Consider the dizzying ascent of solar energy in the United States: In the past decade, solar capacity increased nearly 900 percent, with electricity production eight times greater in 2023 than in 2014. The jump from 2022 to 2023 alone was 51 percent, with a record 32 gigawatts (GW) of solar installations coming online. In the past four years, more solar has been added to the grid than any other form of generation. Installed solar now tops 179 GW, enough to power nearly 33 million homes. The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) is so bullish on the sun that its decarbonization plans envision solar satisfying 45 percent of the nation’s electricity demands by 2050.

But the continued rapid expansion of solar requires advances in technology, notably to improve the efficiency and durability of solar photovoltaic (PV) materials and manufacturing. That’s where Optigon, a three-year-old MIT spinout company, comes in.

“Our goal is to build tools for research and industry that can accelerate the energy transition,” says Dane deQuilettes, the company’s co-founder and chief science officer. “The technology we have developed for solar will enable measurements and analysis of materials as they are being made both in lab and on the manufacturing line, dramatically speeding up the optimization of PV.”

With roots in MIT’s vibrant solar research community, Optigon is poised for a 2024 rollout of technology it believes will drastically pick up the pace of solar power and other clean energy projects.

Beyond silicon

Silicon, the material mainstay of most PV, is limited by the laws of physics in the efficiencies it can achieve converting photons from the sun into electrical energy. Silicon-based solar cells can theoretically reach power conversion levels of just 30 percent, and real-world efficiency levels hover in the low 20s. But beyond the physical limitations of silicon, there is another issue at play for many researchers and the solar industry in the United States and elsewhere: China dominates the silicon PV market, from supply chains to manufacturing.

Scientists are eagerly pursuing alternative materials, either for enhancing silicon’s solar conversion capacity or for replacing silicon altogether.

In the past decade, a family of crystal-structured semiconductors known as perovskites has risen to the fore as a next-generation PV material candidate. Perovskite devices lend themselves to a novel manufacturing process using printing technology that could circumvent the supply chain juggernaut China has built for silicon. Perovskite solar cells can be stacked on each other or layered atop silicon PV, to achieve higher conversion efficiencies. Because perovskite technology is flexible and lightweight, modules can be used on roofs and other structures that cannot support heavier silicon PV, lowering costs and enabling a wider range of building-integrated solar devices.

But these new materials require testing, both during R&D and then on assembly lines, where missing or defective optical, electrical, or dimensional properties in the nano-sized crystal structures can negatively impact the end product.

“The actual measurement and data analysis processes have been really, really slow, because you have to use a bunch of separate tools that are all very manual,” says Optigon co-founder and chief executive officer Anthony Troupe ’21. “We wanted to come up with tools for automating detection of a material’s properties, for determining whether it could make a good or bad solar cell, and then for optimizing it.”

“Our approach packed several non-contact, optical measurements using different types of light sources and detectors into a single system, which together provide a holistic, cross-sectional view of the material,” says Brandon Motes ’21, ME ’22, co-founder and chief technical officer.

“This breakthrough in achieving millisecond timescales for data collection and analysis means we can take research-quality tools and actually put them on a full production system, getting extremely detailed information about products being built at massive, gigawatt scale in real-time,” says Troupe.

This streamlined system takes measurements “in the snap of the fingers, unlike the traditional tools,” says Joseph Berry, director of the US Manufacturing of Advanced Perovskites Consortium and a senior research scientist at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory. “Optigon’s techniques are high precision and allow high throughput, which means they can be used in a lot of contexts where you want rapid feedback and the ability to develop materials very, very quickly.”

According to Berry, Optigon’s technology may give the solar industry not just better materials, but the ability to pump out high-quality PV products at a brisker clip than is currently possible. “If Optigon is successful in deploying their technology, then we can more rapidly develop the materials that we need, manufacturing with the requisite precision again and again,” he says. “This could lead to the next generation of PV modules at a much, much lower cost.”

Measuring makes the difference

With Small Business Innovation Research funding from DOE to commercialize its products and a grant from the Massachusetts Clean Energy Center, Optigon has settled into a space at the climate technology incubator Greentown Labs in Somerville, Massachusetts. Here, the team is preparing for this spring’s launch of its first commercial product, whose genesis lies in MIT’s GridEdge Solar Research Program.

Led by Vladimir Bulović, a professor of electrical engineering and the director of MIT.nano, the GridEdge program was established with funding from the Tata Trusts to develop lightweight, flexible, and inexpensive solar cells for distribution to rural communities around the globe. When deQuilettes joined the group in 2017 as a postdoc, he was tasked with directing the program and building the infrastructure to study and make perovskite solar modules.

“We were trying to understand once we made the material whether or not it was good,” he recalls. “There were no good commercial metrology [the science of measurements] tools for materials beyond silicon, so we started to build our own.” Recognizing the group’s need for greater expertise on the problem, especially in the areas of electrical, software, and mechanical engineering, deQuilettes put a call out for undergraduate researchers to help build metrology tools for new solar materials.

“Forty people inquired, but when I met Brandon and Anthony, something clicked; it was clear we had a complementary skill set,” says deQuilettes. “We started working together, with Anthony coming up with beautiful designs to integrate multiple measurements, and Brandon creating boards to control all of the hardware, including different types of lasers. We started filing multiple patents and that was when we saw it all coming together.”

“We knew from the start that metrology could vastly improve not just materials, but production yields,” says Troupe. Adds deQuilettes, “Our goal was getting to the highest performance orders of magnitude faster than it would ordinarily take, so we developed tools that would not just be useful for research labs but for manufacturing lines to give live feedback on quality.”

The device Optigon designed for industry is the size of a football, “with sensor packages crammed into a tiny form factor, taking measurements as material flows directly underneath,” says Motes. “We have also thought carefully about ways to make interaction with this tool as seamless and, dare I say, as enjoyable as possible, streaming data to both a dashboard an operator can watch and to a custom database.”

Photovoltaics is just the start

The company may have already found its market niche. “A research group paid us to use our in-house prototype because they have such a burning need to get these sorts of measurements,” says Troupe, and according to Motes, “Potential customers ask us if they can buy the system now.” deQuilettes says, “Our hope is that we become the de facto company for doing any sort of characterization metrology in the United States and beyond.”

Challenges lie ahead for Optigon: product launches, full-scale manufacturing, technical assistance, and sales. Greentown Labs offers support, as does MIT’s own rich community of solar researchers and entrepreneurs. But the founders are already thinking about next phases.

“We are not limiting ourselves to the photovoltaics area,” says deQuilettes. “We’re planning on working in other clean energy materials such as batteries and fuel cells.”

That’s because the team wants to make the maximum impact on the climate challenge. “We’ve thought a lot about the potential our tools will have on reducing carbon emissions, and we’ve done a really in-depth analysis looking at how our system can increase production yields of solar panels and other energy technologies, reducing materials and energy wasted in conventional optimization,” deQuilettes says. “If we look across all these sectors, we can expect to offset about 1,000 million metric tons of CO₂ [carbon dioxide] per year in the not-too-distant future.”

The team has written scale into its business plan. “We want to be the key enabler for bringing these new energy technologies to market,” says Motes. “We envision being deployed on every manufacturing line making these types of materials. It’s our goal to walk around and know that if we see a solar panel deployed, there’s a pretty high likelihood that it will be one we measured at some point.”

A maze of brackish and freshwater ponds covers Taiwan’s coastal plain, supporting aquaculture operations that produce roughly NT $30 billion (US $920 million) worth of seafood every year. Taiwan’s government is hoping that the more than 400 square kilometers of fishponds can simultaneously produce a second harvest: solar power.

What is aquavoltaics?

That’s the impetus behind the new 42.9-megawatt aquavoltaics facility in the southern city of Tainan. To build it, Taipei-based Hongde Renewable Energy bought 57.6 hectares of abandoned land in Tainan’s fishpond-rich Qigu district, created earthen berms to delineate the two dozen ponds, and installed solar panels along the berms and over six reservoir ponds.

Tony Chang, general manager of the Hongde subsidiary Star Aquaculture, says 18 of the ponds are stocked with mullet (prized for their roe) and shrimp, while milkfish help clean the water in the reservoir ponds. In 2023, the first full year of operation, Chang says his team harvested over 100,000 kilograms of seafood. This August, they began stocking a cavernous indoor facility, also festooned with photovoltaics, to cultivate white-legged shrimp.

A number of other countries have been experimenting with aquavoltaics, including China, Chile, Bangladesh, and Norway, extending the concept to large solar arrays floating on rivers and bays. But nowhere else is the pairing of aquaculture and solar power seen as so crucial to the economy. Taiwan is striving to massively expand renewable generation to sustain its semiconductor fabs, and solar is expected to play a large role. But on this densely populated island—slightly larger than Maryland, smaller than the Netherlands—there’s not a lot of open space to install solar panels. The fishponds are hard to ignore. By the end of 2025, the government is looking to install 4.4 gigawatts of aquavoltaics to help meet its goal of 20 GW of solar generation.

Is Taiwan’s aquavoltaics plan unrealistic?

Meanwhile, though, solar developers are struggling to deliver on Taiwan’s ambitious goals, even as some projections suggest Taiwan will need over eight times more solar by 2050. And aquavoltaics in particular have come under scrutiny from environmental groups. In 2020, for example, reporter Cai Jiashan visited 100 solar plants built on agricultural land, including fishponds, and found dozens of cases where solar developers built more solar capacity than the law intended, or secured permits based on promises of continued farming that weren’t kept.

Star Aquaculture grows milkfish to help clean water for its breeding ponds.HDRenewables

On 7 July 2020, Taiwan’s Ministry of Agriculture responded by restricting solar development on farmland, in what the solar industry called the “Double-Seven Incident.” Many aquavoltaic projects were canceled while others were delayed. The latter included a 10-MW facility in Tainan that Google had announced to great fanfare in 2019 as its first renewable-energy investment in Asia, to supply power for the company’s Taiwan data centers. The array finally started up in 2023, three years behind schedule.

Critics of Taiwan’s renewed aquavoltaic plans thus see the government’s goal as unrealistic. Yuping Chen, executive director of the Taiwan Environment and Planning Association, a Taipei-based nonprofit dedicated to resolving conflicts between solar energy and agriculture, says of aquavoltaics, “It is claimed to be crucial by the government, but it’s impossible to realize.”

How aquavoltaics could revive fishing, boost revenue

Solar developers and government officials who endorse aquavoltaics argue that such projects could revive the island’s traditional fishing community. Taiwan’s fishing villages are aging and shrinking as younger people take city jobs. Climate change has also taken a toll. Severe storms damage fishpond embankments, while extreme heat and rainfall stress the fish.

4.4

Gigawatts of aquavoltaics that Taiwan wants to install by the end of 2025

Solar development could help reverse these trends. Several recent studies examining fishponds in Taiwan found that adding solar improves profitability, providing an opportunity to reinvigorate communities if agrivoltaic investors share their returns. Alan Wu, deputy director of the Green Energy Initiative at Taiwan’s Industrial Technology Research Institute, says the Hsinchu-based lab has opened a research station in Tainan to connect solar and aquaculture firms. ITRI is helping aquavoltaics facilities boost their revenues by figuring out how they can raise “species of high economic value that are normally more difficult to raise,” Wu says.

Such high-value products include the 27,000 pieces of sun-dried mullet roe that Hongde Renewable Energy’s Tainan site produced last year. The new indoor facility, meanwhile, should boost yields of the relatively pricey whiteleg shrimp. Chang expects the indoor harvests to fetch $500,000 to $600,000 annually, compared to $800,000 to $900,000 from the larger outdoor ponds.

The solar roof over the 100,000-liter indoor growth tanks protects the 2.7 million shrimp against weather and bird droppings. Chang says a patent-pending drain mechanically removes waste from each tank, and also sucks out the shrimp when they’re ready for harvest.

Land that Star Aquaculture set aside for wildlife now attracts endangered birds like the black-faced spoonbill [left] and the oriental stork [right].iStock (2)

The company has also set aside 9 percent of the site for wildlife, in response to concerns from conservationists. “Egrets, endangered oriental storks, and black-faced spoonbills continue to use the site,” Chang says. “If it was all covered with PV, it could impact their habitat.”

Such measures may not satisfy environmentalists, though. In a review published last month, researchers at Fudan University in Shanghai and two Chinese power firms concluded that China’s floating aquavoltaic installations—some of which already span 5 square kilometers—will “inevitably” alter the marine environment.

Aquavoltaic facilities that are entirely indoors may be an even harder sell as they scale up. Toshiba is backing such a plant in Tainan, to generate 120 MW for an unspecified “semiconductor manufacturer,” with plans for a 360-MW expansion. The resulting buildings could exclude wildlife from 5 square kilometers of habitat. Indoor projects could compensate by protecting land elsewhere. But, as Chen of the Taiwan Environment and Planning Association notes, developers of such sites may not take such measures unless they’re required by law to do so.

New releases in fiction, nonfiction and comics that caught our attention.

Toward Eternity by Anton Hur

Toward Eternity does not waste any time in getting to the drama. The novel by Anton Hur begins in the not-so-far-off future, and opens with a moment of crisis: a patient in a nanotherapy research clinic has seemingly vanished into thin air. This patient had been undergoing a new type of treatment that uses android cells (dubbed “nanites”) to cure cancer by replacing the body’s own cells. In doing so, however, it transforms the body entirely into a nanodroid, giving rise to “nano humans” that are no longer subjected to mortality.

The story jumps through time and different perspectives, exploring what it means “to be human in a world where technology is quickly catching up to biology.” From the second I started reading this one, I did not want to put it down.

Into the Clear Blue Sky: The Path to Restoring Our Atmosphere by Rob Jackson

It can be hard not to get swept up in the doom and gloom of climate change, especially amid reports marking Earth’s hottest years on record and still-rising emissions from fossil fuels. Stanford climate scientist Rob Jackson’s new book Into the Clear Blue Sky: The Path to Restoring Our Atmosphere aims to foster a more optimistic outlook by calling attention to the courses of action that could lead us to a better future for our planet and its inhabitants.

“I view my book as a home repair manual for the planet,” Jackson said in a recent interview published by the scientific journal ACS Central Science. “It highlights the people and the ideas needed to solve the climate crisis. I want most of all to give people hope, a sense of optimism. Yes, climate change is already bad, but we can still fix this problem.”

Epitaphs from the Abyss #1

Legendary comic book publisher EC Comics, which brought us series like Tales from the Crypt and Weird Science more than 70 years ago, is making a comeback with its first new series in decades: Epitaphs from the Abyss. The first issue of the horror series was released at the end of July and features four tales — which are introduced by a ghoulish narrator dubbed The Grave-Digger.

Epitaphs from the Abyss #1 has stories by Brian Azzarello, J. Holtham, Stephanie Phillips and Chris Condon, with art by Lee Bermejo, Phil Hester, Peter Krause and Jorge Fornés. There’s something about those old EC Comics that just hits different, and Epitaphs faithfully slips back into that vibe to deliver spooky new stories that have a classic feel.

Consider the dizzying ascent of solar energy in the United States: In the past decade, solar capacity increased nearly 900 percent, with electricity production eight times greater in 2023 than in 2014. The jump from 2022 to 2023 alone was 51 percent, with a record 32 gigawatts (GW) of solar installations coming online. In the past four years, more solar has been added to the grid than any other form of generation. Installed solar now tops 179 GW, enough to power nearly 33 million homes. The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) is so bullish on the sun that its decarbonization plans envision solar satisfying 45 percent of the nation’s electricity demands by 2050.

But the continued rapid expansion of solar requires advances in technology, notably to improve the efficiency and durability of solar photovoltaic (PV) materials and manufacturing. That’s where Optigon, a three-year-old MIT spinout company, comes in.

“Our goal is to build tools for research and industry that can accelerate the energy transition,” says Dane deQuilettes, the company’s co-founder and chief science officer. “The technology we have developed for solar will enable measurements and analysis of materials as they are being made both in lab and on the manufacturing line, dramatically speeding up the optimization of PV.”

With roots in MIT’s vibrant solar research community, Optigon is poised for a 2024 rollout of technology it believes will drastically pick up the pace of solar power and other clean energy projects.

Beyond silicon

Silicon, the material mainstay of most PV, is limited by the laws of physics in the efficiencies it can achieve converting photons from the sun into electrical energy. Silicon-based solar cells can theoretically reach power conversion levels of just 30 percent, and real-world efficiency levels hover in the low 20s. But beyond the physical limitations of silicon, there is another issue at play for many researchers and the solar industry in the United States and elsewhere: China dominates the silicon PV market, from supply chains to manufacturing.

Scientists are eagerly pursuing alternative materials, either for enhancing silicon’s solar conversion capacity or for replacing silicon altogether.

In the past decade, a family of crystal-structured semiconductors known as perovskites has risen to the fore as a next-generation PV material candidate. Perovskite devices lend themselves to a novel manufacturing process using printing technology that could circumvent the supply chain juggernaut China has built for silicon. Perovskite solar cells can be stacked on each other or layered atop silicon PV, to achieve higher conversion efficiencies. Because perovskite technology is flexible and lightweight, modules can be used on roofs and other structures that cannot support heavier silicon PV, lowering costs and enabling a wider range of building-integrated solar devices.

But these new materials require testing, both during R&D and then on assembly lines, where missing or defective optical, electrical, or dimensional properties in the nano-sized crystal structures can negatively impact the end product.

“The actual measurement and data analysis processes have been really, really slow, because you have to use a bunch of separate tools that are all very manual,” says Optigon co-founder and chief executive officer Anthony Troupe ’21. “We wanted to come up with tools for automating detection of a material’s properties, for determining whether it could make a good or bad solar cell, and then for optimizing it.”

“Our approach packed several non-contact, optical measurements using different types of light sources and detectors into a single system, which together provide a holistic, cross-sectional view of the material,” says Brandon Motes ’21, ME ’22, co-founder and chief technical officer.

