Power 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 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 below are the ten hottest AI articles that Spectrum printed in 2023, ranked by the period of time folks spent studying them.
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1. Warmth Pumps—The Nicely-Tempered Way forward for 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 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 Power’s Menlo Park, Calif., facility.Artistic Shot
Some of the attention-grabbing vitality startups that you simply’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 form 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 middle of a linear meeting react and push outward, in direction of the other ends of the meeting, driving magnets on both aspect 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 few of the greatest 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 often called the positioning 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 rather 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
For those who 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 means of tens of 1000’s 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 developing a 93,000-square-meter manufacturing facility across the similar time. The corporate is certainly one of a rising group focusing on grid-scale functions, significantly 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 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 provide 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, 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 type rods which might be clad in zirconium alloy. The gas is enriched to about 4.8 % U-235. However the superior reactors now approaching line use a wholly completely different form of gas, known as high-assay, low-enriched uranium (HALEU). (Enriched to twenty % U-235, it’s nonetheless far beneath the 90-plus % required for making nuclear weapons.) This previous November, Centrus Power of Bethesda, Maryland, turned solely the second group able to producing HALEU gas, and the primary exterior of Russia. Enjoyable reality: “The vitality in simply 3 tablespoons of HALEU can provide a lifetime’s price of energy for the typical U.S. client,” reported Prachi Patel.
7. To Free The Baltic Grid, Outdated Expertise Is New Once more
A synchronous condenser, such because the one at proper right here, will be coupled to a flywheel, at left.
Siemens Power
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 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 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 fundamental function, on this case, is to offer 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 simply’re prone to hear from any grizzled expertise 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 undertaking, the ITER, won’t be examined with deuterium and tritium gas till 2035, and couldn’t produce any helpful energy for fairly just a few years after that. However, 2023 noticed a number of attention-grabbing developments in fusion, largely in reference to startup corporations pursuing different 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 in addition Commonwealth Fusion Programs, in Devens, Mass. To supply the stupendous magnetic fields essential to confine a superheated plasma, Commonwealth is utilizing high-temperature superconducting tape, which is able to significantly cut back the scale of the magnets wanted to provide the fields (see beneath).
9. This Fusion Reactor Is Held Collectively With Tape
Commonwealth Fusion Programs 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 sturdy magnetic fields to restrict a superhot plasma, usually inside a torus-shaped vessel known as a tokamak. On the ITER undertaking, researchers are constructing superconducting electromagnets utilizing alloys of niobium-tin or niobium-titanium, which should be cooled to about ‑269 °C (about 4 levels Kelvin). The 18 ITER magnets would require 600 tonnes of the superconductor. Commonwealth Fusion Programs 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 might be manufactured extra rapidly and inexpensively, in keeping 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 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 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 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 Applied sciences in Woodinville, Washington.