Europe is falling far behind on energy storage installation exactly when it’s most needed. Most of the targeted storage additions will come from lithium-ion batteries, the dominant technology in the global energy storage sector. Moreover, lithium-ion battery supply chains are almost entirely controlled by China, leaving Europe facing eerily familiar vulnerabilities in the face of geopolitical conflict. “Hopefully a big portion of those storages could be sand battery-type of storages where we don’t need rare earth materials, like in many chemical batteries, such as lithium-ion batteries,” she went on to say. While the sand battery is not nearly as energy-efficient as lithium-ion batteries, it has other critical advantages.