![]() Wittingham had a few peeves to get off his chest and did so at a symposium this past April at Stanford. Stanley Wittingham, along with the late John Goodenough, are credited as key figures in the invention of the lithium-ion battery in the early 1970s (the two of them shared the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 2019 with Akira Yoshino). Lithium Battery Ripe for Disruption, Inventor SaysĪ car battery pack is opened, revealing the modules, at a Volkswagen pilot recycling plant in Salzgitter, Germany. The company is one of a growing group targeting grid-scale applications, particularly for solar installations.ĥ. This past September, startup EnerVenue launched a new generation of its nickel-hydrogen battery and finished constructing a 93,000-square-meter factory around the same time. ![]() ![]() Such a battery already exists-it’s called nickel-hydrogen, and it’s been used in space since 1977. Now imagine a battery that can last through tens of thousands of charge-discharge cycles. ![]() If you don’t discharge and then recharge them all the way, lithium-ion batteries can last for thousands of charge-discharge cycles. NASA Battery Tech to Deliver for the GridĮnerVenue’s nickel-hydrogen battery cells are 1.8 meters long, weigh 62 kilograms, and store 3 kilowatt-hours. Zap and Helion are part of a renaissance in fusion-energy R&D aimed at achieving practical fusion power using much more modest facilities than the vast International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) being built in southern France, at a cost estimated to be north of US $22 billion by the time it’s completed.Ĥ. Helion Energyįusion startups Zap Energy and Helion Energy have big ambitions and relatively modest facilities in Everett, Washington, better known as the site where Boeing employs 30,000 people in one of the world’s largest manufacturing facilities. The machines are already generating electricity at scores of installations, and the company’s backers include some of the biggest names in tech investing, including Bill Gates and Vinod Khosla.Īt Helion Energy, workers build a section of the company’s Polaris fusion reactor. Fuel and air compressed in the center of a linear assembly react and push outward, towards the opposite ends of the assembly, driving magnets on either side of the chamber through conducting copper coils, generating electricity. Mainspring calls its machine a linear generator, because it converts linear motion into electricity. The Menlo Park, Calif., company, which was founded in 2010 by three Stanford grads, is producing a machine that generates 230 to 430 kilowatts using almost any kind of fuel, including ammonia, hydrogen, biogas, or natural gas. One of the most interesting energy startups that you’ve never heard of (unless you are a diligent reader of Spectrum) is Mainspring Energy. Technicians assembled a linear generator at Mainspring Energy’s Menlo Park, Calif., facility. This New Breed of Generator Can Run on Almost Any Fuel And yet more air conditioning exacerbates the very problem-climate change-that is driving the need for more air conditioning. Gradient ComfortĪ world growing warmer will inevitably need more air conditioning, to keep people not just comfortable but alive in the hottest regions. Heat Pumps-The Well-Tempered Future of A/CsĪ window-mounted air-conditioning system includes an electric heat pump for heating. Here are the 10 most popular AI articles that Spectrum published in 2023, ranked by the amount of time people spent reading them.ġ. Number two? A real corker, and the answer to the question, what generates electricity but isn’t a dynamo or a fuel cell? But atop the list are a couple of surprises. Energy storage and nuclear fusion-two reliable crowd pleasers when the crowd you’re talking about is readers of IEEE Spectrum-are well represented among our most widely read energy stories of 2023.
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