
LFP Lithium-Ion Battery
Iron and phosphate instead of nickel and cobalt: heavier, cheaper, safer and very long-lived.

NMC Lithium-Ion Battery
The high-energy chemistry — nickel, manganese and cobalt in the cathode — used where range matters most.

Sodium-Ion Battery
A cell that uses sodium — from ordinary salt — instead of lithium, at the cost of energy density.

Vanadium Redox Flow Battery
A battery that stores its energy in two tanks of dissolved vanadium, so power and capacity scale separately.

Direct-Drive Offshore Wind Turbine
A turbine with no gearbox, using a very large permanent-magnet generator instead.

EV Traction Motor
The permanent-magnet synchronous motor that drives most electric cars.

NdFeB Permanent Magnet
The strongest permanent magnet ever made — neodymium, iron and boron, sintered and coated.

Alkaline Electrolyser
The century-old design: steel, nickel and potassium hydroxide, with no precious metals at all.

HVDC Transmission Cable
High-voltage direct-current cable, the technology used to move power hundreds of kilometres with low loss.

PEM Electrolyser
Splits water using a polymer membrane, platinum and iridium — fast-responding but catalyst-hungry.

Pressurised Water Reactor
The most common reactor design: enriched uranium fuel in zirconium tubes, water as both coolant and moderator.

Three-Way Catalytic Converter
The ceramic honeycomb in an exhaust that converts three pollutants at once, coated in platinum-group metals.

Cadmium Telluride Thin-Film Module
A solar panel a few microns thick, using no silicon at all.

Crystalline Silicon Solar Module
The standard solar panel: silicon wafers, silver contact paste, glass and an aluminium frame.

Gallium Nitride Power Device
A switch that turns on and off far faster than silicon, so power supplies can shrink.

Leading-Edge Logic Chip
The most advanced processors, built on wafers that pass through hundreds of process steps.

Single-Crystal Turbine Blade
A turbine blade grown as one continuous crystal so it has no grain boundaries to creep along.