Quantum Batteries Could Change Everyday Technology, Community Microgrids Put Power in Local Hands, Tribal Nations Developing Energy Sovereignty
September 19, 2026

Everyone knows that the larger the battery, the longer it takes to charge – that's why it can take several hours to charge a laptop and typically all night to charge an electric vehicle. Quantum mechanics (the science of matter at atomic and subatomic scales) "sort of flips [that] on its head", says James Quach, a quantum science researcher at Csiro, Australia's national science agency. Quach is working to create a quantum battery that defies common sense by charging faster the bigger it gets. In March 2026, his team made an important breakthrough when they unveiled what they say is the world's first working quantum battery prototype. Quach's latest experiment represents a first tentative step towards a quantum battery that could one day be substituted for conventional ones. At present, the prototype battery can only hold a very small amount of energy – a few billion electron volts – for a matter of nanoseconds. To power conventional devices, it would need to store far more energy for far longer. Quach says he has already achieved this with a new design he's built, and is now working on a paper to publish the results. It uses "a hybrid structure", he says, involving quantum components to allow super-fast charging. Quantum mechanics is no stranger to mind-bending concepts, from "entangled" particles that influence each other at great distances to time that flows backwards. A milestone paper in 2015 showed that quantum entanglement means quantum batteries might charge – and discharge – more efficiently than conventional ones. "The key point is that quantum batteries are not about storing a great amount of energy, but about delivering it faster and with greater control," says [associate professor of physics at the University of Genova, Italy Dario Ferraro].

Around a dozen communities across the country have launched campaigns to get rid of their investor-owned electric utilities — the for-profit companies that distribute electricity to three-quarters of U.S. households — and replace them with publicly owned ones. Calling their goal “public power,” advocates argue that existing utilities have saddled customers with high rates and frequent outages, while lobbying to delay rooftop solar and other climate policies. Advocates say local ownership of the power grid would lead to lower electric bills, a quicker transition to renewables, and greater accountability to customers. Publicly owned utilities are far from new. Across the country, around 2,000 consumer-owned utilities serve more than 50 million customers, in places like Sacramento, Long Island, and the entire state of Nebraska. Unlike investor-owned utilities, public utilities don’t pay dividends to shareholders and have access to tax-exempt, low-interest municipal bonds. Supporters say the benefits of public power are wide ranging. Customers served by publicly owned utilities often have smaller electric bills — on average about $15 lower per month than with an investor-owned utility, according to the American Public Power Association. They also tend to experience more reliable service than investor-owned utility customers, with on average about half the annual duration of interrupted power.

Community microgrids provide a new approach to the design and operation of the power grid at the community level. These microgrids, serving a specific area and supported by renewable energy and other distributed energy resources (DERs), help achieve a sustainable, secure, and cost-effective energy system. The installations, which can include energy storage among their DERs, can provide indefinite, always-on power. That’s of particular importance in areas prone to extreme weather events. A BlockEnergy installation in Florida, approved as a pilot project by the Florida Public Service Commission, is an example of a community microgrid that already has proved its worth. Tampa-based BlockEnergy, considered among the world’s first utility-owned, residential community microgrid developers, in 2022 partnered with home-builder Lennar and Tampa-based Metro Development Group to launch a 37-home microgrid community within the Medley at Southshore Bay residential development in Wimauma, Florida. Each home has power generation and battery energy storage that supplements electricity from the local grid. The system is scalable and, importantly, storm-resilient. That was proven last year when Hurricane Ian pummeled Florida, leaving more than 2.2 million power customers without electricity. The BlockEnergy homes at Medley at Southshore Bay, though, never lost power. None of the microgrid equipment was damaged by the hurricane.

