Will-o’-the-Wisps, also called “ignis fatuus,” Latin for “foolish fire”, are enchanting balls of greenish-blue floating lights observed over swamps and marshes at night. At a distance, they look identical to flickering lanterns. All over the world, since ancient times, people have struggled to rationalize with the origins of these mystery lights; thus, legends and myths appear in almost every ancient culture surrounding Will-o’-the-Wisps.
Zinc is important in battery manufacturing, but also in many other areas. Electrical and power engineering uses zinc. Whether USB plugs, computer vents, in the X-ray sector or in fuse boxes, zinc has remarkable properties. Conductivity and electromagnetic shielding are among them. Even if the first thing that comes to mind when you hear the word zinc is galvanizing, i.e., preventing corrosion. The world-s hunger for energy is growing, and digitization and data storage are also gaining in scale.
From data centres to long-duration storage for the grid, zinc looks increasingly likely to play a part in the energy transition, writes Dr Josef Daniel-Ivad from the the Zinc Battery Initiative.