“This breakthrough in achieving millisecond timescales for data collection and analysis means we can take research-quality tools and actually put them on a full production system, getting extremely detailed information about products being built at massive, gigawatt scale in real-time,” says Troupe.

This streamlined system takes measurements “in the snap of the fingers, unlike the traditional tools,” says Joseph Berry, director of the US Manufacturing of Advanced Perovskites Consortium and a senior research scientist at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory. “Optigon’s techniques are high precision and allow high throughput, which means they can be used in a lot of contexts where you want rapid feedback and the ability to develop materials very, very quickly.”

According to Berry, Optigon’s technology may give the solar industry not just better materials, but the ability to pump out high-quality PV products at a brisker clip than is currently possible. “If Optigon is successful in deploying their technology, then we can more rapidly develop the materials that we need, manufacturing with the requisite precision again and again,” he says. “This could lead to the next generation of PV modules at a much, much lower cost.”

Measuring makes the difference

With Small Business Innovation Research funding from DOE to commercialize its products and a grant from the Massachusetts Clean Energy Center, Optigon has settled into a space at the climate technology incubator Greentown Labs in Somerville, Massachusetts. Here, the team is preparing for this spring’s launch of its first commercial product, whose genesis lies in MIT’s GridEdge Solar Research Program.

Led by Vladimir Bulović, a professor of electrical engineering and the director of MIT.nano, the GridEdge program was established with funding from the Tata Trusts to develop lightweight, flexible, and inexpensive solar cells for distribution to rural communities around the globe. When deQuilettes joined the group in 2017 as a postdoc, he was tasked with directing the program and building the infrastructure to study and make perovskite solar modules.

“We were trying to understand once we made the material whether or not it was good,” he recalls. “There were no good commercial metrology [the science of measurements] tools for materials beyond silicon, so we started to build our own.” Recognizing the group’s need for greater expertise on the problem, especially in the areas of electrical, software, and mechanical engineering, deQuilettes put a call out for undergraduate researchers to help build metrology tools for new solar materials.

“Forty people inquired, but when I met Brandon and Anthony, something clicked; it was clear we had a complementary skill set,” says deQuilettes. “We started working together, with Anthony coming up with beautiful designs to integrate multiple measurements, and Brandon creating boards to control all of the hardware, including different types of lasers. We started filing multiple patents and that was when we saw it all coming together.”

“We knew from the start that metrology could vastly improve not just materials, but production yields,” says Troupe. Adds deQuilettes, “Our goal was getting to the highest performance orders of magnitude faster than it would ordinarily take, so we developed tools that would not just be useful for research labs but for manufacturing lines to give live feedback on quality.”

The device Optigon designed for industry is the size of a football, “with sensor packages crammed into a tiny form factor, taking measurements as material flows directly underneath,” says Motes. “We have also thought carefully about ways to make interaction with this tool as seamless and, dare I say, as enjoyable as possible, streaming data to both a dashboard an operator can watch and to a custom database.”

Photovoltaics is just the start

The company may have already found its market niche. “A research group paid us to use our in-house prototype because they have such a burning need to get these sorts of measurements,” says Troupe, and according to Motes, “Potential customers ask us if they can buy the system now.” deQuilettes says, “Our hope is that we become the de facto company for doing any sort of characterization metrology in the United States and beyond.”

Challenges lie ahead for Optigon: product launches, full-scale manufacturing, technical assistance, and sales. Greentown Labs offers support, as does MIT’s own rich community of solar researchers and entrepreneurs. But the founders are already thinking about next phases.

“We are not limiting ourselves to the photovoltaics area,” says deQuilettes. “We’re planning on working in other clean energy materials such as batteries and fuel cells.”

That’s because the team wants to make the maximum impact on the climate challenge. “We’ve thought a lot about the potential our tools will have on reducing carbon emissions, and we’ve done a really in-depth analysis looking at how our system can increase production yields of solar panels and other energy technologies, reducing materials and energy wasted in conventional optimization,” deQuilettes says. “If we look across all these sectors, we can expect to offset about 1,000 million metric tons of CO₂ [carbon dioxide] per year in the not-too-distant future.”

The team has written scale into its business plan. “We want to be the key enabler for bringing these new energy technologies to market,” says Motes. “We envision being deployed on every manufacturing line making these types of materials. It’s our goal to walk around and know that if we see a solar panel deployed, there’s a pretty high likelihood that it will be one we measured at some point.”

New releases in fiction, nonfiction and comics that caught our attention.

Toward Eternity by Anton Hur

Toward Eternity does not waste any time in getting to the drama. The novel by Anton Hur begins in the not-so-far-off future, and opens with a moment of crisis: a patient in a nanotherapy research clinic has seemingly vanished into thin air. This patient had been undergoing a new type of treatment that uses android cells (dubbed “nanites”) to cure cancer by replacing the body’s own cells. In doing so, however, it transforms the body entirely into a nanodroid, giving rise to “nano humans” that are no longer subjected to mortality.

The story jumps through time and different perspectives, exploring what it means “to be human in a world where technology is quickly catching up to biology.” From the second I started reading this one, I did not want to put it down.

Into the Clear Blue Sky: The Path to Restoring Our Atmosphere by Rob Jackson

It can be hard not to get swept up in the doom and gloom of climate change, especially amid reports marking Earth’s hottest years on record and still-rising emissions from fossil fuels. Stanford climate scientist Rob Jackson’s new book Into the Clear Blue Sky: The Path to Restoring Our Atmosphere aims to foster a more optimistic outlook by calling attention to the courses of action that could lead us to a better future for our planet and its inhabitants.

“I view my book as a home repair manual for the planet,” Jackson said in a recent interview published by the scientific journal ACS Central Science. “It highlights the people and the ideas needed to solve the climate crisis. I want most of all to give people hope, a sense of optimism. Yes, climate change is already bad, but we can still fix this problem.”

Epitaphs from the Abyss #1

Legendary comic book publisher EC Comics, which brought us series like Tales from the Crypt and Weird Science more than 70 years ago, is making a comeback with its first new series in decades: Epitaphs from the Abyss. The first issue of the horror series was released at the end of July and features four tales — which are introduced by a ghoulish narrator dubbed The Grave-Digger.

Epitaphs from the Abyss #1 has stories by Brian Azzarello, J. Holtham, Stephanie Phillips and Chris Condon, with art by Lee Bermejo, Phil Hester, Peter Krause and Jorge Fornés. There’s something about those old EC Comics that just hits different, and Epitaphs faithfully slips back into that vibe to deliver spooky new stories that have a classic feel.

Consider the dizzying ascent of solar energy in the United States: In the past decade, solar capacity increased nearly 900 percent, with electricity production eight times greater in 2023 than in 2014. The jump from 2022 to 2023 alone was 51 percent, with a record 32 gigawatts (GW) of solar installations coming online. In the past four years, more solar has been added to the grid than any other form of generation. Installed solar now tops 179 GW, enough to power nearly 33 million homes. The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) is so bullish on the sun that its decarbonization plans envision solar satisfying 45 percent of the nation’s electricity demands by 2050.

But the continued rapid expansion of solar requires advances in technology, notably to improve the efficiency and durability of solar photovoltaic (PV) materials and manufacturing. That’s where Optigon, a three-year-old MIT spinout company, comes in.

“Our goal is to build tools for research and industry that can accelerate the energy transition,” says Dane deQuilettes, the company’s co-founder and chief science officer. “The technology we have developed for solar will enable measurements and analysis of materials as they are being made both in lab and on the manufacturing line, dramatically speeding up the optimization of PV.”

With roots in MIT’s vibrant solar research community, Optigon is poised for a 2024 rollout of technology it believes will drastically pick up the pace of solar power and other clean energy projects.

Beyond silicon

Silicon, the material mainstay of most PV, is limited by the laws of physics in the efficiencies it can achieve converting photons from the sun into electrical energy. Silicon-based solar cells can theoretically reach power conversion levels of just 30 percent, and real-world efficiency levels hover in the low 20s. But beyond the physical limitations of silicon, there is another issue at play for many researchers and the solar industry in the United States and elsewhere: China dominates the silicon PV market, from supply chains to manufacturing.

Scientists are eagerly pursuing alternative materials, either for enhancing silicon’s solar conversion capacity or for replacing silicon altogether.

In the past decade, a family of crystal-structured semiconductors known as perovskites has risen to the fore as a next-generation PV material candidate. Perovskite devices lend themselves to a novel manufacturing process using printing technology that could circumvent the supply chain juggernaut China has built for silicon. Perovskite solar cells can be stacked on each other or layered atop silicon PV, to achieve higher conversion efficiencies. Because perovskite technology is flexible and lightweight, modules can be used on roofs and other structures that cannot support heavier silicon PV, lowering costs and enabling a wider range of building-integrated solar devices.

But these new materials require testing, both during R&D and then on assembly lines, where missing or defective optical, electrical, or dimensional properties in the nano-sized crystal structures can negatively impact the end product.

“The actual measurement and data analysis processes have been really, really slow, because you have to use a bunch of separate tools that are all very manual,” says Optigon co-founder and chief executive officer Anthony Troupe ’21. “We wanted to come up with tools for automating detection of a material’s properties, for determining whether it could make a good or bad solar cell, and then for optimizing it.”

“Our approach packed several non-contact, optical measurements using different types of light sources and detectors into a single system, which together provide a holistic, cross-sectional view of the material,” says Brandon Motes ’21, ME ’22, co-founder and chief technical officer.

“This breakthrough in achieving millisecond timescales for data collection and analysis means we can take research-quality tools and actually put them on a full production system, getting extremely detailed information about products being built at massive, gigawatt scale in real-time,” says Troupe.

This streamlined system takes measurements “in the snap of the fingers, unlike the traditional tools,” says Joseph Berry, director of the US Manufacturing of Advanced Perovskites Consortium and a senior research scientist at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory. “Optigon’s techniques are high precision and allow high throughput, which means they can be used in a lot of contexts where you want rapid feedback and the ability to develop materials very, very quickly.”

According to Berry, Optigon’s technology may give the solar industry not just better materials, but the ability to pump out high-quality PV products at a brisker clip than is currently possible. “If Optigon is successful in deploying their technology, then we can more rapidly develop the materials that we need, manufacturing with the requisite precision again and again,” he says. “This could lead to the next generation of PV modules at a much, much lower cost.”

Measuring makes the difference

With Small Business Innovation Research funding from DOE to commercialize its products and a grant from the Massachusetts Clean Energy Center, Optigon has settled into a space at the climate technology incubator Greentown Labs in Somerville, Massachusetts. Here, the team is preparing for this spring’s launch of its first commercial product, whose genesis lies in MIT’s GridEdge Solar Research Program.

Led by Vladimir Bulović, a professor of electrical engineering and the director of MIT.nano, the GridEdge program was established with funding from the Tata Trusts to develop lightweight, flexible, and inexpensive solar cells for distribution to rural communities around the globe. When deQuilettes joined the group in 2017 as a postdoc, he was tasked with directing the program and building the infrastructure to study and make perovskite solar modules.

“We were trying to understand once we made the material whether or not it was good,” he recalls. “There were no good commercial metrology [the science of measurements] tools for materials beyond silicon, so we started to build our own.” Recognizing the group’s need for greater expertise on the problem, especially in the areas of electrical, software, and mechanical engineering, deQuilettes put a call out for undergraduate researchers to help build metrology tools for new solar materials.

“Forty people inquired, but when I met Brandon and Anthony, something clicked; it was clear we had a complementary skill set,” says deQuilettes. “We started working together, with Anthony coming up with beautiful designs to integrate multiple measurements, and Brandon creating boards to control all of the hardware, including different types of lasers. We started filing multiple patents and that was when we saw it all coming together.”

“We knew from the start that metrology could vastly improve not just materials, but production yields,” says Troupe. Adds deQuilettes, “Our goal was getting to the highest performance orders of magnitude faster than it would ordinarily take, so we developed tools that would not just be useful for research labs but for manufacturing lines to give live feedback on quality.”

The device Optigon designed for industry is the size of a football, “with sensor packages crammed into a tiny form factor, taking measurements as material flows directly underneath,” says Motes. “We have also thought carefully about ways to make interaction with this tool as seamless and, dare I say, as enjoyable as possible, streaming data to both a dashboard an operator can watch and to a custom database.”

Photovoltaics is just the start

The company may have already found its market niche. “A research group paid us to use our in-house prototype because they have such a burning need to get these sorts of measurements,” says Troupe, and according to Motes, “Potential customers ask us if they can buy the system now.” deQuilettes says, “Our hope is that we become the de facto company for doing any sort of characterization metrology in the United States and beyond.”

Challenges lie ahead for Optigon: product launches, full-scale manufacturing, technical assistance, and sales. Greentown Labs offers support, as does MIT’s own rich community of solar researchers and entrepreneurs. But the founders are already thinking about next phases.

“We are not limiting ourselves to the photovoltaics area,” says deQuilettes. “We’re planning on working in other clean energy materials such as batteries and fuel cells.”

That’s because the team wants to make the maximum impact on the climate challenge. “We’ve thought a lot about the potential our tools will have on reducing carbon emissions, and we’ve done a really in-depth analysis looking at how our system can increase production yields of solar panels and other energy technologies, reducing materials and energy wasted in conventional optimization,” deQuilettes says. “If we look across all these sectors, we can expect to offset about 1,000 million metric tons of CO₂ [carbon dioxide] per year in the not-too-distant future.”

The team has written scale into its business plan. “We want to be the key enabler for bringing these new energy technologies to market,” says Motes. “We envision being deployed on every manufacturing line making these types of materials. It’s our goal to walk around and know that if we see a solar panel deployed, there’s a pretty high likelihood that it will be one we measured at some point.”

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. won applause at the Libertarian National Convention by criticizing government lockdowns and deficit spending, and saying America shouldn't police the world.

It made me want to interview him. This month, I did.

He said intelligent things about America's growing debt:

"President Trump said that he was going to balance the budget and instead he (increased the debt more) than every president in United States history—$8 trillion. President Biden is on track now to beat him."

It's good to hear a candidate actually talk about our debt.

"When the debt is this large…you have to cut dramatically, and I'm going to do that," he says.

But looking at his campaign promises, I don't see it.

He promises "affordable" housing via a federal program backing 3 percent mortgages.

"Imagine that you had a rich uncle who was willing to cosign your mortgage!" gushes his campaign ad. "I'm going to make Uncle Sam that rich uncle!"

I point out that such giveaways won't reduce our debt.

"That's not a giveaway," Kennedy replies. "Every dollar that I spend as president is going to go toward building our economy."

That's big government nonsense, like his other claim: "Every million dollars we spend on child care creates 22 jobs!"

Give me a break.

When I pressed him about specific cuts, Kennedy says, "I'll cut the military in half…cut it to about $500 billion….We are not the policemen of the world."

"Stop giving any money to Ukraine?" I ask.

"Negotiate a peace," Kennedy replies. "Biden has never talked to Putin about this, and it's criminal."

He never answered whether he'd give money to Ukraine. He did answer about Israel.

"Yes, of course we should,"

"[Since] you don't want to cut this spending, what would you cut?"

"Israel spending is rather minor," he responds. "I'm going to pick the most wasteful programs, put them all in one bill, and send them to Congress with an up and down vote."

Of course, Congress would just vote it down.

Kennedy's proposed cuts would hardly slow down our path to bankruptcy. Especially since he also wants new spending that activists pretend will reduce climate change.

At a concert years ago, he smeared "crisis" skeptics like me, who believe we can adjust to climate change, screaming at the audience, "Next time you see John Stossel and [others]… these flat-earthers, these corporate toadies—lying to you. This is treason, and we need to start treating them now as traitors!"

Now, sitting with him, I ask, "You want to have me executed for treason?"

"That statement," he replies, "it's not a statement that I would make today….Climate is existential. I think it's human-caused climate change. But I don't insist other people believe that. I'm arguing for free markets and then the lowest cost providers should prevail in the marketplace….We should end all subsidies and let the market dictate."

That sounds good: "Let the market dictate."

But wait, Kennedy makes money from solar farms backed by government guaranteed loans. He "leaned on his contacts in the Obama administration to secure a $1.6 billion loan guarantee," wrote The New York Times.

"Why should you get a government subsidy?" I ask.

"If you're creating a new industry," he replies, "you're competing with the Chinese. You want the United States to own pieces of that industry."

I suppose that means his government would subsidize every industry leftists like.

Yet when a wind farm company proposed building one near his family's home, he opposed it.

"Seems hypocritical," I say.

"We're exterminating the right whale in the North Atlantic through these wind farms!" he replies.

I think he was more honest years ago, when he complained that "turbines…would be seen from Cape Cod, Martha's Vineyard… Nantucket….[They] will steal the stars and nighttime views."

Kennedy was once a Democrat, but now Democrats sue to keep him off ballots. Former Clinton Labor Secretary Robert Reich calls him a "dangerous nutcase."

Kennedy complains that Reich won't debate him.

"Nobody will," he says. "They won't have me on any of their networks."

Well, obviously, I will.

I especially wanted to confront him about vaccines.

In a future column, Stossel TV will post more from our hourlong discussion.

COPYRIGHT 2024 BY JFS PRODUCTIONS INC.

The post RFK Jr. Pays Lip Service to the Debt While Pushing Policies That Would Increase It appeared first on Reason.com.

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This article originally appeared on Inside Climate News, a nonprofit, independent news organization that covers climate, energy, and the environment. It is republished with permission. Sign up for its newsletter here. 

Among the many obstacles to enacting federal limits on climate pollution, none has been more daunting than the Supreme Court. That is where the Obama administration’s efforts to regulate power plant emissions met their demise and where the Biden administration’s attempts will no doubt land.

A forthcoming study seeks to inform how courts consider challenges to these regulations by establishing once and for all that the lawmakers who shaped the Clean Air Act in 1970 knew scientists considered carbon dioxide an air pollutant, and that these elected officials were intent on limiting its emissions.

