Every quarter BloombergNEF updates its Tier 1 list of energy storage manufacturers, and every quarter a wave of press releases follows from companies announcing they’re on it. This week brought AlphaESS, saying it made the list for the fifth quarter in a row, CNTE and, a few days earlier, HIZENERGY from Hefei. What’s different this time is that BNEF raised the bar. What Tier 1 means The list isn’t a quality rating, and it isn’t a ranking of the best batteries.

Nyquis, a San Francisco startup, closed a $6.3 million seed round on November 5 to sell utilities a better look at their own power lines. Gigascale Capital and South Park Commons co-led, with Allison Pickens Ventures, Sovereign’s Capital, Pioneer Fund, Script Capital, Lost Coast Ventures and Friale joining. The product is a box called the Nyquis Node. It installs at an existing substation in about 15 minutes, with no outage and no rewiring, and samples voltage and current thousands of times a second.

TVS Motor showed the Orbiter, its entry-level electric scooter, in European form at EICMA in Milan this week. It’s a small, plain commuter. That’s the point of it. The European version sits in the L1e class, the moped category with a 45 km/h cap, which most riders in Italy, Spain and France can use on a car licence or a basic moped permit. It comes with two NMC battery sizes, 1.

CATL told investors on October 27 that it still expects small-batch production of all-solid-state batteries in 2027, with large-scale manufacturing around 2030. The reply went out on the Shenzhen Stock Exchange’s investor Q&A platform. Six days earlier QuantumScape said its first commercial-scale cell line would be sized at 100 MWh and start production in 2028. So two of the most watched solid-state programs gave updates in the same week. Neither one brought a date forward.

For a decade sodium-ion was the battery that would matter once lithium got expensive. In 2026 it picked up something it never had before: order books measured in gigawatt-hours. CATL signed a three-year deal in April to supply Beijing HyperStrong, one of the world’s five biggest storage integrators, with 60 GWh of sodium-ion cells. In the US, Peak Energy holds a phased agreement with Jupiter Power for up to 4.75 GWh between 2027 and 2030, and Alsym Energy has a 500 MWh deployment lined up with developer Juniper Energy, mostly in California.

A data centre can secure land, announce a supply agreement and order computing equipment while still lacking the grid connection needed to operate at the intended scale. That gap makes local electricity infrastructure central to the AI power debate. National generation totals matter, but a project needs deliverable power at a particular place, with an acceptable connection date and a workable operating arrangement. The International Energy Agency’s Electricity 2026 report places grid constraints and connection queues among the major issues facing expanding electricity systems.