Energy storage and nuclear fusion—two dependable crowd pleasers when the gang you’re speaking about is readers of IEEE Spectrum—are nicely represented amongst our most generally learn vitality tales of 2023. But atop the checklist are a few surprises. Number one? Heat pumps. Number two? An actual corker, and the reply to the query, what generates electrical energy however isn’t a dynamo or a gasoline cell?
Here 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 Comfort
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 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 Almost Any Fuel
Technicians assembled a linear generator at Mainspring Energy’s Menlo Park, Calif., facility.Creative Shot
One of probably the most fascinating vitality startups that you simply’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 gasoline, 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. Fuel and air compressed within the heart of a linear meeting react and push outward, in direction of the alternative ends of the meeting, driving magnets on both aspect of the chamber by way of conducting copper coils, producing electrical energy. The machines are already producing electrical energy at scores of installations, and the corporate’s backers embrace among the largest names in tech investing, together with Bill Gates and Vinod Khosla.
3. Welcome to Fusion City, USA
At Helion Energy, employees construct a piece of the corporate’s Polaris fusion reactor.Helion Energy
Fusion startups Zap Energy and Helion Energy have large ambitions and comparatively modest amenities in Everett, Washington, higher often called 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 geared toward attaining sensible fusion energy utilizing way more modest amenities than the huge International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) being inbuilt 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 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 way 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 house 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 firm is one in all 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 Images
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 a couple of peeves to get off his chest and did so at a symposium this previous April at Stanford. 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, akin to this one at a Centrus Energy plant in Piketon, Ohio.
Centrus Energy
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 kind rods which can be clad in zirconium alloy. The gasoline is enriched to about 4.8 % U-235. But the superior reactors now approaching line use a completely totally different type of gasoline, referred to as high-assay, low-enriched uranium (HALEU). (Enriched to twenty % U-235, it’s nonetheless far under the 90-plus % 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. Fun reality: “The energy in just 3 tablespoons of HALEU can supply a lifetime’s worth of power for the average U.S. consumer,” 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 Energy
Spectrum’s veteran, globe-trotting vitality contributor, Peter Fairley, has been masking the electric-grid and -power ramifications of the warfare 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 nations 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 sudden and sudden lack of transmission traces or turbines. Such a condenser is basically a big synchronous machine that spins freely; nonetheless, a flywheel linked to its shaft can retailer kinetic vitality. Its foremost function, on this case, is to supply extra inertia, additionally referred to as spinning reserve, that might assist stabilize a grid within the occasion of a disaster.
8. Fusion Is Having a Moment
Fusion has been the ability supply of the longer term for greater than 70 years.Harry Campbell
Fusion is the ability supply of the longer term—and it all the time can be. So goes the quip that you simply’re prone to hear from any grizzled know-how watcher sufficiently old to have lived by way 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 gasoline till 2035, and couldn’t produce any helpful energy for fairly a couple of years after that. Nevertheless, 2023 noticed a number of fascinating 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 embrace Zap Energy and Helion Energy (see above, “Welcome to Fusion City, USA”) and in addition Commonwealth Fusion Systems, in Devens, Mass. To produce the stupendous magnetic fields essential to confine a superheated plasma, Commonwealth is utilizing high-temperature superconducting tape, which is able to drastically scale back the dimensions of the magnets wanted to supply the fields (see under).
9. This Fusion Reactor Is Held Together With Tape
Commonwealth Fusion Systems is utilizing superconducting tape based mostly on yttrium barium copper oxide.Gretchen Ertl/CFS/MIT Plasma Science and Fusion Center
Magnetic-confinement fusion depends on staggeringly robust magnetic fields to restrict a superhot plasma, usually inside a torus-shaped vessel referred to as a tokamak. At 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 rapidly and inexpensively, in response to Commonwealth. The eventual success of fusion would possibly very nicely rely on 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 typical anode materials for lithium-ion batteries is graphite, coated on copper foil. But researchers have lengthy been tantalized by the potential of 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, a bent to increase 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.