Read 21 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Consider the dizzying ascent of solar energy in the United States: In the past decade, solar capacity increased nearly 900 percent, with electricity production eight times greater in 2023 than in 2014. The jump from 2022 to 2023 alone was 51 percent, with a record 32 gigawatts (GW) of solar installations coming online. In the past four years, more solar has been added to the grid than any other form of generation. Installed solar now tops 179 GW, enough to power nearly 33 million homes. The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) is so bullish on the sun that its decarbonization plans envision solar satisfying 45 percent of the nation’s electricity demands by 2050.

But the continued rapid expansion of solar requires advances in technology, notably to improve the efficiency and durability of solar photovoltaic (PV) materials and manufacturing. That’s where Optigon, a three-year-old MIT spinout company, comes in.

“Our goal is to build tools for research and industry that can accelerate the energy transition,” says Dane deQuilettes, the company’s co-founder and chief science officer. “The technology we have developed for solar will enable measurements and analysis of materials as they are being made both in lab and on the manufacturing line, dramatically speeding up the optimization of PV.”

With roots in MIT’s vibrant solar research community, Optigon is poised for a 2024 rollout of technology it believes will drastically pick up the pace of solar power and other clean energy projects.

Beyond silicon

Silicon, the material mainstay of most PV, is limited by the laws of physics in the efficiencies it can achieve converting photons from the sun into electrical energy. Silicon-based solar cells can theoretically reach power conversion levels of just 30 percent, and real-world efficiency levels hover in the low 20s. But beyond the physical limitations of silicon, there is another issue at play for many researchers and the solar industry in the United States and elsewhere: China dominates the silicon PV market, from supply chains to manufacturing.

Scientists are eagerly pursuing alternative materials, either for enhancing silicon’s solar conversion capacity or for replacing silicon altogether.

In the past decade, a family of crystal-structured semiconductors known as perovskites has risen to the fore as a next-generation PV material candidate. Perovskite devices lend themselves to a novel manufacturing process using printing technology that could circumvent the supply chain juggernaut China has built for silicon. Perovskite solar cells can be stacked on each other or layered atop silicon PV, to achieve higher conversion efficiencies. Because perovskite technology is flexible and lightweight, modules can be used on roofs and other structures that cannot support heavier silicon PV, lowering costs and enabling a wider range of building-integrated solar devices.

But these new materials require testing, both during R&D and then on assembly lines, where missing or defective optical, electrical, or dimensional properties in the nano-sized crystal structures can negatively impact the end product.

“The actual measurement and data analysis processes have been really, really slow, because you have to use a bunch of separate tools that are all very manual,” says Optigon co-founder and chief executive officer Anthony Troupe ’21. “We wanted to come up with tools for automating detection of a material’s properties, for determining whether it could make a good or bad solar cell, and then for optimizing it.”

“Our approach packed several non-contact, optical measurements using different types of light sources and detectors into a single system, which together provide a holistic, cross-sectional view of the material,” says Brandon Motes ’21, ME ’22, co-founder and chief technical officer.

“This breakthrough in achieving millisecond timescales for data collection and analysis means we can take research-quality tools and actually put them on a full production system, getting extremely detailed information about products being built at massive, gigawatt scale in real-time,” says Troupe.

This streamlined system takes measurements “in the snap of the fingers, unlike the traditional tools,” says Joseph Berry, director of the US Manufacturing of Advanced Perovskites Consortium and a senior research scientist at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory. “Optigon’s techniques are high precision and allow high throughput, which means they can be used in a lot of contexts where you want rapid feedback and the ability to develop materials very, very quickly.”

According to Berry, Optigon’s technology may give the solar industry not just better materials, but the ability to pump out high-quality PV products at a brisker clip than is currently possible. “If Optigon is successful in deploying their technology, then we can more rapidly develop the materials that we need, manufacturing with the requisite precision again and again,” he says. “This could lead to the next generation of PV modules at a much, much lower cost.”

Measuring makes the difference

With Small Business Innovation Research funding from DOE to commercialize its products and a grant from the Massachusetts Clean Energy Center, Optigon has settled into a space at the climate technology incubator Greentown Labs in Somerville, Massachusetts. Here, the team is preparing for this spring’s launch of its first commercial product, whose genesis lies in MIT’s GridEdge Solar Research Program.

Led by Vladimir Bulović, a professor of electrical engineering and the director of MIT.nano, the GridEdge program was established with funding from the Tata Trusts to develop lightweight, flexible, and inexpensive solar cells for distribution to rural communities around the globe. When deQuilettes joined the group in 2017 as a postdoc, he was tasked with directing the program and building the infrastructure to study and make perovskite solar modules.

“We were trying to understand once we made the material whether or not it was good,” he recalls. “There were no good commercial metrology [the science of measurements] tools for materials beyond silicon, so we started to build our own.” Recognizing the group’s need for greater expertise on the problem, especially in the areas of electrical, software, and mechanical engineering, deQuilettes put a call out for undergraduate researchers to help build metrology tools for new solar materials.

“Forty people inquired, but when I met Brandon and Anthony, something clicked; it was clear we had a complementary skill set,” says deQuilettes. “We started working together, with Anthony coming up with beautiful designs to integrate multiple measurements, and Brandon creating boards to control all of the hardware, including different types of lasers. We started filing multiple patents and that was when we saw it all coming together.”

“We knew from the start that metrology could vastly improve not just materials, but production yields,” says Troupe. Adds deQuilettes, “Our goal was getting to the highest performance orders of magnitude faster than it would ordinarily take, so we developed tools that would not just be useful for research labs but for manufacturing lines to give live feedback on quality.”

The device Optigon designed for industry is the size of a football, “with sensor packages crammed into a tiny form factor, taking measurements as material flows directly underneath,” says Motes. “We have also thought carefully about ways to make interaction with this tool as seamless and, dare I say, as enjoyable as possible, streaming data to both a dashboard an operator can watch and to a custom database.”

Photovoltaics is just the start

The company may have already found its market niche. “A research group paid us to use our in-house prototype because they have such a burning need to get these sorts of measurements,” says Troupe, and according to Motes, “Potential customers ask us if they can buy the system now.” deQuilettes says, “Our hope is that we become the de facto company for doing any sort of characterization metrology in the United States and beyond.”

Challenges lie ahead for Optigon: product launches, full-scale manufacturing, technical assistance, and sales. Greentown Labs offers support, as does MIT’s own rich community of solar researchers and entrepreneurs. But the founders are already thinking about next phases.

“We are not limiting ourselves to the photovoltaics area,” says deQuilettes. “We’re planning on working in other clean energy materials such as batteries and fuel cells.”

That’s because the team wants to make the maximum impact on the climate challenge. “We’ve thought a lot about the potential our tools will have on reducing carbon emissions, and we’ve done a really in-depth analysis looking at how our system can increase production yields of solar panels and other energy technologies, reducing materials and energy wasted in conventional optimization,” deQuilettes says. “If we look across all these sectors, we can expect to offset about 1,000 million metric tons of CO₂ [carbon dioxide] per year in the not-too-distant future.”

The team has written scale into its business plan. “We want to be the key enabler for bringing these new energy technologies to market,” says Motes. “We envision being deployed on every manufacturing line making these types of materials. It’s our goal to walk around and know that if we see a solar panel deployed, there’s a pretty high likelihood that it will be one we measured at some point.”

When it comes to motorsports, the need for speed isn’t only on the racetrack. Engineers who support race teams also need to work at a breakneck pace to fix problems, and that’s something Aakhilesh Singhania relishes.

Singhania is a senior applications engineer at Bosch Engineering, in Novi, Mich. He develops and supports electronic control systems for hybrid race cars, which feature combustion engines and battery-powered electric motors.

Aakhilesh Singhania

Employer:

Bosch Engineering

Occupation:

Senior applications engineer

Education:

Bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering, Manipal Institute of Technology, India; master’s degree in automotive engineering, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

His vehicles compete in two iconic endurance races: the Rolex 24 at Daytona in Daytona Beach, Fla., and the 24 Hours of Le Mans in France. He splits his time between refining the underlying technology and providing trackside support on competition day. Given the relentless pace of the racing calendar and the intense time pressure when cars are on the track, the job is high octane. But Singhania says he wouldn’t have it any other way.

“I’ve done jobs where the work gets repetitive and mundane,” he says. “Here, I’m constantly challenged. Every second counts, and you have to be very quick at making decisions.”

An Early Interest in Motorsports

Growing up in Kolkata, India, Singhania picked up a fascination with automobiles from his father, a car enthusiast.

In 2010, when Singhania began his mechanical engineering studies at India’s Manipal Institute of Technology, he got involved in the Formula Student program, an international engineering competition that challenges teams of university students to design, build, and drive a small race car. The cars typically weigh less than 250 kilograms and can have an engine no larger than 710 cubic centimeters.

“It really hooked me,” he says. “I devoted a lot of my spare time to the program, and the experience really motivated me to dive further into motorsports.”

One incident in particular shaped Singhania’s career trajectory. In 2013, he was leading Manipal’s Formula Student team and was one of the drivers for a competition in Germany. When he tried to start the vehicle, smoke poured out of the battery, and the team had to pull out of the race.

“I asked myself what I could have done differently,” he says. “It was my lack of knowledge of the electrical system of the car that was the problem.” So, he decided to get more experience and education.

Learning About Automotive Electronics

After graduating in 2014, Singhania began working on engine development for Indian car manufacturer Tata Motors in Pune. In 2016, determined to fill the gaps in his knowledge about automotive electronics, he left India to begin a master’s degree program in automotive engineering at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.

He took courses in battery management, hybrid controls, and control-system theory, parlaying this background into an internship with Bosch in 2017. After graduation in 2018, he joined Bosch full-time as a calibration engineer, developing technology for hybrid and electric vehicles.

Transitioning into motorsports required perseverance, Singhania says. He became friendly with the Bosch team that worked on electronics for race cars. Then in 2020 he got his big break.

That year, the U.S.-based International Motor Sports Association and the France-based Automobile Club de l’Ouest created standardized rules to allow the same hybrid race cars to compete in both the Sportscar Championship in North America, host of the famous Daytona race, and the global World Endurance Championship, host of Le Mans.

The Bosch motorsports team began preparing a proposal to provide the standardized hybrid system. Singhania, whose job already included creating simulations of how vehicles could be electrified, volunteered to help.

“I’m constantly challenged. Every second counts, and you have to be very quick at making decisions.”

The competition organizers selected Bosch as lead developer of the hybrid system that would be provided to all teams. Bosch engineers would also be required to test the hardware they supplied to each team to ensure none had an advantage.

“The performance of all our parts in all the cars has to fall within 1 percent of each other,” Singhania says.

After Bosch won the contract, Singhania officially became a motorsports calibration engineer, responsible for tweaking the software to fit the idiosyncrasies of each vehicle.

In 2022 he stepped up to his current role: developing software for the hybrid control unit (HCU), which is essentially the brains of the vehicle. The HCU helps coordinate all of the different subsystems such as the engine, battery, and electric motor and is responsible for balancing power requirements among these different components to maximize performance and lifetime.

Bosch’s engineers also designed software known as an equity model, which runs on the HCU. It is based on historical data collected from the operation of the hybrid systems’ various components, and controls their performance in real time to ensure all the teams’ hardware operates at the same level.

In addition, Singhania creates simulations of the race cars, which are used to better understand how the different components interact and how altering their configuration would affect performance.

Troubleshooting Problems on Race Day

Technology development is only part of Singhania’s job. On race days, he works as a support engineer, helping troubleshoot problems with the hybrid system as they crop up. Singhania and his colleagues monitor each team’s hardware using computers on Bosch’s race-day trailer, a mobile nerve center hardwired to the organizers’ control center on the race track.

“We are continuously looking at all the telemetry data coming from the hybrid system and analyzing [the system’s] health and performance,” he says.

If the Bosch engineers spot an issue or a team notifies them of a problem, they rush to the pit stall to retrieve a USB stick from the vehicle, which contains detailed data to help them diagnose and fix the issue.

After the race, the Bosch engineers analyze the telemetry data to identify ways to boost the standardized hybrid system’s performance for all the teams. In motorsports, where the difference between winning and losing can come down to fractions of a second, that kind of continual improvement is crucial.

Customers “put lots of money into this program, and they are there to win,” Singhania says.

Breaking Into Motorsports Engineering

Many engineers dream about working in the fast-paced and exciting world of motorsports, but it’s not easy breaking in. The biggest lesson Singhania learned is that if you don’t ask, you don’t get invited.

“Keep pursuing them because nobody’s going to come to you with an offer,” he says. “You have to keep talking to people and be ready when the opportunity presents itself.”

Demonstrating that you have experience contributing to challenging projects is a big help. Many of the engineers Bosch hires have been involved in Formula Student or similar automotive-engineering programs, such as the EcoCAR EV Challenge, says Singhania.

The job isn’t for everyone, though, he says. It’s demanding and requires a lot of travel and working on weekends during race season. But if you thrive under pressure and have a knack for problem solving, there are few more exciting careers.

When it comes to addressing climate change, the “in unity there’s strength” adage certainly applies.

To support IEEE’s climate change initiative, which highlights innovative solutions and approaches to the climate crisis, IEEE’s TryEngineering program has created a collection of lesson plans, activities, and events that cover electric vehicles, solar and wind power systems, and more.

TryEngineering, a program within IEEE Educational Activities, aims to foster the next generation of technology innovators by providing preuniversity educators and students with resources.

To help bring the climate collection to more students, TryEngineering has partnered with the Museum of Science in Boston. The museum, one of the world’s largest science centers, reaches nearly 5 million people annually through its physical location, nearby classrooms, and online platforms.

TryEngineering worked with the museum to distribute a nearly four-minute educational video created by Moment Factory, a multimedia studio specializing in immersive experiences. Using age-appropriate language, the video, which is posted on TryEngineering’s climate change page, explores the issue through visual models and scientific explanations.

“Since the industrial revolution, humans have been digging up fossil fuels and burning them, which releases CO2 into the atmosphere in unprecedented quantities,” the video says. It notes that in the past 60 years, atmospheric carbon dioxide increased at a rate 100 times faster than previous natural changes.

“We are committed to energizing students around important issues like climate change and helping them understand how engineering can make a difference.”

The video explains the impact of pollutants such as lead and ash, and it adds that “when we work together, we can change the global environment.” The video encourages students to contribute to a global solution by making small, personal changes.

“We’re thrilled to contribute to the IEEE climate change initiative by providing IEEE volunteers and educators access to TryEngineering’s collection, so they have resources to use with students,” says Debra Gulick, director of IEEE student and academic education programs.

“We are excited to partner with the Museum of Science to bring even more awareness and exposure of this important issue to the school setting,” Gulick says. “Working with prominent partners like the museum, we are committed to energizing students around important issues like climate change and helping them understand how engineering can make a difference.”

When Yifeng Chen was a teenager in Shantou, China, in the early 2000s, he saw a TV program that amazed him. The show highlighted rooftop solar panels in Germany, explaining that the panels generated electricity to power the buildings and even earned the owners money by letting them sell extra energy back to the electricity company.

Yifeng Chen

Employer

Trina Solar

Title

Assistant vice president of technology

Member Grade

Member

Alma Maters

Sun Yat-sen University, in Guangzhou, China, and Leibniz University Hannover, in Germany

An incredulous Chen marveled at not only the technology but also the economics. A power authority would pay its customers?

It sounded like magic: useful and valuable electricity extracted from simple sunlight. The wonder of it all has fueled his dreams ever since.

In 2013 Chen earned a Ph.D. in photovoltaic sciences and technologies, and today he’s assistant vice president of technology at China’s Trina Solar, a Changzhou-based company that is one of the largest PV manufacturers in the world. He leads the company’s R&D group, whose efforts have set more than two dozen world records for solar power efficiency and output.

For Chen’s contributions to the science and technology of photovoltaic energy conversion, the IEEE member received the 2023 IEEE Stuart R. Wenham Young Professional Award from the IEEE Electron Devices Society.

“I was quite surprised and so grateful” to receive the Wenham Award, Chen says. “It’s a very high-level recognition, and there are so many deserving experts from around the world.”

Trina Solar’s push for more efficient hardware

Today’s commercial solar panels typically achieve about 20 percent efficiency: They can turn one-fifth of captured sunlight into electricity. Chen’s group is trying to make the panels more efficient.

The group is focusing on optimizing solar cell designs, including the passivated emitter and rear cell (PERC), which is the industry standard for commodity solar panels.

Invented in 1983, PERCs are used today in nearly 90 percent of solar panels on the market. They incorporate coatings on the front and back to capture sunlight more effectively and to avoid losing energy, both at the surfaces and as the sunlight travels through the cell. The coatings, known as passivation layers, are made from materials such as silicon nitride, silicon dioxide, and aluminum oxide. The layers keep negatively charged free electrons and positively charged electron holes apart, preventing them from combining at the surface of the solar cell and wasting energy.

Chen and his team have developed several ways to boost the performance of PERC panels, hitting a record of 24.5 percent efficiency in 2022. One of the technologies is a multilayer antireflective coating that helps solar panels trap more light. They also created extremely fine metallization fingers—narrow lines on solar cells’ surfaces—to collect and transport the electric current and help capture more sunlight. And they developed an advanced method for laying the strips of conductive metal that run across the solar cell, known as bus bars.

Experts predict the maximum efficiency of PERC technology will be reached soon, topping out at about 25 percent.

IEEE Member Yifeng Chen displays an i-TOPCon solar module, which has a production efficiency of more than 23 percent and a power output of up to 720 watts.Trina Solar

“So the question is: How do we get solar cells even more efficient?” Chen says.

