a human safety driver in the cab.

Aigen says it has developed a simulation and world-model system that can train its autonomous agricultural robots to work with new crops in less than a week. The company's Alchemy simulation platform generates synthetic, pixel-level annotated training data used to train its solar-powered Element robots before they are deployed in fields.

On the Proton issue tracker, Valve's maintainer responded on October 3 at 01:10 UTC to a request to merge a crash fix for Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2 by pointing to Wine's rule on code written with a large language model. The comment came from the kisak-valve account, which GitHub marks MEMBER on Valve's repositories.

IPP Zelestra and power firm and utility EDP have agreed two new hybrid PPAs in Spain, adding 181MWdc of solar and 462MWh of battery energy storage (BESS) to their existing co-operation.

Zhaopeng Chen, CEO of Munich-based robotics company Agile Robots, predicted at the firm's Physical AI Media Day in Munich and Fürstenfeldbruck, Germany, that "physical AI is going to be 10x bigger than automotive." The company says it is expanding its manufacturing, AI development and humanoid robot operations, and opened its engineering laboratories and Robots Academy at the event.

Thailand will now require crystalline silicon solar panels to meet national safety standards, in its latest effort to improve the quality and safety of solar installations.

EUPD Research's Business Climate Survey and Storage Report project Europe's battery storage market to nearly double from 34 GWh in 2025 to 65 GWh in 2026, driven mainly by utility-scale projects and growing renewable energy integration. The report also says intensifying residential and commercial storage competition is pushing manufacturers toward integrated energy solutions, strategic partnerships and advanced energy management technologies.

In an opinion piece, H. Gilbert Welch argues that the FDA should not approve Grail's multicancer screening test, which he describes as ineffective, writing that “telling more people they have cancer is not progress; progress is having fewer people die from cancer.” This is the author's opinion, not a regulatory decision.

Apple says it will add new controls to Full Disk Access on macOS—the permission that lets an app read everything on a Mac—and names AI agents as a reason. The company said it will introduce additional controls so that only users who genuinely wish to grant an app this extraordinary level of access can do so; the quoted statement is truncated in the source.

Researchers in India developed an inverted perovskite solar cell based on a mixed self-assembled monolayer (SAM) that reportedly improves film quality, charge transport, and device stability. The cell achieved 18.88% efficiency on a 5.2 cm² active area, with a relative efficiency loss of only around 7% compared with smaller devices.