Vitality storage and nuclear fusion—two dependable crowd pleasers when the group you’re speaking about is readers of IEEE Spectrum—are nicely represented amongst our most generally learn vitality tales of 2023. However atop the listing are a few surprises. Primary? Warmth pumps. Quantity two? An actual corker, and the reply to the query, what generates electrical energy however isn’t a dynamo or a gas cell?
Listed below are the ten hottest AI articles that Spectrum revealed in 2023, ranked by the period of time folks spent studying them.
1. Heat Pumps—The Well-Tempered Future of A/Cs
A window-mounted air-conditioning system contains an electrical warmth pump for heating.Gradient Consolation
A world rising hotter will inevitably want extra air-con, to maintain folks not simply snug however alive within the hottest areas. And but extra air-con exacerbates the very drawback—local weather change—that’s driving the necessity for extra air-con. What to do? Two phrases: warmth pumps.
2. This New Breed of Generator Can Run on Almost Any Fuel
Technicians assembled a linear generator at Mainspring Vitality’s Menlo Park, Calif., facility.Artistic Shot
One of the vital fascinating vitality startups that you just’ve by no means heard of (except you’re a diligent reader of Spectrum) is Mainspring Energy. The Menlo Park, Calif., firm, which was based in 2010 by three Stanford grads, is producing a machine that generates 230 to 430 kilowatts utilizing nearly any type of gas, together with ammonia, hydrogen, biogas, or pure fuel. Mainspring calls its machine a linear generator, as a result of it converts linear movement into electrical energy. Gas and air compressed within the heart of a linear meeting react and push outward, in the direction of the other ends of the meeting, driving magnets on both facet of the chamber by means of conducting copper coils, producing electrical energy. The machines are already producing electrical energy at scores of installations, and the corporate’s backers embody a number of the greatest names in tech investing, together with Invoice Gates and Vinod Khosla.
3. Welcome to Fusion City, USA
At Helion Vitality, staff construct a bit of the corporate’s Polaris fusion reactor.Helion Vitality
Fusion startups Zap Energy and Helion Energy have massive ambitions and comparatively modest services in Everett, Washington, higher often known as the positioning the place Boeing employs 30,000 folks in one of many world’s largest manufacturing facilities. Zap and Helion are a part of a renaissance in fusion-energy R&D aimed toward attaining sensible fusion energy utilizing way more modest services than the huge Worldwide Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) being in-built southern France, at a value estimated to be north of US $22 billion by the point it’s accomplished.
4. NASA Battery Tech to Deliver for the Grid
EnerVenue’s nickel-hydrogen battery cells are 1.8 meters lengthy, weigh 62 kilograms, and retailer 3 kilowatt-hours.EnerVenue
If you happen to don’t discharge after which recharge all of them the way in which, lithium-ion batteries can final for hundreds of charge-discharge cycles. Now think about a battery that may final by means of tens of hundreds of charge-discharge cycles. Such a battery already exists—it’s referred to as nickel-hydrogen, and it’s been utilized in area since 1977. This previous September, startup EnerVenue launched a brand new technology of its nickel-hydrogen battery and completed developing a 93,000-square-meter manufacturing facility across the similar time. The corporate is one in every of a rising group concentrating on grid-scale functions, significantly for photo voltaic installations.
5. Lithium Battery Ripe for Disruption, Inventor Says
A automobile battery pack is opened, revealing the modules, at a Volkswagen pilot recycling plant in Salzgitter, Germany.
John MacDougall/AFP/Getty Photographs
M. Stanley Wittingham, together with the late John Goodenough, are credited as key figures within the invention of the lithium-ion battery within the early Nineteen Seventies (the 2 of them shared the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 2019 with Akira Yoshino). Wittingham had a couple of peeves to get off his chest and did so at a symposium this previous April at Stanford. Right here’s one of many gripes: It takes 60 to 80 kilowatt hours of electrical energy to supply a 1-kWh lithium-ion battery. For Wittingham’s different complaints, you’ll need to learn the article.
6. U.S. Re-Enters the Nuclear Fuel Game
Uranium is enriched in centrifuge cascades, resembling this one at a Centrus Vitality plant in Piketon, Ohio.