During the past few years he and his group have been working on tunnel oxide passivated contact (TOPCon) technology. A TOPCon cell uses a thin layer of “tunneling oxide” insulating material—typically silicon dioxide—which is applied to the solar cell’s surface. Similar to the passivation layers on PERC cells, the tunnel oxide stops free electrons and electron holes from combining and wasting energy.

In 2022 Trina created a TOPCon-type panel with a record 25.5 percent efficiency, and two months ago the company announced it had achieved a record 740.6 watts for a mass-produced TOPCon solar module. The latter was the 26th record Trina set for solar power–related efficiencies and outputs.

To achieve that record-breaking performance for their TOPCon panels, Chen and his team optimized the company’s manufacturing processes including laser-induced firing, in which a laser heats part of the solar cell and creates bonds between the metal contacts and the silicon wafer. The resulting connections are stronger and better aligned, enhancing efficiency.

“We’re trying to keep improving things to trap just a little bit more sunlight,” Chen says. “Gaining 1 or 2 percent more efficiency is huge. These may sound like very tiny increases, but at scale these small improvements create a lot of value in terms of economics, sustainability, and value to society.”

As the efficiency of solar cells rises and prices drop, Chen says, he expects solar power to continue to grow around the world. China currently leads the world in installed solar power capacity, accounting for about 40 percent of global capacity. The United States is a distant second, with 12 percent, according to a 2023 Rystad Energy report. The report predicts that China’s 500 gigawatts of solar capacity in 2023 is likely to exceed 1 terawatt by 2026.

“I’m inspired by using science to create something useful for human beings, and then driven by the pursuit for excellence,” Chen says. “We can always learn something new to make that change, improve that piece of technology, and get just that little bit better.”

Trained by solar-power pioneers

Chen attended Sun Yat-sen University in Guangzhou, China, earning a bachelor’s degree in optics sciences and technologies in 2008. He stayed on to pursue a Ph.D. in photovoltaics sciences and technologies. His research was on high-efficiency solar cells made from wafer-based crystalline silicon. His adviser was Hui Shen, a leading PV professor and founder of the university’s Institute for Solar Energy Systems. Chen calls him “the first of three very important figures in my scientific career.”

In 2011 Chen spent a year as a Ph.D. student at Leibniz University Hannover, in Germany. There he studied under Pietro P. Altermatt, the second influential figure in his career.

Altermatt—a prominent silicon solar-cell expert who would later become principal scientist at Trina—advised Chen on his computational techniques for modeling and analyzing the behavior of 2D and 3D solar cells. The models play a key role in designing solar cells to optimize their output.

“Gaining 1 or 2 percent more efficiency is huge. These may sound like very tiny increases, but at scale, these small improvements create a lot of value in terms of economics, sustainability, and value to society.”

“Dr. Altermatt changed how I look at things,” Chen says. “In Germany, they really focus on device physics.”

After completing his Ph.D., Chen became a technical assistant at Trina, where he met the third highly influential person in his career: Pierre Verlinden, a pioneering photovoltaic researcher who was the company’s chief scientist.

At Trina, Chen quickly ascended through R&D roles. He has been the company’s assistant vice president of technology since 2023.

IEEE’s “treasure” trove of research

Chen joined IEEE as a student because he wanted to attend the IEEE Photovoltaic Specialists Conference, the longest-running event dedicated to photovoltaics, solar cells, and solar power.

The membership was particularly beneficial during his Ph.D. studies, he says, because he used the IEEE Xplore Digital Library to access archival papers.

“My work has certainly been inspired by papers I found via IEEE,” Chen says. “Plus, you end up clicking around and reading other work that isn’t related to your field but is so interesting.

“The publication repository is a treasure. It’s eye-opening to see what’s going on inside and outside of your industry, with new discoveries happening all the time.”

Consider the dizzying ascent of solar energy in the United States: In the past decade, solar capacity increased nearly 900 percent, with electricity production eight times greater in 2023 than in 2014. The jump from 2022 to 2023 alone was 51 percent, with a record 32 gigawatts (GW) of solar installations coming online. In the past four years, more solar has been added to the grid than any other form of generation. Installed solar now tops 179 GW, enough to power nearly 33 million homes. The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) is so bullish on the sun that its decarbonization plans envision solar satisfying 45 percent of the nation’s electricity demands by 2050.

But the continued rapid expansion of solar requires advances in technology, notably to improve the efficiency and durability of solar photovoltaic (PV) materials and manufacturing. That’s where Optigon, a three-year-old MIT spinout company, comes in.

“Our goal is to build tools for research and industry that can accelerate the energy transition,” says Dane deQuilettes, the company’s co-founder and chief science officer. “The technology we have developed for solar will enable measurements and analysis of materials as they are being made both in lab and on the manufacturing line, dramatically speeding up the optimization of PV.”

With roots in MIT’s vibrant solar research community, Optigon is poised for a 2024 rollout of technology it believes will drastically pick up the pace of solar power and other clean energy projects.

Beyond silicon

Silicon, the material mainstay of most PV, is limited by the laws of physics in the efficiencies it can achieve converting photons from the sun into electrical energy. Silicon-based solar cells can theoretically reach power conversion levels of just 30 percent, and real-world efficiency levels hover in the low 20s. But beyond the physical limitations of silicon, there is another issue at play for many researchers and the solar industry in the United States and elsewhere: China dominates the silicon PV market, from supply chains to manufacturing.

Scientists are eagerly pursuing alternative materials, either for enhancing silicon’s solar conversion capacity or for replacing silicon altogether.

In the past decade, a family of crystal-structured semiconductors known as perovskites has risen to the fore as a next-generation PV material candidate. Perovskite devices lend themselves to a novel manufacturing process using printing technology that could circumvent the supply chain juggernaut China has built for silicon. Perovskite solar cells can be stacked on each other or layered atop silicon PV, to achieve higher conversion efficiencies. Because perovskite technology is flexible and lightweight, modules can be used on roofs and other structures that cannot support heavier silicon PV, lowering costs and enabling a wider range of building-integrated solar devices.

But these new materials require testing, both during R&D and then on assembly lines, where missing or defective optical, electrical, or dimensional properties in the nano-sized crystal structures can negatively impact the end product.

“The actual measurement and data analysis processes have been really, really slow, because you have to use a bunch of separate tools that are all very manual,” says Optigon co-founder and chief executive officer Anthony Troupe ’21. “We wanted to come up with tools for automating detection of a material’s properties, for determining whether it could make a good or bad solar cell, and then for optimizing it.”

“Our approach packed several non-contact, optical measurements using different types of light sources and detectors into a single system, which together provide a holistic, cross-sectional view of the material,” says Brandon Motes ’21, ME ’22, co-founder and chief technical officer.

“This breakthrough in achieving millisecond timescales for data collection and analysis means we can take research-quality tools and actually put them on a full production system, getting extremely detailed information about products being built at massive, gigawatt scale in real-time,” says Troupe.

This streamlined system takes measurements “in the snap of the fingers, unlike the traditional tools,” says Joseph Berry, director of the US Manufacturing of Advanced Perovskites Consortium and a senior research scientist at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory. “Optigon’s techniques are high precision and allow high throughput, which means they can be used in a lot of contexts where you want rapid feedback and the ability to develop materials very, very quickly.”

According to Berry, Optigon’s technology may give the solar industry not just better materials, but the ability to pump out high-quality PV products at a brisker clip than is currently possible. “If Optigon is successful in deploying their technology, then we can more rapidly develop the materials that we need, manufacturing with the requisite precision again and again,” he says. “This could lead to the next generation of PV modules at a much, much lower cost.”

Measuring makes the difference

With Small Business Innovation Research funding from DOE to commercialize its products and a grant from the Massachusetts Clean Energy Center, Optigon has settled into a space at the climate technology incubator Greentown Labs in Somerville, Massachusetts. Here, the team is preparing for this spring’s launch of its first commercial product, whose genesis lies in MIT’s GridEdge Solar Research Program.

Led by Vladimir Bulović, a professor of electrical engineering and the director of MIT.nano, the GridEdge program was established with funding from the Tata Trusts to develop lightweight, flexible, and inexpensive solar cells for distribution to rural communities around the globe. When deQuilettes joined the group in 2017 as a postdoc, he was tasked with directing the program and building the infrastructure to study and make perovskite solar modules.

“We were trying to understand once we made the material whether or not it was good,” he recalls. “There were no good commercial metrology [the science of measurements] tools for materials beyond silicon, so we started to build our own.” Recognizing the group’s need for greater expertise on the problem, especially in the areas of electrical, software, and mechanical engineering, deQuilettes put a call out for undergraduate researchers to help build metrology tools for new solar materials.

“Forty people inquired, but when I met Brandon and Anthony, something clicked; it was clear we had a complementary skill set,” says deQuilettes. “We started working together, with Anthony coming up with beautiful designs to integrate multiple measurements, and Brandon creating boards to control all of the hardware, including different types of lasers. We started filing multiple patents and that was when we saw it all coming together.”

“We knew from the start that metrology could vastly improve not just materials, but production yields,” says Troupe. Adds deQuilettes, “Our goal was getting to the highest performance orders of magnitude faster than it would ordinarily take, so we developed tools that would not just be useful for research labs but for manufacturing lines to give live feedback on quality.”

The device Optigon designed for industry is the size of a football, “with sensor packages crammed into a tiny form factor, taking measurements as material flows directly underneath,” says Motes. “We have also thought carefully about ways to make interaction with this tool as seamless and, dare I say, as enjoyable as possible, streaming data to both a dashboard an operator can watch and to a custom database.”

Photovoltaics is just the start

The company may have already found its market niche. “A research group paid us to use our in-house prototype because they have such a burning need to get these sorts of measurements,” says Troupe, and according to Motes, “Potential customers ask us if they can buy the system now.” deQuilettes says, “Our hope is that we become the de facto company for doing any sort of characterization metrology in the United States and beyond.”

Challenges lie ahead for Optigon: product launches, full-scale manufacturing, technical assistance, and sales. Greentown Labs offers support, as does MIT’s own rich community of solar researchers and entrepreneurs. But the founders are already thinking about next phases.

“We are not limiting ourselves to the photovoltaics area,” says deQuilettes. “We’re planning on working in other clean energy materials such as batteries and fuel cells.”

That’s because the team wants to make the maximum impact on the climate challenge. “We’ve thought a lot about the potential our tools will have on reducing carbon emissions, and we’ve done a really in-depth analysis looking at how our system can increase production yields of solar panels and other energy technologies, reducing materials and energy wasted in conventional optimization,” deQuilettes says. “If we look across all these sectors, we can expect to offset about 1,000 million metric tons of CO₂ [carbon dioxide] per year in the not-too-distant future.”

The team has written scale into its business plan. “We want to be the key enabler for bringing these new energy technologies to market,” says Motes. “We envision being deployed on every manufacturing line making these types of materials. It’s our goal to walk around and know that if we see a solar panel deployed, there’s a pretty high likelihood that it will be one we measured at some point.”

Consider the dizzying ascent of solar energy in the United States: In the past decade, solar capacity increased nearly 900 percent, with electricity production eight times greater in 2023 than in 2014. The jump from 2022 to 2023 alone was 51 percent, with a record 32 gigawatts (GW) of solar installations coming online. In the past four years, more solar has been added to the grid than any other form of generation. Installed solar now tops 179 GW, enough to power nearly 33 million homes. The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) is so bullish on the sun that its decarbonization plans envision solar satisfying 45 percent of the nation’s electricity demands by 2050.

But the continued rapid expansion of solar requires advances in technology, notably to improve the efficiency and durability of solar photovoltaic (PV) materials and manufacturing. That’s where Optigon, a three-year-old MIT spinout company, comes in.

“Our goal is to build tools for research and industry that can accelerate the energy transition,” says Dane deQuilettes, the company’s co-founder and chief science officer. “The technology we have developed for solar will enable measurements and analysis of materials as they are being made both in lab and on the manufacturing line, dramatically speeding up the optimization of PV.”

With roots in MIT’s vibrant solar research community, Optigon is poised for a 2024 rollout of technology it believes will drastically pick up the pace of solar power and other clean energy projects.

Beyond silicon

Silicon, the material mainstay of most PV, is limited by the laws of physics in the efficiencies it can achieve converting photons from the sun into electrical energy. Silicon-based solar cells can theoretically reach power conversion levels of just 30 percent, and real-world efficiency levels hover in the low 20s. But beyond the physical limitations of silicon, there is another issue at play for many researchers and the solar industry in the United States and elsewhere: China dominates the silicon PV market, from supply chains to manufacturing.

Scientists are eagerly pursuing alternative materials, either for enhancing silicon’s solar conversion capacity or for replacing silicon altogether.

In the past decade, a family of crystal-structured semiconductors known as perovskites has risen to the fore as a next-generation PV material candidate. Perovskite devices lend themselves to a novel manufacturing process using printing technology that could circumvent the supply chain juggernaut China has built for silicon. Perovskite solar cells can be stacked on each other or layered atop silicon PV, to achieve higher conversion efficiencies. Because perovskite technology is flexible and lightweight, modules can be used on roofs and other structures that cannot support heavier silicon PV, lowering costs and enabling a wider range of building-integrated solar devices.

But these new materials require testing, both during R&D and then on assembly lines, where missing or defective optical, electrical, or dimensional properties in the nano-sized crystal structures can negatively impact the end product.

“The actual measurement and data analysis processes have been really, really slow, because you have to use a bunch of separate tools that are all very manual,” says Optigon co-founder and chief executive officer Anthony Troupe ’21. “We wanted to come up with tools for automating detection of a material’s properties, for determining whether it could make a good or bad solar cell, and then for optimizing it.”

“Our approach packed several non-contact, optical measurements using different types of light sources and detectors into a single system, which together provide a holistic, cross-sectional view of the material,” says Brandon Motes ’21, ME ’22, co-founder and chief technical officer.

“This breakthrough in achieving millisecond timescales for data collection and analysis means we can take research-quality tools and actually put them on a full production system, getting extremely detailed information about products being built at massive, gigawatt scale in real-time,” says Troupe.

This streamlined system takes measurements “in the snap of the fingers, unlike the traditional tools,” says Joseph Berry, director of the US Manufacturing of Advanced Perovskites Consortium and a senior research scientist at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory. “Optigon’s techniques are high precision and allow high throughput, which means they can be used in a lot of contexts where you want rapid feedback and the ability to develop materials very, very quickly.”

According to Berry, Optigon’s technology may give the solar industry not just better materials, but the ability to pump out high-quality PV products at a brisker clip than is currently possible. “If Optigon is successful in deploying their technology, then we can more rapidly develop the materials that we need, manufacturing with the requisite precision again and again,” he says. “This could lead to the next generation of PV modules at a much, much lower cost.”

Measuring makes the difference

With Small Business Innovation Research funding from DOE to commercialize its products and a grant from the Massachusetts Clean Energy Center, Optigon has settled into a space at the climate technology incubator Greentown Labs in Somerville, Massachusetts. Here, the team is preparing for this spring’s launch of its first commercial product, whose genesis lies in MIT’s GridEdge Solar Research Program.

Led by Vladimir Bulović, a professor of electrical engineering and the director of MIT.nano, the GridEdge program was established with funding from the Tata Trusts to develop lightweight, flexible, and inexpensive solar cells for distribution to rural communities around the globe. When deQuilettes joined the group in 2017 as a postdoc, he was tasked with directing the program and building the infrastructure to study and make perovskite solar modules.

“We were trying to understand once we made the material whether or not it was good,” he recalls. “There were no good commercial metrology [the science of measurements] tools for materials beyond silicon, so we started to build our own.” Recognizing the group’s need for greater expertise on the problem, especially in the areas of electrical, software, and mechanical engineering, deQuilettes put a call out for undergraduate researchers to help build metrology tools for new solar materials.

“Forty people inquired, but when I met Brandon and Anthony, something clicked; it was clear we had a complementary skill set,” says deQuilettes. “We started working together, with Anthony coming up with beautiful designs to integrate multiple measurements, and Brandon creating boards to control all of the hardware, including different types of lasers. We started filing multiple patents and that was when we saw it all coming together.”

“We knew from the start that metrology could vastly improve not just materials, but production yields,” says Troupe. Adds deQuilettes, “Our goal was getting to the highest performance orders of magnitude faster than it would ordinarily take, so we developed tools that would not just be useful for research labs but for manufacturing lines to give live feedback on quality.”

The device Optigon designed for industry is the size of a football, “with sensor packages crammed into a tiny form factor, taking measurements as material flows directly underneath,” says Motes. “We have also thought carefully about ways to make interaction with this tool as seamless and, dare I say, as enjoyable as possible, streaming data to both a dashboard an operator can watch and to a custom database.”

Photovoltaics is just the start

The company may have already found its market niche. “A research group paid us to use our in-house prototype because they have such a burning need to get these sorts of measurements,” says Troupe, and according to Motes, “Potential customers ask us if they can buy the system now.” deQuilettes says, “Our hope is that we become the de facto company for doing any sort of characterization metrology in the United States and beyond.”

Challenges lie ahead for Optigon: product launches, full-scale manufacturing, technical assistance, and sales. Greentown Labs offers support, as does MIT’s own rich community of solar researchers and entrepreneurs. But the founders are already thinking about next phases.

“We are not limiting ourselves to the photovoltaics area,” says deQuilettes. “We’re planning on working in other clean energy materials such as batteries and fuel cells.”

That’s because the team wants to make the maximum impact on the climate challenge. “We’ve thought a lot about the potential our tools will have on reducing carbon emissions, and we’ve done a really in-depth analysis looking at how our system can increase production yields of solar panels and other energy technologies, reducing materials and energy wasted in conventional optimization,” deQuilettes says. “If we look across all these sectors, we can expect to offset about 1,000 million metric tons of CO₂ [carbon dioxide] per year in the not-too-distant future.”

The team has written scale into its business plan. “We want to be the key enabler for bringing these new energy technologies to market,” says Motes. “We envision being deployed on every manufacturing line making these types of materials. It’s our goal to walk around and know that if we see a solar panel deployed, there’s a pretty high likelihood that it will be one we measured at some point.”