Heron’s Nest [is] North Carolina’s first residential “microgrid” development. A microgrid is a network of buildings that essentially acts as a miniature power grid. It can operate outside of the larger municipal electrical system by ensuring backup power for the entire development, which can be produced by a solar array system and stored in a battery. “The rooftop solar and the sense of security we got knowing that you’d have power during a storm sealed the deal for us,” said Mr. Moulder, 57, a semiretired inventory manager. Heron’s Nest is part of wider electric cooperative in North Carolina, a membership-based utility that allows customers, acting as shareholders, to benefit from revenue that is either diverted back into the utility or passed along as dividends. “This is why microgrids are very attractive to us, because when we lower the costs of maintaining the grid, the profit goes back to the customer as a lower utility bill,” said Nicky Nance, a key accounts and renewable specialist with Brunswick Electric. The 31 homes at Heron’s Nest have sold quickly. It was easy to explain to buyers how rooftop solar panels, included in the price of each home, could lower a utility bill, and how the microgrid would generate power when residents most needed it. While residents can feel secure knowing they are generating and storing power, a microgrid also eases the burden on the local utility, because it can disconnect from the larger grid during a period of overload.

Cody Two Bears knows a thing or two about coalitions. “I wanted to change to a new way for Native communities that would really allow us to stop playing defense so much, but allow us to play offense,” said Two Bears. “We’ve always protested, protested, protested and been against something. But now with this new initiative, Indigenized Energy, it gives us the opportunity to fight for something for native tribes.” Two Bears, who is an enrolled member of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, was the youngest leader to ever be elected to its tribal council in 2013. “Like food sovereignty, traditional medicines, culture and language, energy to Indigenous and native people in this country now is one of those main pillars that we need to focus on moving forward,” he said. That’s why he launched Indigenized Energy, which aims to develop energy sovereignty on tribal lands via renewable energy. In 2019, the nonprofit debuted a 300-kilowatt solar farm in Two Bears’ hometown of Cannon Ball, North Dakota, just three miles from the Dakota Access Pipeline. To this day, it’s the largest solar farm in the state, he said. “I told myself, if we can see solar there, we can do it anywhere,” he said. When it comes to fossil fuel development, North Dakota is second only to Texas. Renewable energy faces strong opposition in the state. But Two Bears insists “energy in itself should never be political.” Two Bears sees energy independence as a way to save lives today and safeguard his community.

The ranking member of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee is demanding that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement explain why it has purchased commercial spyware capable of covertly taking control of phones as well as collecting messages, photographs, location information and other personal data. Sen. Gary Peters of Michigan called the purchase "one of the most significant expansions of DHS and ICE's surveillance ambitions to date," flagging potential civil liberties concerns and risks to U.S. national security. Peters sought clarity from Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin in a letter ... dated July 23, calling into question ICE's $2 million, sole-source purchase of Graphite, a surveillance tool developed by Paragon Solutions and now owned by REDLattice. "Misuse of Graphite is not hypothetical," Peters wrote, mentioning public reporting that more than 90 journalists and civil society members were targeted by the technology across several countries. The ranking member said he was "deeply troubled about how Graphite might be used in the United States to target Americans," pointing to ongoing concerns about ICE's collection of information involving protests, social media posts and other First Amendment-protected activities. Peters also asked ICE for the number of U.S. and non-U.S. people who have been targeted, where they were located and why the software was procured.

Modern cars are computers on wheels, and giant corporations are using them to suck up intimate details about your life and make more money. The information they harvest can include precise location data about everywhere you go, who's in the car with you, what's on the radio and whether you buckle your seatbelt, drive too fast or brake too hard. Some can gather details you might not expect like your weight, age, race and facial expressions. Some cars have cameras on the inside pointed at the driver's seat. Among the biggest customers for car data are insurance companies, and they're using it to charge some people higher prices. But there's no telling where your information is going. Some car companies admit they sell your data, but they don't have to say who's buying. "People would be shocked at the number of data points that their car collects and transmits to other people, either the manufacturer or third-party applications," says Darrell West, a senior fellow in the Center for Technology Innovation at the Brookings Institute. "It basically means your life can be recreated almost on a second-by-second basis." A federal law ... will soon require American car companies to install infrared biometric cameras and other systems to scan your body language, track your eyes or other aspects of your behavoiur to detect whether you're too drunk or tired to drive. There are no rules limiting what the car companies can do with that information.