Centrus Vitality
To generate energy, old-school light-water nuclear reactors use oxide gas, which consists of ceramic pellets of uranium oxide, organized end-to-end to kind rods which can be clad in zirconium alloy. The gas is enriched to about 4.8 p.c U-235. However the superior reactors now approaching line use a completely completely different type of gas, referred to as high-assay, low-enriched uranium (HALEU). (Enriched to twenty p.c U-235, it’s nonetheless far under the 90-plus p.c required for making nuclear weapons.) This previous November, Centrus Energy of Bethesda, Maryland, grew to become solely the second group able to producing HALEU gas, and the primary exterior of Russia. Enjoyable truth: “The vitality in simply 3 tablespoons of HALEU can provide a lifetime’s value of energy for the typical U.S. client,” reported Prachi Patel.
7. To Free The Baltic Grid, Old Technology Is New Again
A synchronous condenser, such because the one at proper right here, will be coupled to a flywheel, at left.
Siemens Vitality
Spectrum’s veteran, globe-trotting vitality contributor, Peter Fairley, has been overlaying the electric-grid and -power ramifications of the struggle in Ukraine. This previous November, he targeted on the efforts of three Baltic states—Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia—to separate their electrical grids from the Russian-controlled synchronous AC power zone. The three nations are deploying synchronous condensers to extend the resilience of their grids and allow them to resist, within the absence of connections to the a lot bigger Russian grid, the surprising and sudden lack of transmission strains or mills. Such a condenser is actually a big synchronous machine that spins freely; nonetheless, a flywheel linked to its shaft can retailer kinetic vitality. Its principal goal, on this case, is to offer extra inertia, additionally referred to as spinning reserve, that might assist stabilize a grid within the occasion of a disaster.
Fusion has been the facility supply of the long run for greater than 70 years.Harry Campbell
Fusion is the facility supply of the long run—and it all the time might be. So goes the quip that you just’re prone to hear from any grizzled know-how watcher sufficiently old to have lived by means of a number of hype cycles concerning the promise of fusion vitality. The grim actuality of fusion is that the world’s largest challenge, the ITER, is not going to be examined with deuterium and tritium gas till 2035, and couldn’t produce any helpful energy for fairly a couple of years after that. However, 2023 noticed a number of fascinating developments in fusion, principally in reference to startup corporations pursuing various approaches to the money-pit gigantism of ITER and the National Ignition Facility at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. These startups embody Zap Vitality and Helion Vitality (see above, “Welcome to Fusion Metropolis, USA”) and likewise Commonwealth Fusion Techniques, in Devens, Mass. To provide the stupendous magnetic fields essential to confine a superheated plasma, Commonwealth is utilizing high-temperature superconducting tape, which can drastically cut back the dimensions of the magnets wanted to supply the fields (see under).
9. This Fusion Reactor Is Held Together With Tape
Commonwealth Fusion Techniques is utilizing superconducting tape primarily based on yttrium barium copper oxide.Gretchen Ertl/CFS/MIT Plasma Science and Fusion Middle
Magnetic-confinement fusion depends on staggeringly robust magnetic fields to restrict a superhot plasma, sometimes inside a torus-shaped vessel referred to as a tokamak. On the ITER challenge, researchers are constructing superconducting electromagnets utilizing alloys of niobium-tin or niobium-titanium, which have to be cooled to about ‑269 °C (about 4 levels Kelvin). The 18 ITER magnets would require 600 tonnes of the superconductor. Commonwealth Fusion Systems thinks there’s a greater approach, and it includes utilizing a extra superior superconductor, yttrium barium copper oxide, or YBCO. It superconducts at temperatures between ‑200 to ‑250 °C (73 to 23 Kelvin). That seemingly small temperature distinction, together with different options of the YBCO, will allow a lot smaller magnets that may very well be manufactured extra rapidly and inexpensively, based on Commonwealth. The eventual success of fusion may very nicely rely on the effectiveness of those higher-temperature superconductors.
10. The Age of Silicon Is Here…for Batteries
Nanostructured silicon supplies might ship longer-range, faster-charging batteries.
Group14
The standard anode materials for lithium-ion batteries is graphite, coated on copper foil. However researchers have lengthy been tantalized by the potential for utilizing silicon, which, gram for gram, can maintain 10 instances as many lithium ions. And in 2023, after a number of startups managed to unravel issues with silicon anodes—primarily, an inclination to develop and fracture—a number of automakers introduced plans to make use of silicon-anode lithium-ion cells in upcoming electric-vehicle batteries. The startups included OneD Battery Sciences in Palo Alto, Calif., Sila Nanotechnologies in Alameda, Calif., and Group14 Technologies in Woodinville, Washington.