Nearly 400 exhibitors representing the boldest energy innovations in the United States came together last week at the annual ARPA-E Energy Innovation Summit. The conference, hosted in Dallas by the U.S. Advanced Research Projects Agency–Energy (ARPA-E), showcased the agency’s bets on early-stage energy technologies that can disrupt the status quo. U.S. Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm spoke at the summit. “The people in this room are America’s best hope” in the race to unleash the power of clean energy, she said. “The technologies you create will decide whether we win that race. But no pressure,” she quipped. IEEE Spectrum spent three days meandering the aisles of the showcase. Here are five of our favorite demonstrations.

Gas Li-ion batteries thwart extreme cold

South 8 Technologies demonstrates the cold tolerance of its Li-ion battery by burying it in ice at the 2024 ARPA-E Energy Innovation Summit. Emily Waltz

Made with a liquified gas electrolyte instead of the standard liquid solvent, a new kind of lithium-ion battery that stands up to extreme cold, made by South 8 Technologies in San Diego, won’t freeze until temps drop below –80 °C. That’s a big improvement on conventional Li-ion batteries, which start to degrade when temps reach 0 °C and shut down at about –20 °C. “You lose about half of your range in an electric vehicle if you drive it in the middle of winter in Michigan,” says Cyrus Rustomji, cofounder of South 8. To prove the company’s point, Rustomji and his team set out a bucket of dry ice at nearly –80 °C at their booth at the ARPA-E summit and put flashlights in it—one powered by a South 8 battery and one powered by a conventional Li-ion cell. The latter flashlight went out after about 10 minutes, and South 8’s kept going for the next 15 hours. Rustomji says he expects EV batteries made with South 8’s technology to maintain nearly full range at –40 °C, and gradually degrade in temperatures lower than that.

South 8 Technologies

Conventional Li-ion batteries use liquid solvents, such as ethylene and dimethyl carbonate, as the electrolyte. The electrolyte serves as a medium through which lithium salt moves from one electrode to the other in the battery, shuttling electricity. When it’s cold, the carbonates thicken, which lowers the power of the battery. They can also freeze, which shuts down all conductivity. South 8 swapped out the carbonate for some industrial liquified gases with low freezing points (a recipe the company won’t disclose).

Using liquified gases also reduces fire risk because the gas very quickly evaporates from a damaged battery cell, removing fuel that could burn and cause the battery to catch fire. If a conventional Li-ion battery gets damaged, it can short-circuit and quickly become hot—like over 800 °C hot. This causes the liquid electrolyte to heat adjacent cells and potentially start a fire.

There’s another benefit to this battery, and this one will make EV drivers very happy: It will take only 10 minutes to reach an 80 percent charge in EVs powered by these batteries, Rustomji estimates. That’s because liquified gas has a lower viscosity than carbonate-based electrolytes, which allows the lithium salt to move from one electrode to the other at a faster rate, shortening the time it takes to recharge the battery.

South 8’s latest improvement is a high-voltage cathode that reduces material costs and could enable fast charging down to 5 minutes for a full charge. “We have the world record for a high-voltage, low-temperature cathode,” says Rustomji.

Liquid cooling won’t leak on servers

Chilldyne guarantees that its liquid-cooling system won’t leak even if tubes get hacked in half, as IEEE Spectrum editor Emily Waltz demonstrates at the 2024 ARPA-E Energy Innovation Summit. Emily Waltz

Data centers need serious cooling technologies to keep servers from overheating, and sometimes air-conditioning just isn’t enough. In fact, the latest Blackwell chips from Nvidia require liquid cooling, which is more energy efficient than air. But liquid cooling tends to make data-center operators nervous. “A bomb won’t do as much damage as a leaky liquid-cooling system,” says Steve Harrington, CEO of Chilldyne. His company, based in Carlsbad, Calif., offers liquid cooling that’s guaranteed not to leak, even if the coolant lines get chopped in half. (They aren’t kidding: Chilldyne brought an axe to its demonstration at ARPA-E and let Spectrum try it out. Watch the blue cooling liquid immediately disappear from the tube after it’s chopped.)

Chilldyne

The system is leakproof because Chilldyne’s negative-pressure system pulls rather than pushes liquid coolant through tubes, like a vacuum. The tubes wind through servers, absorbing heat through cold plates, and return the warmed liquid to tanks in a cooling distribution unit. This unit transfers the heat outside and supplies cooled liquid back to the servers. If a component anywhere in the cooling loop breaks, the liquid is immediately sucked back into the tanks before it can leak. Key to the technology: low-thermal-resistance cold plates attached to each server’s processors, such as the CPUs or GPUs. The cold plates absorb heat by convection, transferring the heat to the coolant tube that runs through it. Chilldyne optimized the cold plate using corkscrew-shaped metal channels, called turbulators, that force water around them “like little tornadoes,” maximizing the heat absorbed, says Harrington. The company developed the cold plate under an ARPA-E grant and is now measuring the energy savings of liquid cooling through an ARPA-E program.

Salvaged mining waste also sequesters CO₂

Phoenix Tailings’ senior research scientist Rita Silbernagel explains how mining waste contains useful metals and rare earth elements and can also be used as a place to store carbon dioxide.Emily Waltz

Mining leaves behind piles of waste after the commercially viable material is extracted. This waste, known as tailings, can contain rare earth elements and valuable metals that are too difficult to extract with conventional mining techniques. Phoenix Tailings—a startup based in Woburn, Mass.—extracts metals and rare earth elements from tailings in a process that leaves behind no waste and creates no direct carbon dioxide emissions. The company’s process starts with a hydrometallurgical treatment that separates rare earth elements from the tailings, which contain iron, aluminum, and other common elements. Next the company uses a novel solvent extraction method to separate the rare earth elements from one another and purify the desired element in the form of an oxide. The rare earth oxide then undergoes a molten-salt electrolysis process that converts it into a solid metal form. Phoenix Tailings focuses on extracting neodymium, neodymium-praseodymium alloy, dysprosium, and ferro dysprosium alloy, which are rare earth metals used in permanent magnets for EVs, wind turbines, jet engines, and other applications. The company is evaluating several tailings sites in the United States, including in upstate New York.

The company has also developed a process to extract metals such as nickel, copper, and cobalt from mining tailings while simultaneously sequestering carbon dioxide. The approach involves injecting CO₂ into the tailings, where it reacts with minerals, transforming them into carbonates—compounds that contain the carbonate ion, which contains three oxygen atoms and one carbon atom. After the mineral carbonation process, the nickel or other metals are selectively leached from the mixture, yielding high-quality nickel that can be used by EV-battery and stainless-steel industries.

Better still, this whole process, says Rita Silbernagel, senior research scientist at Phoenix Tailings, absorbs more CO₂ than it emits.

Hydrokinetic turbines: a new business model

Emrgy adjusts the height of its hydrokinetic turbines at the 2024 ARPA-E Energy Innovation Summit. The company plans to install them in old irrigation channels to generate renewable energy and new revenue streams for rural communities. Emily Waltz

These hydrokinetic turbines run in irrigation channels, generating electricity and revenue for rural communities. Developed by Emrgy in Atlanta, the turbines can change in height and blade pitch based on the flow of the water. The company plans to put them in irrigation channels that were built to bring water from snowmelt in the Rocky Mountains to agricultural areas in the western United States. Emrgy estimates that there are more than 160,000 kilometers of these waterways in the country. The system is aging and losing water, but it’s hard for water districts to justify the cost of repairing them, says Tom Cuthbert, chief technology officer at Emrgy. The company’s solution is to place its hydrokinetic turbines throughout these waterways as a way to generate renewable electricity and pay for upgrades to the irrigation channels.

The concept of placing hydrokinetic turbines in waterways isn’t new, but until recent years, connecting them to the grid wasn’t practical. Emrgy’s timing takes advantage of the groundwork laid by the solar power industry. The company has five pilot projects in the works in the United States and New Zealand. “We found that existing water infrastructure is a massive overlooked real estate segment that is ripe for renewable energy development,” says Emily Morris, CEO and founder of Emrgy.

Pressurized water stores energy deep underground

Quidnet Energy brought a wellhead to the 2024 ARPA-E Energy Innovation Summit to demonstrate its geoengineered energy-storage system.Emily Waltz

Quidnet Energy brought a whole wellhead to the ARPA-E summit to demonstrate its underground pumped hydro storage technique. The Houston-based company’s geoengineered system stores energy as pressurized water deep underground. It consists of a surface-level pond, a deep well, an underground reservoir at the end of the well, and a pump system that moves pressurized water from the pond to the underground reservoir and back. The design doesn’t require an elevation change like traditional pumped storage hydropower.

Quidnet’s system consists of a surface-level pond, a deep well, an underground reservoir at the end of the well, and a pump system that moves pressurized water from the pond to the underground reservoir and back.Quidnet Energy

It works like this: Electricity from renewable sources powers a pump that sends water from the surface pond into a wellhead and down a well that’s about 300 meters deep. At the end of the well, the pressure from the pumped water flows into a previously engineered fracture in the rock, creating a reservoir that’s hundreds of meters wide and sits beneath the weight of the whole column of rock above it, says Bunker Hill, vice president of engineering at Quidnet. The wellhead then closes and the water remains under high pressure, keeping energy stored in the reservoir for days if necessary. When electricity is needed, the well is opened, letting the pressurized water run up the same well. Above ground, the water passes through a hydroelectric turbine, generating 2 to 8 megawatts of electricity. The spent water then returns to the surface pond, ready for the next cycle. “The hard part is making sure the underground reservoir doesn’t lose water,” says Hill. To that end, the company developed customized sealing solutions that get injected into the fracture, sealing in the water.

By now it’s been made fairly clear that the bedazzling wonderment that is “AI” doesn’t come cheap. Story after story have highlighted how the technology consumes massive amounts of electricity and water, and we’re not really adapting to keep pace. This is also occurring alongside a destabilizing climate crisis that’s already putting a capacity and financial strain on aging electrical infrastructure.

A new report from the International Energy Agency (IEA) indicates that the 460 terawatt-hours (TWh) consumed by data centers in 2022 represented 2% of all global electricity usage, mostly driven by data centers and data center cooling. AI and crypto mining is expected to double that consumption by 2026.

Marc Ganzi, CEO of data center company DigitalBridge, isn’t really being subtle about his warnings. He claims that data centers are going to start running out of power within the next 18-24 months:

“We started talking about this over two years ago at the Berlin Infrastructure Conference when I told the investor world, we’re running out of power in five years. Well, I was wrong about that. We’re kind of running out of power in the next 18 to 24 months.”

Of course when these guys say “we” are going to run out of power, they really mean you (the plebs) will be running out of power. They’ll find solutions to address their need for unlimited power, and the strain will likely be shifted to areas, companies, and residents with far less robust lobbying budgets.

Data centers can move operations closer to natural gas, hydropower sources, or nuclear plants. Some are even using decommissioned Navy ships to exploit liquid cooling. But a report by the financial analysts at TD Cowen says there’s now a 3+ year lead time on bringing new power connections to data centers. It’s a 7 year wait in Silicon Valley; 8 years in markets like Frankfurt, London, Amsterdam, Paris and Dublin.

Network engineers have seen this problem coming for years. Yet crypto and AI power consumption, combined with the strain of climate dysregulation, still isn’t really a problem the sector is prepared for. And when the blame comes, the VC hype bros who got out over their skis, or utilities that failed to modernize for modern demand and climate stability issues won’t blame themselves, but regulation:

“[Cisco VP Denise] Lee said that, now, two major trends are getting ready to crash into each other: Cutting-edge AI is supercharging demand for power-hungry data center processing, while slow-moving power utilities are struggling to keep up with demand amid outdated technologies and voluminous regulations.”

While I’m sure utilities and data centers certainly face some annoying regulations, the real problem rests on the back of technology hype cycles that don’t really care about the real-world impact of their hyper-scaled profit seeking. As always, the real-world impact of the relentless pursuit of unlimited wealth and impossible scale is somebody else’s problem to figure out later, likely at significant taxpayer cost.

This story is playing out to a backdrop of a total breakdown of federal regulatory guidance. Bickering state partisans are struggling to coordinate vastly different and often incompatible visions of our energy future. While at the same time a corrupt Supreme Court prepares several pro-corporate rulings designed to dismantle what’s left of coherent federal regulatory independence.

I would suspect the crypto and AI-hyping VCs (and the data centers that profit off of the relentless demand for unlimited computational power and energy) will be fine. Not so sure about everybody else, though.

Consider the dizzying ascent of solar energy in the United States: In the past decade, solar capacity increased nearly 900 percent, with electricity production eight times greater in 2023 than in 2014. The jump from 2022 to 2023 alone was 51 percent, with a record 32 gigawatts (GW) of solar installations coming online. In the past four years, more solar has been added to the grid than any other form of generation. Installed solar now tops 179 GW, enough to power nearly 33 million homes. The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) is so bullish on the sun that its decarbonization plans envision solar satisfying 45 percent of the nation’s electricity demands by 2050.

But the continued rapid expansion of solar requires advances in technology, notably to improve the efficiency and durability of solar photovoltaic (PV) materials and manufacturing. That’s where Optigon, a three-year-old MIT spinout company, comes in.

“Our goal is to build tools for research and industry that can accelerate the energy transition,” says Dane deQuilettes, the company’s co-founder and chief science officer. “The technology we have developed for solar will enable measurements and analysis of materials as they are being made both in lab and on the manufacturing line, dramatically speeding up the optimization of PV.”

With roots in MIT’s vibrant solar research community, Optigon is poised for a 2024 rollout of technology it believes will drastically pick up the pace of solar power and other clean energy projects.

Beyond silicon

Silicon, the material mainstay of most PV, is limited by the laws of physics in the efficiencies it can achieve converting photons from the sun into electrical energy. Silicon-based solar cells can theoretically reach power conversion levels of just 30 percent, and real-world efficiency levels hover in the low 20s. But beyond the physical limitations of silicon, there is another issue at play for many researchers and the solar industry in the United States and elsewhere: China dominates the silicon PV market, from supply chains to manufacturing.

Scientists are eagerly pursuing alternative materials, either for enhancing silicon’s solar conversion capacity or for replacing silicon altogether.

In the past decade, a family of crystal-structured semiconductors known as perovskites has risen to the fore as a next-generation PV material candidate. Perovskite devices lend themselves to a novel manufacturing process using printing technology that could circumvent the supply chain juggernaut China has built for silicon. Perovskite solar cells can be stacked on each other or layered atop silicon PV, to achieve higher conversion efficiencies. Because perovskite technology is flexible and lightweight, modules can be used on roofs and other structures that cannot support heavier silicon PV, lowering costs and enabling a wider range of building-integrated solar devices.

But these new materials require testing, both during R&D and then on assembly lines, where missing or defective optical, electrical, or dimensional properties in the nano-sized crystal structures can negatively impact the end product.

“The actual measurement and data analysis processes have been really, really slow, because you have to use a bunch of separate tools that are all very manual,” says Optigon co-founder and chief executive officer Anthony Troupe ’21. “We wanted to come up with tools for automating detection of a material’s properties, for determining whether it could make a good or bad solar cell, and then for optimizing it.”

“Our approach packed several non-contact, optical measurements using different types of light sources and detectors into a single system, which together provide a holistic, cross-sectional view of the material,” says Brandon Motes ’21, ME ’22, co-founder and chief technical officer.

“This breakthrough in achieving millisecond timescales for data collection and analysis means we can take research-quality tools and actually put them on a full production system, getting extremely detailed information about products being built at massive, gigawatt scale in real-time,” says Troupe.

This streamlined system takes measurements “in the snap of the fingers, unlike the traditional tools,” says Joseph Berry, director of the US Manufacturing of Advanced Perovskites Consortium and a senior research scientist at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory. “Optigon’s techniques are high precision and allow high throughput, which means they can be used in a lot of contexts where you want rapid feedback and the ability to develop materials very, very quickly.”

According to Berry, Optigon’s technology may give the solar industry not just better materials, but the ability to pump out high-quality PV products at a brisker clip than is currently possible. “If Optigon is successful in deploying their technology, then we can more rapidly develop the materials that we need, manufacturing with the requisite precision again and again,” he says. “This could lead to the next generation of PV modules at a much, much lower cost.”

Measuring makes the difference

With Small Business Innovation Research funding from DOE to commercialize its products and a grant from the Massachusetts Clean Energy Center, Optigon has settled into a space at the climate technology incubator Greentown Labs in Somerville, Massachusetts. Here, the team is preparing for this spring’s launch of its first commercial product, whose genesis lies in MIT’s GridEdge Solar Research Program.

Led by Vladimir Bulović, a professor of electrical engineering and the director of MIT.nano, the GridEdge program was established with funding from the Tata Trusts to develop lightweight, flexible, and inexpensive solar cells for distribution to rural communities around the globe. When deQuilettes joined the group in 2017 as a postdoc, he was tasked with directing the program and building the infrastructure to study and make perovskite solar modules.

“We were trying to understand once we made the material whether or not it was good,” he recalls. “There were no good commercial metrology [the science of measurements] tools for materials beyond silicon, so we started to build our own.” Recognizing the group’s need for greater expertise on the problem, especially in the areas of electrical, software, and mechanical engineering, deQuilettes put a call out for undergraduate researchers to help build metrology tools for new solar materials.

“Forty people inquired, but when I met Brandon and Anthony, something clicked; it was clear we had a complementary skill set,” says deQuilettes. “We started working together, with Anthony coming up with beautiful designs to integrate multiple measurements, and Brandon creating boards to control all of the hardware, including different types of lasers. We started filing multiple patents and that was when we saw it all coming together.”

“We knew from the start that metrology could vastly improve not just materials, but production yields,” says Troupe. Adds deQuilettes, “Our goal was getting to the highest performance orders of magnitude faster than it would ordinarily take, so we developed tools that would not just be useful for research labs but for manufacturing lines to give live feedback on quality.”