Federal prosecutors twice sought search warrants for account information for the YouTube channel of [journalist Georgia] Fort and the journalist Don Lemon. A judge twice rejected the request. Less than a month later, the DHS served Google with ... an administrative summons citing an arcane provision of federal law – 19 USC 1509 – dealing with customs imports. The provision gives the DHS broad power to inspect records. It also instructed the recipients of the summons to keep it secret. In addition to efforts to obtain records on Minnesota journalists, the DHS has used 1509 summonses to pressure social media companies to unmask the identities of people who have criticized ICE officers and to obtain financial information on a host of unions and left-leaning non-profit organizations in Minneapolis. In a separate case in which 15 activists face criminal conspiracy charges, DHS successfully obtained the ... Venmo records for a non-profit organization called Voices for Racial Justice. None of the organizations is charged with crimes. “There’s a long history of DHS abusing this summons authority in particular, and using it to seek both records that are clearly outside of its scope in general, and more particularly to try to go after people whose speech DHS is somehow irked by – but whose speech is protected by the first amendment,” said Nathan Freed Wessler, a lawyer at the American Civil Liberties Union who specializes in privacy issues.

In 2022, Assistant Chief Adam Glueck, of the Cape Girardeau Police Department in southeastern Missouri, purchased electric shock gloves for his officers after learning about them at a trade show. And his employees, he said, couldn’t get enough of them. The shock gloves, he went on to explain, allow their wearer to inflict pain without leaving the sort of marks that could look bad to witnesses or leave an officer vulnerable to lawsuits. The gloves, manufactured by a company called Compliant Technologies, have been used by police, sheriffs, jail wardens, and even school resource officers for years. They’ve been described by groups like Amnesty International as “readily misused for torture.” And this week, ICE published a plan to order $20 million worth of them. The device is called a GLOVE, which stands for Generated Low Output Voltage Emitter. It looks like a regular padded black utility glove, but when the wearer presses a small button on the glove’s wrist, it produces a painful electric shock. A pending wrongful death lawsuit alleges that a 43-year-old man named Jonathan Mansfield died because corrections officers shocked him 27 times with the gloves and 13 times with a Taser. Two of the glove shocks lasted 45 and 99 seconds. The manufacturer’s recommended limit is 15 seconds. Local police across the country are still eagerly buying the gloves—in large part so that they can harm people and avoid being sued for it.

Esmaeil Baqaei, the spokesperson for Iran’s Foreign Ministry, recently warned of the increasing environmental damage caused by the U.S. war, drawing attention to oil contamination in the Persian Gulf that has begun washing up on Iranian shores. By March, attacks had already resulted in more than 300 incidents of potential environmental harm, documented across 12 countries in the region, according to a report by the Conflict and Environment Observatory. These toxic exposures threaten not only today’s war victims, but also future generations who will grapple with the knock-on effects. Fallujah offers a glimpse of the environmental fallout that the people of neighboring Iran may face in the years to come. More than half of Fallujah was leveled in a U.S. Marine-led siege of the city in 2004. Hospitals, water systems and electrical grids were destroyed. Post-war surges in birth defects, respiratory diseases, and cancers in Fallujah have now been directly linked with exposure to the weapons of war. The U.S–Israeli war on Iran has only exacerbated ongoing environmental crises in the Middle East. Though it is still too soon to calculate the full extent of the environmental harm imposed by the ongoing conflict, the toxic airborne pollutants, land contaminated with heavy metals, and oil-soaked waterways will pose a threat to life for decades to come. As [anthropologist Kali] Rubaii’s study concludes, “the most effective way to limit heavy metal toxicity from war is by not bombing cities.”

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