Power storage and nuclear fusion—two dependable crowd pleasers when the gang you’re speaking about is readers of IEEE Spectrum—are effectively represented amongst our most generally learn power tales of 2023. However atop the checklist 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 here are the ten hottest AI articles that Spectrum revealed 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 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 Virtually Any Gasoline
Technicians assembled a linear generator at Mainspring Power’s Menlo Park, Calif., facility.Inventive Shot
One of the crucial attention-grabbing power startups that you just’ve by no means heard of (until you’re a diligent reader of Spectrum) is Mainspring Power. 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 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. Gasoline 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 way 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 few of the largest names in tech investing, together with Invoice Gates and Vinod Khosla.
3. Welcome to Fusion Metropolis, USA
At Helion Power, staff construct a piece of the corporate’s Polaris fusion reactor.Helion Power
Fusion startups Zap Power and Helion Power have massive 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 rather more modest amenities than the huge Worldwide Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) being in-built 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
When 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 known as nickel-hydrogen, and it’s been utilized in house since 1977. This previous September, startup EnerVenue launched a brand new era of its nickel-hydrogen battery and completed setting up 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 purposes, 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 Pictures
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 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 should learn the article.
6. U.S. Re-Enters the Nuclear Gasoline Sport
Uranium is enriched in centrifuge cascades, reminiscent of this one at a Centrus Power plant in Piketon, Ohio.
Centrus Power
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 are 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 sort of gas, 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 Power of Bethesda, Maryland, grew to become solely the second group able to producing HALEU gas, and the primary outdoors of Russia. Enjoyable truth: “The power in simply 3 tablespoons of HALEU can provide a lifetime’s price of energy for the typical U.S. shopper,” reported Prachi Patel.
7. To Free The Baltic Grid, Previous Expertise Is New Once more
A synchronous condenser, such because the one at proper right here, might be coupled to a flywheel, at left.
Siemens Power
Spectrum’s veteran, globe-trotting power contributor, Peter Fairley, has been masking the electric-grid and -power ramifications of the conflict 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 resist, within the absence of connections to the a lot bigger Russian grid, the sudden 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 power. Its major goal, 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 will likely be. So goes the quip that you just’re more likely 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 power. The grim actuality of fusion is that the world’s largest mission, 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. However, 2023 noticed a number of attention-grabbing 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 embody Zap Power and Helion Power (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 significantly 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 Techniques 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 robust magnetic fields to restrict a superhot plasma, sometimes inside a torus-shaped vessel known as a tokamak. On the ITER mission, 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 Techniques thinks there’s a greater means, 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, in accordance with Commonwealth. The eventual success of fusion would possibly very effectively depend 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 everyday 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 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 Applied sciences in Woodinville, Washington.