The device Optigon designed for industry is the size of a football, “with sensor packages crammed into a tiny form factor, taking measurements as material flows directly underneath,” says Motes. “We have also thought carefully about ways to make interaction with this tool as seamless and, dare I say, as enjoyable as possible, streaming data to both a dashboard an operator can watch and to a custom database.”

Photovoltaics is just the start

The company may have already found its market niche. “A research group paid us to use our in-house prototype because they have such a burning need to get these sorts of measurements,” says Troupe, and according to Motes, “Potential customers ask us if they can buy the system now.” deQuilettes says, “Our hope is that we become the de facto company for doing any sort of characterization metrology in the United States and beyond.”

Challenges lie ahead for Optigon: product launches, full-scale manufacturing, technical assistance, and sales. Greentown Labs offers support, as does MIT’s own rich community of solar researchers and entrepreneurs. But the founders are already thinking about next phases.

“We are not limiting ourselves to the photovoltaics area,” says deQuilettes. “We’re planning on working in other clean energy materials such as batteries and fuel cells.”

That’s because the team wants to make the maximum impact on the climate challenge. “We’ve thought a lot about the potential our tools will have on reducing carbon emissions, and we’ve done a really in-depth analysis looking at how our system can increase production yields of solar panels and other energy technologies, reducing materials and energy wasted in conventional optimization,” deQuilettes says. “If we look across all these sectors, we can expect to offset about 1,000 million metric tons of CO₂ [carbon dioxide] per year in the not-too-distant future.”

The team has written scale into its business plan. “We want to be the key enabler for bringing these new energy technologies to market,” says Motes. “We envision being deployed on every manufacturing line making these types of materials. It’s our goal to walk around and know that if we see a solar panel deployed, there’s a pretty high likelihood that it will be one we measured at some point.”

By now it’s been made fairly clear that the bedazzling wonderment that is “AI” doesn’t come cheap. Story after story have highlighted how the technology consumes massive amounts of electricity and water, and we’re not really adapting to keep pace. This is also occurring alongside a destabilizing climate crisis that’s already putting a capacity and financial strain on aging electrical infrastructure.

A new report from the International Energy Agency (IEA) indicates that the 460 terawatt-hours (TWh) consumed by data centers in 2022 represented 2% of all global electricity usage, mostly driven by data centers and data center cooling. AI and crypto mining is expected to double that consumption by 2026.

Marc Ganzi, CEO of data center company DigitalBridge, isn’t really being subtle about his warnings. He claims that data centers are going to start running out of power within the next 18-24 months:

“We started talking about this over two years ago at the Berlin Infrastructure Conference when I told the investor world, we’re running out of power in five years. Well, I was wrong about that. We’re kind of running out of power in the next 18 to 24 months.”

Of course when these guys say “we” are going to run out of power, they really mean you (the plebs) will be running out of power. They’ll find solutions to address their need for unlimited power, and the strain will likely be shifted to areas, companies, and residents with far less robust lobbying budgets.

Data centers can move operations closer to natural gas, hydropower sources, or nuclear plants. Some are even using decommissioned Navy ships to exploit liquid cooling. But a report by the financial analysts at TD Cowen says there’s now a 3+ year lead time on bringing new power connections to data centers. It’s a 7 year wait in Silicon Valley; 8 years in markets like Frankfurt, London, Amsterdam, Paris and Dublin.

Network engineers have seen this problem coming for years. Yet crypto and AI power consumption, combined with the strain of climate dysregulation, still isn’t really a problem the sector is prepared for. And when the blame comes, the VC hype bros who got out over their skis, or utilities that failed to modernize for modern demand and climate stability issues won’t blame themselves, but regulation:

“[Cisco VP Denise] Lee said that, now, two major trends are getting ready to crash into each other: Cutting-edge AI is supercharging demand for power-hungry data center processing, while slow-moving power utilities are struggling to keep up with demand amid outdated technologies and voluminous regulations.”

While I’m sure utilities and data centers certainly face some annoying regulations, the real problem rests on the back of technology hype cycles that don’t really care about the real-world impact of their hyper-scaled profit seeking. As always, the real-world impact of the relentless pursuit of unlimited wealth and impossible scale is somebody else’s problem to figure out later, likely at significant taxpayer cost.

This story is playing out to a backdrop of a total breakdown of federal regulatory guidance. Bickering state partisans are struggling to coordinate vastly different and often incompatible visions of our energy future. While at the same time a corrupt Supreme Court prepares several pro-corporate rulings designed to dismantle what’s left of coherent federal regulatory independence.

I would suspect the crypto and AI-hyping VCs (and the data centers that profit off of the relentless demand for unlimited computational power and energy) will be fine. Not so sure about everybody else, though.

Consider the dizzying ascent of solar energy in the United States: In the past decade, solar capacity increased nearly 900 percent, with electricity production eight times greater in 2023 than in 2014. The jump from 2022 to 2023 alone was 51 percent, with a record 32 gigawatts (GW) of solar installations coming online. In the past four years, more solar has been added to the grid than any other form of generation. Installed solar now tops 179 GW, enough to power nearly 33 million homes. The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) is so bullish on the sun that its decarbonization plans envision solar satisfying 45 percent of the nation’s electricity demands by 2050.

But the continued rapid expansion of solar requires advances in technology, notably to improve the efficiency and durability of solar photovoltaic (PV) materials and manufacturing. That’s where Optigon, a three-year-old MIT spinout company, comes in.

“Our goal is to build tools for research and industry that can accelerate the energy transition,” says Dane deQuilettes, the company’s co-founder and chief science officer. “The technology we have developed for solar will enable measurements and analysis of materials as they are being made both in lab and on the manufacturing line, dramatically speeding up the optimization of PV.”

With roots in MIT’s vibrant solar research community, Optigon is poised for a 2024 rollout of technology it believes will drastically pick up the pace of solar power and other clean energy projects.

Beyond silicon

Silicon, the material mainstay of most PV, is limited by the laws of physics in the efficiencies it can achieve converting photons from the sun into electrical energy. Silicon-based solar cells can theoretically reach power conversion levels of just 30 percent, and real-world efficiency levels hover in the low 20s. But beyond the physical limitations of silicon, there is another issue at play for many researchers and the solar industry in the United States and elsewhere: China dominates the silicon PV market, from supply chains to manufacturing.

Scientists are eagerly pursuing alternative materials, either for enhancing silicon’s solar conversion capacity or for replacing silicon altogether.

In the past decade, a family of crystal-structured semiconductors known as perovskites has risen to the fore as a next-generation PV material candidate. Perovskite devices lend themselves to a novel manufacturing process using printing technology that could circumvent the supply chain juggernaut China has built for silicon. Perovskite solar cells can be stacked on each other or layered atop silicon PV, to achieve higher conversion efficiencies. Because perovskite technology is flexible and lightweight, modules can be used on roofs and other structures that cannot support heavier silicon PV, lowering costs and enabling a wider range of building-integrated solar devices.

But these new materials require testing, both during R&D and then on assembly lines, where missing or defective optical, electrical, or dimensional properties in the nano-sized crystal structures can negatively impact the end product.

“The actual measurement and data analysis processes have been really, really slow, because you have to use a bunch of separate tools that are all very manual,” says Optigon co-founder and chief executive officer Anthony Troupe ’21. “We wanted to come up with tools for automating detection of a material’s properties, for determining whether it could make a good or bad solar cell, and then for optimizing it.”

“Our approach packed several non-contact, optical measurements using different types of light sources and detectors into a single system, which together provide a holistic, cross-sectional view of the material,” says Brandon Motes ’21, ME ’22, co-founder and chief technical officer.

“This breakthrough in achieving millisecond timescales for data collection and analysis means we can take research-quality tools and actually put them on a full production system, getting extremely detailed information about products being built at massive, gigawatt scale in real-time,” says Troupe.

This streamlined system takes measurements “in the snap of the fingers, unlike the traditional tools,” says Joseph Berry, director of the US Manufacturing of Advanced Perovskites Consortium and a senior research scientist at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory. “Optigon’s techniques are high precision and allow high throughput, which means they can be used in a lot of contexts where you want rapid feedback and the ability to develop materials very, very quickly.”

According to Berry, Optigon’s technology may give the solar industry not just better materials, but the ability to pump out high-quality PV products at a brisker clip than is currently possible. “If Optigon is successful in deploying their technology, then we can more rapidly develop the materials that we need, manufacturing with the requisite precision again and again,” he says. “This could lead to the next generation of PV modules at a much, much lower cost.”

Measuring makes the difference

With Small Business Innovation Research funding from DOE to commercialize its products and a grant from the Massachusetts Clean Energy Center, Optigon has settled into a space at the climate technology incubator Greentown Labs in Somerville, Massachusetts. Here, the team is preparing for this spring’s launch of its first commercial product, whose genesis lies in MIT’s GridEdge Solar Research Program.

Led by Vladimir Bulović, a professor of electrical engineering and the director of MIT.nano, the GridEdge program was established with funding from the Tata Trusts to develop lightweight, flexible, and inexpensive solar cells for distribution to rural communities around the globe. When deQuilettes joined the group in 2017 as a postdoc, he was tasked with directing the program and building the infrastructure to study and make perovskite solar modules.

“We were trying to understand once we made the material whether or not it was good,” he recalls. “There were no good commercial metrology [the science of measurements] tools for materials beyond silicon, so we started to build our own.” Recognizing the group’s need for greater expertise on the problem, especially in the areas of electrical, software, and mechanical engineering, deQuilettes put a call out for undergraduate researchers to help build metrology tools for new solar materials.

“Forty people inquired, but when I met Brandon and Anthony, something clicked; it was clear we had a complementary skill set,” says deQuilettes. “We started working together, with Anthony coming up with beautiful designs to integrate multiple measurements, and Brandon creating boards to control all of the hardware, including different types of lasers. We started filing multiple patents and that was when we saw it all coming together.”

“We knew from the start that metrology could vastly improve not just materials, but production yields,” says Troupe. Adds deQuilettes, “Our goal was getting to the highest performance orders of magnitude faster than it would ordinarily take, so we developed tools that would not just be useful for research labs but for manufacturing lines to give live feedback on quality.”

The device Optigon designed for industry is the size of a football, “with sensor packages crammed into a tiny form factor, taking measurements as material flows directly underneath,” says Motes. “We have also thought carefully about ways to make interaction with this tool as seamless and, dare I say, as enjoyable as possible, streaming data to both a dashboard an operator can watch and to a custom database.”

Photovoltaics is just the start

The company may have already found its market niche. “A research group paid us to use our in-house prototype because they have such a burning need to get these sorts of measurements,” says Troupe, and according to Motes, “Potential customers ask us if they can buy the system now.” deQuilettes says, “Our hope is that we become the de facto company for doing any sort of characterization metrology in the United States and beyond.”

Challenges lie ahead for Optigon: product launches, full-scale manufacturing, technical assistance, and sales. Greentown Labs offers support, as does MIT’s own rich community of solar researchers and entrepreneurs. But the founders are already thinking about next phases.

“We are not limiting ourselves to the photovoltaics area,” says deQuilettes. “We’re planning on working in other clean energy materials such as batteries and fuel cells.”

That’s because the team wants to make the maximum impact on the climate challenge. “We’ve thought a lot about the potential our tools will have on reducing carbon emissions, and we’ve done a really in-depth analysis looking at how our system can increase production yields of solar panels and other energy technologies, reducing materials and energy wasted in conventional optimization,” deQuilettes says. “If we look across all these sectors, we can expect to offset about 1,000 million metric tons of CO₂ [carbon dioxide] per year in the not-too-distant future.”

The team has written scale into its business plan. “We want to be the key enabler for bringing these new energy technologies to market,” says Motes. “We envision being deployed on every manufacturing line making these types of materials. It’s our goal to walk around and know that if we see a solar panel deployed, there’s a pretty high likelihood that it will be one we measured at some point.”

By now it’s been made fairly clear that the bedazzling wonderment that is “AI” doesn’t come cheap. Story after story have highlighted how the technology consumes massive amounts of electricity and water, and we’re not really adapting to keep pace. This is also occurring alongside a destabilizing climate crisis that’s already putting a capacity and financial strain on aging electrical infrastructure.

A new report from the International Energy Agency (IEA) indicates that the 460 terawatt-hours (TWh) consumed by data centers in 2022 represented 2% of all global electricity usage, mostly driven by data centers and data center cooling. AI and crypto mining is expected to double that consumption by 2026.

Marc Ganzi, CEO of data center company DigitalBridge, isn’t really being subtle about his warnings. He claims that data centers are going to start running out of power within the next 18-24 months:

“We started talking about this over two years ago at the Berlin Infrastructure Conference when I told the investor world, we’re running out of power in five years. Well, I was wrong about that. We’re kind of running out of power in the next 18 to 24 months.”

Of course when these guys say “we” are going to run out of power, they really mean you (the plebs) will be running out of power. They’ll find solutions to address their need for unlimited power, and the strain will likely be shifted to areas, companies, and residents with far less robust lobbying budgets.

Data centers can move operations closer to natural gas, hydropower sources, or nuclear plants. Some are even using decommissioned Navy ships to exploit liquid cooling. But a report by the financial analysts at TD Cowen says there’s now a 3+ year lead time on bringing new power connections to data centers. It’s a 7 year wait in Silicon Valley; 8 years in markets like Frankfurt, London, Amsterdam, Paris and Dublin.

Network engineers have seen this problem coming for years. Yet crypto and AI power consumption, combined with the strain of climate dysregulation, still isn’t really a problem the sector is prepared for. And when the blame comes, the VC hype bros who got out over their skis, or utilities that failed to modernize for modern demand and climate stability issues won’t blame themselves, but regulation:

“[Cisco VP Denise] Lee said that, now, two major trends are getting ready to crash into each other: Cutting-edge AI is supercharging demand for power-hungry data center processing, while slow-moving power utilities are struggling to keep up with demand amid outdated technologies and voluminous regulations.”

While I’m sure utilities and data centers certainly face some annoying regulations, the real problem rests on the back of technology hype cycles that don’t really care about the real-world impact of their hyper-scaled profit seeking. As always, the real-world impact of the relentless pursuit of unlimited wealth and impossible scale is somebody else’s problem to figure out later, likely at significant taxpayer cost.

This story is playing out to a backdrop of a total breakdown of federal regulatory guidance. Bickering state partisans are struggling to coordinate vastly different and often incompatible visions of our energy future. While at the same time a corrupt Supreme Court prepares several pro-corporate rulings designed to dismantle what’s left of coherent federal regulatory independence.

I would suspect the crypto and AI-hyping VCs (and the data centers that profit off of the relentless demand for unlimited computational power and energy) will be fine. Not so sure about everybody else, though.

Solar panels are built to last 25 years or more in all kinds of weather. Key to this longevity is a tight seal of the photovoltaic materials. Manufacturers achieve the seal by laminating a panel’s silicon cells with polymer sheets between glass panes. But the sticky polymer is hard to separate from the silicon cells at the end of a solar panel’s life, making recycling the materials more difficult.

Researchers at the U.S. National Renewable Energy Lab (NREL) in Golden, Colo., say they’ve found a better way to seal solar modules. Using a femtosecond laser, the researchers welded together solar panel glass without the use of polymers such as ethylene vinyl acetate. These glass-to-glass precision welds are strong enough for outdoor solar panels, and are better at keeping out corrosive moisture, the researchers say.

A femtosecond laser welds a small piece of test glass.NREL

“Solar panels are not easily recycled,” says David Young, a senior scientist at NREL. “There are companies that are doing it now, but it’s a tricky play between cost and benefit, and most of the problem is with the polymers.” With no adhesive polymers involved, recycling facilities can more easily separate and reuse the valuable materials in solar panels such as silicon, silver, copper, and glass.

Because of the polymer problem, many recycling facilities just trash the polymer-covered silicon cells and recover only the aluminum frames and glass encasements, says Silvana Ovaitt, a photovoltaic (PV) analyst at NREL. This partial recycling wastes the most valuable materials in the modules.

“At some point there’s going to be a huge amount of spent panels out there, and we want to get it right, and make it easy to recycle.” —David Young, NREL

Finding cost-effective ways to recycle all the materials in solar panels will become increasingly important. Manufacturers globally are deploying enough solar panels to produce an additional 240 gigawatts each year. That rate is projected to increase to 3 terawatts by 2030, Ovaitt says. By 2050, anywhere from 54 to 160 million tonnes of PV panels will have reached the end of their life-spans, she says.

“At some point there’s going to be a huge amount of spent panels out there, and we want to get it right, and make it easy to recycle,” says Young. “There’s no reason not to.” A change in manufacturing could help alleviate the problem—although not for at least another 25 years, when panels constructed with the new technique would be due to be retired.

In NREL’s technique, the glass that encases the solar cells in a PV panel is welded together by precision melting. The precision melting is accomplished with femtosecond lasers, which pack a tremendous number of photons into a very short time scale--about 1 millionth of 1 billionth of a second. The number of photons emitted per second from the laser is so intense that it changes the optical absorption process in the glass, says Young. The process changes from linear (normal absorption) to nonlinear, which allows the glass to absorb energy from the photons that it would normally not absorb, he says.

The intense beam, focused near the interface of the two sheets of glass, generates a small plasma of ionized glass atoms. This plasma allows the glass to absorb most of the photons from the laser and locally melt the two glass sheets to form a weld. Because there’s no open surface, there is no evaporation of the molten glass during the welding process. The lack of evaporation from the molten pool allows the glass to cool in a stress-free state, leaving a very strong weld.

A femtosecond laser creates precision welds between two glass plates.David Young/NREL

In stress tests conducted by the NREL group, the welds proved almost as strong as the glass itself, as if there were no weld at all. Young and his colleagues described their proof-of-concept technique in a paper published 21 February in the IEEE Journal of Photovoltaics.

