Introduction to the Blog

What's the one thing you cannot imagine modern life without ?

Phones ? AI ? Social Media ? These are relatively modern inventions, commercialized in the last two decades. Let's go farther back - Cars, Trains ? Ships ? Planes ? still hardly a century old. Personally, my answer would be energy. From food you eat all the way to content you consume, everything is essentially some form of energy. 

And i don't think any person reading this will need to be told that even today, most of humanity's energy comes from fossil fuels (petrol, diesel, crude oil etc), basically carbon that took 300 million years to form, which we dig up, process, and burn in seconds

But energy is changing, fast and its happening at a historic pace, EVs, batteries, green hydrogen, solar, wind, hydropower, nuclear fission (hell maybe even fusion !!! ). Just to put that in perspective the amount of solar energy we deployed in the last 12 months (511 GW)is equal or may be more than the electricity demand of our civilisation for the first 100 years after Edison invented the light bulb. That's a lot of electrons ⚡. Don't believe me, ask Gemini or Claude yourself.

So me being a person crazy about this green transition since I was 15, always wanted to contribute to it , in a meaningful, impactful way , maybe even accelerate it. And try to achieve net zero before 2050 (yeah, i know, too optimistic).

But in the last 4 years during my Mechanical Engineering, I realized there were a large amount of unsolved problems for us to achieve this green transition, largely a materials science problem, but also an implementation problem. There are too many people in the world who talk a lot about green transition, green laws, policies, you name it. And power to them, political will is excellent, especially after 50 years of convincing. 

But now humans need implementation, technological implementation, at large scale, of not one but multiple technologies. We don't need another solar panel, we need a range of technologies that assist solar panel.

So i decided to build one of them, a battery, not for your phone or laptop or even your Tesla  (or Tata  if you're in India). But for the grid, I am building a Iron Chromium Redox Flow Battery, in my bedroom in Delhi, battling the whole range of problems - hydrogen evolution, chromium kinetics, membrane selection, on a student budget (which by the way is very tight). I have already spent close to Rs 30,000 (or around $300), i know it doesn't sound like a lot, but its my 2 month stipend from my internship. Thankfully my raw materials are cheap, how cheap you ask ? Dirt cheap. Think building the battery thrice and re-iterating. On my fourth iteration by the way.

I started in January 2026 and have accumulated a lot of information thanks to AI models. And all of this is publicly available information. But how many people search for the crazy things i do. So this is a blog for my reference, all the info i have collected, and for any nerd crazy enough to care 😊. 
Welcome to my blog.

Its called Grid Think because I mostly think about the grid, batteries and energy. I'll not be using AI, so feel free to fact check me and looking forward to your views and help. 

Mayank Jately

If you want to follow this blog
Location: Delhi, India

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