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 printed in 2023, ranked by the period of time folks spent studying them.
1. Warmth Pumps—The Nicely-Tempered Way forward for A/Cs
A window-mounted air-conditioning system consists of an electrical warmth pump for heating.Gradient Consolation
A world rising hotter will inevitably want extra air-con, to maintain folks not simply comfy however alive within the hottest areas. And but extra air-con exacerbates the very downside—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 Virtually Any Gas
Technicians assembled a linear generator at Mainspring Vitality’s Menlo Park, Calif., facility.Artistic Shot
One of the fascinating vitality startups that you just’ve by no means heard of (until you’re a diligent reader of Spectrum) is Mainspring Vitality. 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 sort of gas, together with ammonia, hydrogen, biogas, or pure gasoline. 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 direction of the other ends of the meeting, driving magnets on both facet of the chamber by conducting copper coils, producing electrical energy. The machines are already producing electrical energy at scores of installations, and the corporate’s backers embrace a number of the largest names in tech investing, together with Invoice Gates and Vinod Khosla.
3. Welcome to Fusion Metropolis, USA
At Helion Vitality, staff construct a bit of the corporate’s Polaris fusion reactor.Helion Vitality
Fusion startups Zap Vitality and Helion Vitality have large ambitions and comparatively modest amenities in Everett, Washington, higher referred to as the location the place Boeing employs 30,000 folks in one of many world’s largest manufacturing amenities. Zap and Helion are a part of a renaissance in fusion-energy R&D aimed toward reaching sensible fusion energy utilizing way more modest amenities than the huge Worldwide Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) being inbuilt southern France, at a price estimated to be north of US $22 billion by the point it’s accomplished.
4. NASA Battery Tech to Ship for the Grid
EnerVenue’s nickel-hydrogen battery cells are 1.8 meters lengthy, weigh 62 kilograms, and retailer 3 kilowatt-hours.EnerVenue
In the event you don’t discharge after which recharge all of them the best way, lithium-ion batteries can final for 1000’s of charge-discharge cycles. Now think about a battery that may final by tens of 1000’s 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 era of its nickel-hydrogen battery and completed establishing a 93,000-square-meter manufacturing facility across the identical time. The corporate is considered one of a rising group concentrating on grid-scale functions, notably for photo voltaic installations.
5. Lithium Battery Ripe for Disruption, Inventor Says
A automotive battery pack is opened, revealing the modules, at a Volkswagen pilot recycling plant in Salzgitter, Germany.
John MacDougall/AFP/Getty Photos
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 number 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 must learn the article.
6. U.S. Re-Enters the Nuclear Gas Recreation
Uranium is enriched in centrifuge cascades, similar to 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 totally different sort of gas, referred to as high-assay, low-enriched uranium (HALEU). (Enriched to twenty p.c U-235, it’s nonetheless far beneath the 90-plus p.c required for making nuclear weapons.) This previous November, Centrus Vitality of Bethesda, Maryland, turned solely the second group able to producing HALEU gas, and the primary outdoors of Russia. Enjoyable reality: “The vitality in simply 3 tablespoons of HALEU can provide a lifetime’s value of energy for the common U.S. shopper,” reported Prachi Patel.
7. To Free The Baltic Grid, Previous Know-how Is New Once more
A synchronous condenser, such because the one at proper right here, could be coupled to a flywheel, at left.
Siemens Vitality
Spectrum’s veteran, globe-trotting vitality contributor, Peter Fairley, has been masking the electric-grid and -power ramifications of the battle in Ukraine. This previous November, he centered on the efforts of three Baltic states—Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia—to separate their electrical grids from the Russian-controlled synchronous AC energy zone. The three international locations are deploying synchronous condensers to extend the resilience of their grids and allow them to face up to, 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 basically a big synchronous machine that spins freely; nevertheless, a flywheel linked to its shaft can retailer kinetic vitality. Its major goal, on this case, is to supply further inertia, additionally referred to as spinning reserve, that will 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 at all times will probably be. So goes the quip that you just’re more likely to hear from any grizzled expertise watcher sufficiently old to have lived by a number of hype cycles in regards to the promise of fusion vitality. The grim actuality of fusion is that the world’s largest challenge, the ITER, won’t be examined with deuterium and tritium gas till 2035, and couldn’t produce any helpful energy for fairly a number of years after that. Nonetheless, 2023 noticed a number of fascinating developments in fusion, principally in reference to startup firms pursuing various approaches to the money-pit gigantism of ITER and the Nationwide Ignition Facility at Lawrence Livermore Nationwide Laboratory. These startups embrace Zap Vitality and Helion Vitality (see above, “Welcome to Fusion Metropolis, USA”) and likewise Commonwealth Fusion Methods, in Devens, Mass. To supply the stupendous magnetic fields essential to confine a superheated plasma, Commonwealth is utilizing high-temperature superconducting tape, which can vastly scale back the scale of the magnets wanted to supply the fields (see beneath).
9. This Fusion Reactor Is Held Collectively With Tape
Commonwealth Fusion Methods is utilizing superconducting tape based mostly on yttrium barium copper oxide.Gretchen Ertl/CFS/MIT Plasma Science and Fusion Middle
Magnetic-confinement fusion depends on staggeringly sturdy magnetic fields to restrict a superhot plasma, usually 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 Methods thinks there’s a greater method, and it entails 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 could possibly be manufactured extra rapidly and inexpensively, in accordance with Commonwealth. The eventual success of fusion may very nicely rely upon the effectiveness of those higher-temperature superconductors.
10. The Age of Silicon Is Right here…for Batteries
Nanostructured silicon supplies may 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 opportunity of utilizing silicon, which, gram for gram, can maintain 10 occasions as many lithium ions. And in 2023, after a number of startups managed to unravel issues with silicon anodes—primarily, a bent to broaden 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 Applied sciences in Woodinville, Washington.