This is the first time a femtosecond laser has been used to test glass-to-glass welds for solar modules, the authors say. The cost of such lasers has declined over the last few years, so researchers are finding uses for them in a wide range of applications. For example, femtosecond lasers have been used to create 3D midair plasma displays and to turn tellurite glass into a semiconductor crystal. They’ve also been used to weld glass in medical devices.

Prior to femtosecond lasers, research groups attempted to weld solar panel glass with nanosecond lasers. But those lasers, with pulses a million times as long as those of a femtosecond laser, couldn’t create a glass-to-glass weld. Researchers tried using a filler material called glass frit in the weld, but the bonds of the dissimilar materials proved too brittle and weak for outdoor solar panel designs, Young says.

In addition to making recycling easier, NREL’s design may make solar panels last longer. Polymers are poor barriers to moisture compared with glass, and the material degrades over time. This lets moisture into the solar cells, and eventually leads to corrosion. “Current solar modules aren’t watertight,” says Young. That will be a problem for perovskite cells, a leading next-generation solar technology that is extremely sensitive to moisture and oxygen.

“If we can provide a different kind of seal where we can eliminate the polymers, not only do we get a better module that lasts longer, but also one that is much easier to recycle,” says Young.

A quick glance at the news headlines each morning might convey that the world is in crisis. Challenges include climate-change threats to human infrastructure and habitats; cyberwarfare by state and nonstate actors attacking energy sources and health care systems; and the global water crisis, which is compounded by the climate crisis. Perhaps the biggest challenge is the rapid advance of artificial intelligence and what it means for humanity.

As people grapple with those and other issues, they typically look to policymakers and business leaders for answers. However, no true solutions can be developed and implemented without the technical expertise of engineers.

Encouraging visionary, futuristic thinking is the function of the Engineering Research Visioning Alliance. ERVA is an initiative of the U.S. National Science Foundation’s Directorate for Engineering, for which I serve as principal investigator. IEEE is one of several professional engineering societies that are affiliate partners.

Engineers are indispensable architects

Engineers are not simply crucial problem-solvers; they have long proven to be proactive architects of the future. For example, Nobel-winning physicists discovered the science behind the sensors that make modern photography possible. Engineers ran with the discovery, developing technology that NASA could use to send back clear pictures from space, giving us glimpses of universes far beyond our line of sight. The same tech enables you to snap photos with your cellphone.

As an engineer myself, I am proud of our history of not just making change but also envisioning it.

In the late 19th century, electrical engineer Nikola Tesla had envisioned wireless communication, lighting, and power distribution.

As early as 1900, civil engineer John Elfreth Watkins predicted that by 2000 we would have such now-commonplace innovations as color photography, wireless telephones, and home televisions (and even TV dinners), among other things.

“If we are going to successfully tackle today’s most vexing global challenges, engineers cannot be relegated to playing a reactive role.”

Watkins embodied an engineer’s curiosity and prescience, but too often today, we spend the lion’s share of our time with technical tinkering and not enough on the bigger picture.

If we are going to successfully tackle today’s most vexing global challenges, engineers cannot be relegated to playing a reactive role. We need to completely reimagine how nearly everything works. And because complex problems are multifaceted, we must do so in a multidisciplinary fashion.

We need big ideas, future-focused thinking with the foresight to transform how we live, work, and play—a visionary mindset embraced and advanced by engineers who leverage R&D to solve problems and activate discoveries. We need a different attitude from that of the consummate practitioners we typically imagine ourselves to be. We need the mindset of the futurist.

Futuristic thinking transforms society

A futurist studies current events and trends to determine not just predictions but also possibilities for the future. The term futurist has a long connection with science fiction, going back to the early 20th century, personified in such figures as writer H.G. Wells.

While many literary figures’ predictions have proven fanciful (though some, like Elfreth’s, have come true), engineers and scientists have engaged in foresight for generations, introducing new ways to look at our world, and transforming society along the way.

Futuristic thinking pushes the boundaries of what we can currently imagine and conceive. In an era of systemic crises, there is a seemingly paradoxical but accurate truth: It has become impractical to think too pragmatically.

It is especially counterintuitive to engineers, as we are biased toward observable, systematic thinking. But it is a limitation we have overcome through visionary exploits of the past—and one we must overcome now, when the world needs us.

Overcoming systematic thinking

Four times each year, ERVA convenes engineers, scientists, technologists, ethicists, social scientists, and federal science program leads to engage in innovative visioning workshops. We push hard and ask the experts to expand their thinking beyond short-term problems and think big about future possibilities. Some examples of challenges we have addressed—and the subsequent comprehensive reports on recommended research direction for visionary, futuristic thinking—are:

• The Role of Engineering to Address Climate Change. Our first visioning event considered how engineers can help mitigate the effects of rising global temperatures and better reduce carbon emissions. We envisioned how we could use artificial intelligence and other new technologies, including some revolutionary sensors, to proactively assess weather and water security events, decarbonize without disruptions to our energy supply, and slow the pace of warming.
• Engineering R&D Solutions for Unhackable Infrastructure. We considered a future in which humans and computing systems were connected using trustworthy systems, with engineering solutions to self-identity threats and secure systems before they become compromised. Solutions for unhackable infrastructure should be inherent rather than bolted-on, integrated across connected channels, and activated from the system level to wearables. Actions must be taken now to ensure trustworthiness at every level so that the human element is at the forefront of future information infrastructure.
• Engineering Materials for a Sustainable Future. In our most recent report, we discussed a future in which the most ubiquitous, noncircular materials in our world—concrete, chemicals, and single-use packaging—are created using sustainable materials. We embraced the use of organic and reusable materials, examining what it is likely to take to shift production, storage, and transportation in the process. Again, engineers are required to move beyond current solutions and to push the boundaries of what is possible.

ERVA is tackling new topics in upcoming visioning sessions on areas as diverse as the future of wireless competitiveness, quantum engineering, and improving women’s health.

We have an open call for new visioning event ideas. We challenge the engineering community to propose themes for ERVA to explore so we can create a road map of future research priorities to solve societal challenges. Engineers are needed to share their expertise, so visit our website to follow this critical work. It is time we recaptured that futurist spirit.

On Wednesday, District Court Judge Michael Fitzgerald of the Central District of California dismissed Genesis B. v. Environmental Protection Agency, another "kids climate suit" against the federal government. In this case, as in the Juliana litigation, the plaintiffs sought to argue that the federal government is constitutionally obligated to take more aggressive action to control greenhouse gas emissions.

Among other things, the Genesis plaintiffs sought to argued that discounting future harms from climate change constitutes invidious age discrimination under the Equal Protection clause. As extravagant as such substantive arguments were, the plaintiffs here faced a larger threshold problem: Demonstrating federal court jurisdiction to hear the claims.

In the order, Judge Fitzgerald noted that there was no basis upon which to distinguish this case from the Juliana case, which the Ninth Circuit ordered dismissed on standing grounds. However, Judge Fitzgerald did grant the plaintiffs leave to amend, offering them another opportunity to reformulate their claims. No doubt the plaintiffs will file an amended complaint, but I am skeptical it will produce a different result.

The post District Court Dismisses Genesis B. Kids Climate Suit Against the EPA appeared first on Reason.com.

Today a unanimous panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit granted the U.S. Department of Justice's petition for a writ of mandamus seeking dismissal of Juliana v. United States, the so-called "Kids Climate Case."

The brief order was short and direct. It noted that the Ninth Circuit had previously concluded that the plaintiffs lacked standing and ordered the case dismissed. Contrary to the plaintiffs' claims, no intervening decisions changed that fact, and that there was no basis for the district court to allow the plaintiffs to amend the complaint.

This decision should not have been a surprise. It should also be a relief to those who hope to see further climate litigation, as the Ninth Circuit panel saw no need to consider issues beyond the plaintiffs' Article III standing, and dismissal of the case obviates any need for the DOJ to seek Supreme Court review. Judge Aiken was wrong to revive this case, and now the Ninth Circuit has killed it for good.

Meanwhile, there are other (more well-grounded) climate cases proceeding in state courts under state law. More on those cases in future posts.

I've reproduced the Ninth Circuit's order after the jump.

Here is the text of the brief order:

In the underlying case, twenty-one plaintiffs (the Juliana plaintiffs) claim that—by failing to adequately respond to the threat of climate change—the government has violated a putative "right to a stable climate system that can sustain human life." Juliana v. United States, No. 6:15-CV-01517-AA, 2023 WL 9023339, at *1 (D. Or. Dec. 29, 2023). In a prior appeal, we held that the Juliana plaintiffs lack Article III standing to bring such a claim. Juliana v. United States, 947 F.3d 1159, 1175 (9th Cir. 2020). We remanded with instructions to dismiss on that basis. Id. The district court nevertheless allowed amendment, and the government again moved to dismiss. The district court denied that motion, and the government petitioned for mandamus seeking to enforce our earlier mandate. We have jurisdiction to consider the petition. See 28 U.S.C. § 1651. We grant it.

1. "[M]andamus is an extraordinary remedy . . . reserved for extraordinary situations." Gulfstream Aerospace Corp. v. Mayacamas Corp., 485 U.S. 271, 289 (1988). "[M]andamus is the appropriate remedy" when "sought on the ground that the district court failed to follow the appellate court's mandate." Vizcaino v. U.S. Dist. Ct. for W. Dist. of Wash., 173 F.3d 713, 719 (9th Cir. 1999); see also United States v. U.S. Dist. Ct. for S. Dist. of N.Y., 334 U.S. 258, 263 (1948). We review a district court's compliance with the mandate de novo. Pit River Tribe v. U.S. Forest Serv., 615 F.3d 1069, 1080 (9th Cir. 2010).

2. The petition accuses the district court of failing to execute our mandate on remand. District courts must "act on the mandate of an appellate court, without variance or examination, only execution." United States v. Garcia-Beltran, 443 F.3d 1126, 1130 (9th Cir. 2006). "[T]he only step" that a district court can take is "to obey the mandate." Rogers v. Consol. Rock Prods. Co., 114 F.2d 108, 111 (9th Cir. 1940). A district court must "implement both the letter and the spirit of the mandate, taking into account the [prior] opinion and the circumstances it embraces." Pit River Tribe, 615 F.3d at 1079 (emphasis added) (cleaned up).

3. In the prior appeal, we held that declaratory relief was "not substantially likely to mitigate the plaintiffs' asserted concrete injuries." Juliana, 947 F.3d at 1170. To the contrary, it would do nothing "absent further court action," which we held was unavailable. Id. We then clearly explained that Article III courts could not "step into the[] shoes" of the political branches to provide the relief the Juliana plaintiffs sought. Id. at 1175. Because neither the request for declaratory relief nor the request for injunctive relief was justiciable, we "remand[ed] th[e] case to the district court with instructions to dismiss for lack of Article III standing." Id. Our mandate was to dismiss.

4. The district court gave two reasons for allowing amendment. First, it concluded that amendment was not expressly precluded. Second, it held that intervening authority compelled a different result. We reject each.

The first reason fails because we "remand[ed] . . . with instructions to dismiss for lack of Article III standing." Id. Neither the mandate's letter nor its spirit left room for amendment. See Pit River Tribe, 615 F.3d at 1079. The second reason the district court identified was that, in its view, there was an intervening change in the law. District courts are not bound by a mandate when a subsequently decided case changes the law. In re Molasky, 843 F.3d 1179, 1184 n.5 (9th Cir. 2016). The case the court identified was Uzuegbunam v. Preczewski, which "ask[ed] whether an award of nominal damages by itself can redress a past injury." 141 S. Ct. 792, 796 (2021). Thus, Uzuegbunam was a damages case which says nothing about the redressability of declaratory judgments. Damages are a form of retrospective relief. Buckhannon Bd. & Care Home v. W. Va. Dep't of Health & Human Res., 532 U.S. 598, 608–09 (2001). Declaratory relief is prospective. The Juliana plaintiffs do not seek damages but seek only prospective relief.

Nothing in Uzuegbunam changed the law with respect to prospective relief. We held that the Juliana plaintiffs lack standing to bring their claims and told the district court to dismiss. Uzuegbunam did not change that. The district court is instructed to dismiss the case forthwith for lack of Article III standing, without leave to amend.

PETITION GRANTED.

For those interested, here are my prior posts on the Juliana litigation:

• "Is Kids Climate Case Coming to an End?" Nov. 26, 2018.
• "Ninth Circuit Dismisses Kids Climate Case for Lack of Standing (Updated)," Jan. 17, 2020.
• "Kids Climate Plaintiffs to Seek Rehearing En Banc," Jan. 20, 2020.
• "Ninth Circuit Denies Petition for En Banc Rehearing in Kids Climate Case," Feb. 10, 2021.
• "Will the Justice Department Settle a Case the Ninth Circuit Already Dismissed?" May 26, 2021.
• "States Seek to Intervene to Prevent Settlement in Kids Climate Case Ninth Circuit Already Ordered Dismissed," June 9, 2021.
• "Blue States File Brief Encouraging District Court to Consider Juliana Settlement," July 7, 2021.
• "Juliana Plaintiffs Opt Against Filing Cert Petition in Kids Climate Case," July 13, 2021.
• "District Court Judge Revives Kids Climate Case," June 1, 2023.
• "The Next Kids Climate Case: Genesis B. v. EPA," Dec. 15, 2023.
• "Federal Court Again Refuses to Dismiss Juliana Climate Case," Jan. 2, 2024.
• "Justice Department to Seek Mandamus to End Juliana Litigation (Again)," Jan. 29, 2024.
• "DOJ Files Petition for Writ of Mandamus to End Juliana Climate Litigation," Feb. 6, 2024.

The post Ninth Circuit Puts An End to the Kids Climate Case appeared first on Reason.com.

A consortium of U.S. federal agencies has pooled their funds and wide array of expertise to reinvent the emergency vehicle. The hybrid electric box truck they’ve come up with is carbon neutral. And in the aftermath of a natural disaster like a tornado or wildfire, the vehicle, called H2Rescue, can supply electric power and potable water to survivors while acting as a temperature-controlled command center for rescue personnel.

The agencies that funded and developed it from an idea on paper to a functional Class 7 emergency vehicle prototype say they are pleased with the outcome of the project, which is now being used for further research and development.

“Any time the fuel cell is producing energy to move the vehicle or to export power, it’s generating water.” –Nicholas Josefik, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Construction Research Lab

Commercial truck and locomotive engine maker Cummins, which has pledged to make all its heavy-duty road and rail vehicles zero-emission by 2050, won a $1 million competitive award to build the H2Rescue, which gets its power from a hydrogen fuel cell that charges its lithium-ion batteries. In demonstrations, including one last summer at National Renewable Energy Lab facilities in Colorado, the truck proved capable of driving 290-kilometers, then taking on the roles of power plant, mobile command center, and (courtesy of the truck’s “exhaust”) supplier of clean drinking water.

A hydrogen tank system located behind the 15,000-kilogram truck’s cab holds 175 kg of fuel at 70 megapascals (700 bars) of pressure. Civilian anthropology researcher Lance Larkin at the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ Construction Engineering Research Laboratory (CERL) in Champaign, Ill., told IEEE Spectrum that that’s enough fuel for the fuel cell to generate 1,800 kilowatt-hours of energy. Or enough, he says, to keep the lights on in 15 to 20 average U.S. homes for about three days.

The fuel cell can provide energy directly to the truck’s powertrain. However, it mainly charges two battery packs with a total capacity of 155-kilowatt-hours because batteries are better than fuel cells at handling the variable power demands that come with vehicle propulsion. When the truck is at a disaster site, the fuel cell can automatically turn itself on and off to keep the batteries charged up while they are exporting electric power to buildings that would otherwise be in the dark. “If it’s called upon to export, say, 3 kilowatts to keep a few computers running, the fuel in its tanks could keep them powered for weeks,” says Nicholas Josefik, an industrial engineer at CERL.

As if that weren’t enough, an onboard storage tank captures the water that is the byproduct of the electrochemical reactions in the fuel cell. “Any time the fuel cell is producing energy to move the vehicle or to export power, it’s generating water,” says Josefik. The result: roughly 1,500 liters of clean water available any place where municipal or well water supplies are unavailable or unsafe.

“When the H2Rescue drives to a location, you won’t need to pull that generator behind you, because the truck itself is a generator.” —Nicholas Josefik, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Construction Research Lab

Just as important as what it can do, Josefik notes, is what it won’t do: “In a traditional emergency situation, you send in a diesel truck and that diesel truck is pulling a diesel-powered generator, so you can provide power to the site,” he says. “And another diesel truck is pulling in a fuel tank to fuel that diesel generator. A third truck might pull a trailer with a water tank on it.

“But when the H2Rescue drives to a location,” he continues, “You won’t need to pull that generator behind you, because the truck itself is a generator. You don’t have to drag a trailer full of water, because you know that while you’re on site, H2Rescue will be your water source.” He adds that H2Rescue will not only allow first responders to eliminate a few pieces of equipment but will also eliminate the air pollution and noise that come standard with diesel-powered vehicles and generators.

Larkin recalls that the impetus for developing the zero-emission emergency vehicle came in 2019, when a series of natural disasters across the United States, including wildfires and hurricanes, spurred action. “The organizations that funded this project were observing this and saw a need for an alternative emergency support,” he says. They asked themselves, Larkin notes, “‘What can we do to help our first responders take on these natural disasters?’ The rest, as they say, is history.”

Asked when we’ll see the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which is typically in charge of disaster response anywhere in the 50 U.S. states, dispatch the H2Rescue truck to the aftermath of, say, a hurricane, Josefik says, “This is still a research unit. We’re working on trying to build a version 2.0 that could go and support responders to an emergency.” That next version, he says, would be the result of some optimizations suggested by Cummins as it was putting the H2Rescue together. “Because this was a one-off build, [Cummins] identified a number of areas for improvement, like how they would do the wiring and the piping differently, so it’s more compact in the unit.” The aim for the second iteration, Larkin says, is “a turnkey unit, ready to operate without all the extra gauges and monitoring equipment that you wouldn’t want in a vehicle that you would turn over to somebody.”

