On 6 November 2026, the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority (NYSERDA) announced nearly $13 million awarded to 15 projects to advance innovative energy storage technologies under its Power Generation and Storage Innovation program. The programme competitively funds development and demonstration of innovative long-duration energy storage (LDES) and other under-utilised alternatives to traditional lithium-ion technologies that are not yet commercialised.
Iron-sodium takes the largest cheque
Inlyte Energy received more than $2.4 million — the largest award in the round — to deploy a battery delivering more than 10 hours of duration using an iron-sodium chemistry. The deployment is aimed squarely at two grid problems: substation peak load growth and distribution-level resilience challenges. That framing is notable: the value case is built on deferring or avoiding network upgrades rather than on energy arbitrage alone.
Advanced compressed air and heat sink materials
Aestus Energy Storage LLC was awarded over $590,000 to conduct a subscale test of approximately 35 kWh of two alumina-silica ceramic heat sink materials. Those materials will feed into the design of a 20 MWh Advanced Compressed Air Energy Storage (A-CAES) system intended for utility-scale application. Testing thermal media at 35 kWh before committing to a 20 MWh plant is exactly the kind of step the programme appears designed to fund — de-risking component-level unknowns ahead of full-scale builds.
Vanadium flow meets fast charging
Sprocket Power, Inc. won more than $1 million to demonstrate direct current fast charging stations fed from an underground vanadium redox flow battery. The pairing is strategically interesting: DC fast charging creates short, sharp demand spikes that are expensive to serve from the grid, while a flow battery with hours of stored energy can buffer them without the fire-risk profile of lithium in dense or constrained locations.
Why this round matters
The portfolio spans three very different LDES families — electrochemical (iron-sodium), mechanical/thermal (A-CAES) and flow (vanadium) — and it deliberately targets technologies that are not yet commercialised. That distinguishes it from capacity-focused storage incentives, which tend to flow to the cheapest bankable technology available today. New York is effectively buying optionality on the next generation of multi-hour assets.
For developers outside the state, the signal is that public money is still available for pre-commercial LDES, but it is being channelled through demonstration-scale grants with specific grid use cases attached rather than through broad capital subsidies.
This article was assisted by AI analysis. Please refer to the original source for official information.