Vitality storage and nuclear fusion—two dependable crowd pleasers when the group you’re speaking about is readers of IEEE Spectrum—are effectively 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 gasoline 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. 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.Inventive Shot
One of the attention-grabbing 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 virtually any sort of gasoline, 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 middle 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 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 among the largest 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 large ambitions and comparatively modest services in Everett, Washington, higher referred to as the location 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 geared toward reaching sensible fusion energy utilizing way more modest services 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 Deliver for the Grid
EnerVenue’s nickel-hydrogen battery cells are 1.8 meters lengthy, weigh 62 kilograms, and retailer 3 kilowatt-hours.EnerVenue
For those who don’t discharge after which recharge all of them the best way, 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 known 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 setting up a 93,000-square-meter manufacturing facility across the similar time. The corporate is one among a rising group focusing 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 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 Seventies (the 2 of them shared the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 2019 with Akira Yoshino). Wittingham had just a few 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 should learn the article.
6. U.S. Re-Enters the Nuclear Fuel Game
Uranium is enriched in centrifuge cascades, akin to this one at a Centrus Vitality plant in Piketon, Ohio.
Centrus Vitality
To generate energy, old-school light-water nuclear reactors use oxide gasoline, which consists of ceramic pellets of uranium oxide, organized end-to-end to type rods which can be clad in zirconium alloy. The gasoline is enriched to about 4.8 p.c U-235. However the superior reactors now approaching line use a completely completely different sort of gasoline, known 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 Energy of Bethesda, Maryland, turned solely the second group able to producing HALEU gasoline, and the primary exterior 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, Old Technology Is New Again
A synchronous condenser, such because the one at proper right here, might 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 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 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 turbines. Such a condenser is basically a big synchronous machine that spins freely; nevertheless, a flywheel linked to its shaft can retailer kinetic vitality. Its essential objective, on this case, is to supply further inertia, additionally known as spinning reserve, that will assist stabilize a grid within the occasion of a disaster.
Fusion has been the ability supply of the long run for greater than 70 years.Harry Campbell
Fusion is the ability supply of the long run—and it all the time can be. So goes the quip that you just’re more likely to hear from any grizzled expertise watcher sufficiently old to have lived by means of 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, is not going to be examined with deuterium and tritium gasoline till 2035, and couldn’t produce any helpful energy for fairly just a few years after that. Nonetheless, 2023 noticed a number of attention-grabbing developments in fusion, principally in reference to startup corporations pursuing different 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 in addition Commonwealth Fusion Programs, in Devens, Mass. To provide the stupendous magnetic fields essential to confine a superheated plasma, Commonwealth is utilizing high-temperature superconducting tape, which can significantly scale back the dimensions of the magnets wanted to supply the fields (see beneath).
9. This Fusion Reactor Is Held Together With Tape
Commonwealth Fusion Programs is utilizing superconducting tape based mostly on yttrium barium copper oxide.Gretchen Ertl/CFS/MIT Plasma Science and Fusion Heart
Magnetic-confinement fusion depends on staggeringly robust magnetic fields to restrict a superhot plasma, usually inside a torus-shaped vessel known 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 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 shortly and inexpensively, in keeping with Commonwealth. The eventual success of fusion may very effectively rely upon the effectiveness of those higher-temperature superconductors.
10. The Age of Silicon Is 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 potential 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 resolve 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.