There is no timetable for when the new and improved H2Rescue will go into production. The agencies that allocated the funds for the prototype have not yet put up the money to create its successor.

You can’t see, hear, taste, feel, or smell it, but software is everywhere around us. It underpins modern civilization even while consuming more energy, wealth, and time than it needs to and burping out a significant amount of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. The software industry and the code it ships need to be much more efficient in order to minimize the emissions attributable to programs running in data centers and over transmission networks. Two approaches to software development featured in Spectrum‘s April 2024 issue can help us get there.

In “Why Bloat Is Still Software’s Biggest Vulnerability,” Bert Hubert pays homage to the famed computer scientist and inventor of Pascal, Niklaus Wirth, whose influential essay “A Plea for Lean Software” appeared in IEEE Computer in 1995. Wirth’s essay built on a methodology first conceived by Spectrum contributing editor Robert N. Charette, who in the early 1990s adapted the Toyota Production System for software development.

Hubert points out that bloated code offers giant attack surfaces for bad actors. Malicious hacks and ransomware attacks, not to mention run-of-the-mill software failures, are like the weather now: partly cloudy with a 50 percent chance of your app crashing or your personal information being circulated on the Dark Web. Back in the day, limited compute resources forced programmers to write lean code. Now, with much more robust resources at hand, coders are writing millions of lines of code for relatively simple apps that call on hundreds of libraries of, as Hubert says, “unknown provenance.”

“There’s an already existing large segment of the software-development ecosystem that cares about this space—they just haven’t known what to do.” —Asim Hussain, Green Web Foundation

Among other things, he argues for legislation along the lines of what the European Union is trying to enforce: “NIS2 for important services; the Cyber Resilience Act for almost all commercial software and electronic devices; and a revamped Product Liability Directive that also extends to software.” Hubert, a software developer himself, walks the lean walk: His 3-megabyte image-sharing program Trifecta does the same job as other programs that use hundreds of megabytes of code.

Lean software should, in theory, be green software. In other words, it should run so efficiently that it reduces the amount of energy used in data centers and transmission networks. Overall, the IT and communications sectors are estimated to account for 2 to 4 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions and, according to one 2018 study, could by 2040 reach 14 percent. And that study came out prior to the explosion in AI applications, whose insatiable hunger for computing resources and the power required to feed the algorithms exacerbates an already complicated problem.

Thankfully, several groups are working on solutions, including the Green Web Foundation. The GWF was spun up almost 20 years ago to figure out how the Internet is powered, and now has a goal of a fossil-free Internet by 2030.

There are three main ways to achieve that objective, according to the foundation’s chair and executive director Asim Hussain: Use less energy, use fewer physical resources, and use energy more prudently—by, for instance, having your apps do more when there’s power from wind and solar available and less when there’s not.

“There’s an already existing large segment of the software-development ecosystem that cares about this space—they just haven’t known what to do,” Hussain told Spectrum contributing editor Rina Diane Caballar. They do now, thanks to Caballar’s extensive reporting and the handy how-to guide she includes in “We Need to Decarbonize Software.” Programmers have the tools to make software leaner and greener. Now it’s up to them, and as we’ve seen in the EU, their legislators, to make sustainable and secure code their top priority. Software doesn’t have to suck.

The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has gone rogue. The commission has now finalized a rule that will bully publicly traded companies into reporting environmental information that has no relevance to the financial concerns that matter to investors. As much as environmental activists may want this information to shame companies into embracing their political agenda, it is not the SEC's role to demand financially irrelevant disclosures—much less to demand companies speak on political and social issues like climate change.  

The SEC's new rule requires companies to give a public accounting of their annual greenhouse gas emissions. Still worse, the rule strong-arms companies into telling the public whether they are taking steps to combat climate change and forces companies to hazard guesses about how climate change might affect their operations far into the future. But none of that has anything to do with the SEC's statutory mission of helping investors understand the financial risks and rewards of investment. 

The SEC was established to regulate public companies in the wake of the financial crisis that triggered the Great Depression. Toward that end, the law requires companies to disclose to investors "material information…as may be necessary to make the required statements, in light of the circumstances under which they are made, not misleading." For example, companies must provide information about market volatility, pending lawsuits, and significant management changes, because that type of information could affect a company's financial performance.

Disclosures about whether a company is prioritizing climate change concerns are categorically different from the sort of disclosures the SEC has long required, for at least two reasons. First, the new rule requires disclosures across the board from all large companies. That's a marked departure from the "facts and circumstances" test the SEC has long employed, which requires information that could affect the financial performance of individual companies, not environmental or social conditions.

With its extraordinary unpredictability, and a time horizon crossing decades, climate change's impact on any given company is practically impossible to assess. Requiring disclosure of greenhouse gases thus tells investors nothing relevant to a company's financial situation; it will lead to baseless speculation and reams of information that investors cannot possibly apply to investment decisions now.

Of course, none of this is news to supporters of the rule. Their goal is not to inform investors, but to bludgeon companies into toeing the climate change line. The new rule has nothing to do with financial considerations and everything to do with political considerations. As SEC Commissioner Mark Uyeda declared in dissent, "shareholders will be footing [the] bill" to institutionalize an ESG department in every publicly traded corporation in America. 

The SEC's power grab is unprecedented and dangerous. While some investors may care about greenhouse gas emissions, their desires do not justify compelling companies to make disclosures about whether they are prioritizing climate change concerns. If that low bar could trigger SEC regulation, there would be no end to the subjects the agency could require companies to report, including their positions on abortion, gay marriage, and immigration. But forcing companies to parrot the party line on the environment is not the SEC's job.

If the SEC is going to be transformed into the environmental and social thought police, that decision must come from Congress. Our Constitution empowers only Congress to make the law—and, importantly, to take responsibility for the consequences. As SEC Commissioner Hester Peirce stated, "Wading into non-economic issues involves tradeoffs that only our nation's elected representatives have the authority and expertise to make."

The consequences of the greenhouse gas rule are grave. It will fundamentally alter the SEC's mission. It will force companies to play a larger role in politics—something that neither the major political parties nor most companies seem to want. By peppering investors with irrelevant information, it will make them less informed about what actually matters. It will divert companies from their core purpose of maximizing shareholder wealth and creating products that increase everyone's standard of living. And it will violate the First Amendment by compelling companies to disclose information that is not intrinsically linked to their financial performance.

Pacific Legal Foundation, where we work, will file a lawsuit against the SEC in the coming days to block enforcement of this rule and vindicate constitutional principles. Here's hoping that the courts will not allow this rule to stand.

The post The SEC Conscripts Corporate America in Its New Climate Change Fight appeared first on Reason.com.

Why can't we apprehend both of them at the border? Yesterday, both President Joe Biden and his presumed opponent in November, former President Donald Trump, arrived at the southern border for a whole lot of politicking and very little actual problem solving.

Media outlet after media outlet described it as a "split-screen" showdown. The New York Times described it as a visit "pitting the president's belief in legislating against his rival's pledge to be a 'Day 1' dictator." All right.

"A very dangerous border—we're going to take care of it," said Trump upon arrival. Biden has "the blood of countless innocent victims" on his hands, Trump added, citing the recent murder of Laken Riley—an Augusta University nursing student believed to have been killed by Jose Antonio Ibarra, an illegal immigrant from Venezuela, while running on trails at the University of Georgia.

"The United States is being overrun by the Biden migrant crime. It's a new form of vicious violation to our country," Trump said, leaning hard into fear-based messaging.

Biden, on the other hand, blamed Republicans in Congress for sinking deals that would attempt to handle the crisis at the border and kept meekly calling for bipartisan compromises. "Join me," Biden said to Trump—in what the Times described as an "olive branch"—"or I'll join you" in passing the bipartisan border deal that Trump recently lambasted, leading Senate Republicans to turn on the legislation.

If at first you don't succeed, try…an executive order? He's no border dove, though: Biden is reportedly mulling an executive order to majorly crack down on asylum seekers, forcing more rigorous entry standards and deportations for those who do not meet the updated criteria. Section 212(f) of the Immigration and Nationality Act extends latitude to presidents to block certain categories of entrants if deemed "detrimental to the interests of the United States." This would allow him to bypass Congress entirely.

Ironically, Section 212(f) was how Trump instituted the Muslim ban back in 2017. It's dark horseshoe theory that Biden is now considering sidestepping Congress and using the same provision. It's almost as if actual checks and balances would be helpful here, and setting cogent policy in the first place, as opposed to sweeping executive orders to attempt to bandage long-festering problems.

The number of border crossings has reached record levels. December saw almost 250,000 arrests by Border Patrol, a number which fell by more than half in early January due to Mexican immigration authorities stepping up to the plate. The top five nationalities being apprehended are currently Mexicans, Venezuelans, Guatemalans, Honduras, and Colombians, but people from all over the world are now attempting to cross the border as well—including Chinese migrants (the fastest-growing group of border-crossers).

Whether it's Biden's pointless "join me!" pleas, designed to make the media fawn all over him, or Trump calling illegal border-crossers "fighting-age men"—as if they're creating some sort of militia as opposed to seeking work as, like, dishwashers and roofers—nothing good happened at the border yesterday, and the situation got no closer to being resolved.

Scenes from New York: A little before 4 a.m. Thursday morning, an A train conductor was attacked—his neck slashed, as he stuck it out the window to make sure the train was cleared to leave—at the Rockaway Avenue station in Brooklyn (a few stops before mine).

By rush hour Thursday morning, train crews were boycotting the safety conditions they must work under and calling straphangers' attention to attacks on transit workers. For those of us trying to take the A to work (like me, to film a documentary for Reason), it was a massive inconvenience, as trains operated with severe delays. But safety on the subways has gotten intolerably bad: Year over year, NYPD reports a 13 percent increase in crime within the subway system, and an 11 percent increase in assaults specifically. Last week, a man was shot and killed on the D train. In January, a man was shot and killed on the No. 3. Merely 1,000 of the city's 6,500 subway cars are equipped with surveillance cameras; meanwhile, the Metropolitan Transit Authority has installed bright yellow barriers at the Washington Heights stop to deter criminals from pushing people onto the tracks as part of a new pilot program—which would be terribly expensive to actually scale and wouldn't solve many categories of subway-system crime (like yesterday's neck slashing).

As for the conductor in question, he received 34 stitches and nine sutures and thankfully survived.

QUICK HITS

• It's time:

Make them a buddy cop duo and call it a day https://t.co/p8fo42hSWk

— Mary Katharine Ham (@mkhammer) March 1, 2024

• Congress has approved a continuing resolution that will prevent a partial government shutdown.
• Congratulations to The New Republic for finally acknowledging the fact that, generally, plastic isn't actually getting recycled (where Reason has been for a decade-plus): "Between 1990 and 2015, some 90 percent of plastics either ended up in a landfill, were burned, or leaked into the environment," reports The New Republic. Yes, we know.
• Russian President Vladimir Putin engaged in some saber-rattling toward the West yesterday, saying that the prospect of nuclear conflict ought to loom large if any countries intervene on Ukraine's behalf. "We also have weapons that can strike targets on their territory," Putin said. "Do they not understand this?"
• "Several youth advocacy groups are concerned over the Secure DC bill and its potential impact on juveniles," reports ABC7. NeeNee Taylor, the founder of Harriet's Wildest Dreams, a nonprofit in the area, expressed concern at an event Wednesday night about a provision that would make stealing $500 worth of merchandise rise to the level of a felony. "A couple of my young ladies may have committed retail theft—they were actually stealing clothes for themselves to wear to school," Taylor told the news channel. "So what can we do to avoid them to have to steal the clothes?" Actually, they did not have to steal the clothes. Nor do they need to steal $500 worth of clothes in order to be able to cover their bodies to attend school.
• Bloomberg—normally good—seems to think that the Google Gemini scandal—in which its AI-powered image generator simply could not return historically accurate images of white people, but had to turn, like, the Founding Fathers into black men—was actually a "Republicans pounce" situation. (It was not.)
• Watch the dudes of The Fifth Column grace the wonderful Megyn Kelly Show with their presence (and tear Keith Olbermann apart):

"He wants to now replace the court with something else…"@mcmoynihan, @MattWelch, and @kmele on Keith Olbermann's meltdown over Supreme Court hearing Trump immunity case.

Watch & subscribe: https://t.co/Y12z2uKGMbhttps://t.co/8SsT7CZI2P

— The Megyn Kelly Show (@MegynKellyShow) February 29, 2024

The post Border Pageantry appeared first on Reason.com.

Diesel cars are a popular choice for those looking to buy a used vehicle in Asia, Europe, and elsewhere. After all, diesel cars cost less to maintain, burn less fuel, and have a longer engine life. Although the pollutant emissions of a diesel engine are less than those of a gasoline one, it still emits carcinogens, nitrous oxides, and soot. Older models don’t even have the emission-control features that newer ones do.

To reduce emissions, diesel vehicles use filters that catch exhaust particles and other contaminants. The filters can cost thousands of dollars to replace, however, because they’re made with precious metals.

Looking to make replacement filters more environmentally friendly and affordable, a team of engineering students from the Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology, in Dhaka, designed a carbon-based version with bamboo. The Green Warriors idea won the US $300 prize for best impact in the IEEE Women in Engineering Big Idea Pitch competition. The contest’s goal is to encourage female engineering students and researchers to become more entrepreneurial as a way to boost the number of technical startups led by women.

“We found that old diesel cars are a significant contributor to CO₂ emissions, and we wanted to do something about that,” team leader Tasmiah Afrin said in an email interview.

“Our groundbreaking activated-carbon-based filter represents a significant leap forward in environmental and economic efficiency,” the electrical engineering student added. “The filters can rapidly and effectively capture carbon-based gases from vehicle emissions, contributing to immediate improvements in air quality and reduced carbon emissions.”

A carbon-based particulate filter

Diesel engines produce more polluting particulate matter than gas engines. Because the particles are so small, they can pass easily through a catalytic converter, which is designed to reduce a vehicle’s toxic emissions. Diesel particulate filters therefore are installed in the exhaust system, generally at the exit of the catalytic converter. The most popular type of catalytic converter forces the exhaust through a ceramic honeycomb structure coated with a thin layer containing a precious metal such as platinum, palladium, or rhodium.

“Our project,” Afrin says, “is based on a modified air filter for incoming air into the catalytic converter.”

The Green Warriors’ prototype filter is made from bamboo and uses carbon granules to further reduce emissions.

Activated carbon granules in an absorption chamber and metallic mesh form the filters, Afrin says. Gases pass through either double or multiple chambers. Their prototype is more aerodynamic and lightweight than existing designs used for carbon filters, Afrin says.

“These filters offer a remarkable 5 to 7 percent cost efficiency improvement compared to existing filters, making them a more cost-effective solution for carbon capture in vehicle exhaust systems,” she says. “Not only are they cost-efficient, but they also boast an impressive absorption speed. This means the filters can rapidly and effectively capture carbon-based greenhouse gases from vehicle emissions, contribute to immediate improvements in air quality and reduce carbon emissions.”

She says she believes the team’s diesel particulate filter would cost less than a current filter, which because of its precious-metal content can cost a few thousand U.S. dollars.

A system for replacing filters

The filters are just one part of the team’s vision for reducing auto emissions. The students’ pitch also included a transport-management system they would build called CarGreenTech and its accompanying smartphone app. Using the app, owners of older diesel cars could purchase the replacement filter or arrange for one to be installed. Another option would be for CarGreenTech to buy the older car, outfit it with a new filter, and resell the vehicle. The goal is to extend the life of these older vehicles, Afrin says.

“CarGreenTech is a platform to make existing vehicles more climate-positive—which provides an all-in-one solution,” Afrin says. “It captures carbon from the diesel engine exhaust by utilizing layered active carbon filters, upcycling older car parts through a car buying/selling/upgrading business-to-business and business-to-consumer solution.” A motivator for student-led startups

The team also includes Ishman Tasnim, Fahmida Sultana Naznin, and Nusrat Subah Shakhawat. Tasnim is studying industrial and production engineering, and Naznin is pursuing a degree in computer science and engineering. Shakhawat recently graduated from the university with a degree in electrical engineering.

The team’s mentor was IEEE Member Toufiqur Rahman Shuvo, a lecturer at the university.

The students are all members of the IEEE student branch at the Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology.

“IEEE WIE has a great impact on giving motivation to student startups like us,” Afrin says. “Entering the IEEE WIE pitch competition was one of our best decisions. We were greatly motivated by the judges and getting an award for our work.”

This article was updated on 4 March 2024.

Twenty homes scattered across Canada and the northern United States are keeping warm this winter using prototypes of the latest iteration in residential heating systems: cold-climate heat pumps.

Heat pumps aren’t common in homes at this latitude, because historically they haven’t worked well in subzero temperatures. But heat-pump manufacturers say they now have the technology to heat homes just as efficiently in bitter cold as they do in milder winter temperatures.

To prove it, eight manufacturers are publicly testing their prototypes in the Cold-Climate Heat Pump Technology Challenge, hosted by the U.S. Department of Energy in partnership with Natural Resources Canada. The companies’ task is to demonstrate a high-efficiency, residential air-source heat pump that can perform at 100 percent capacity at -15 °C. Companies can choose to further test their machines down to -26 °C.

Heat-pump manufacturers Bosch, Carrier, Daikin, Johnson Controls, Lennox, Midea, Rheem, and Trane Technologies have each passed the laboratory phase of the challenge, according to the DOE. They are now field-testing their prototypes in homes in 10 northern U.S. states and two Canadian provinces, where furnaces and boilers burning fossil gas, fuel oil, or propane are more commonly used.

Companies that complete the challenge won’t receive cash prizes. But the DOE will help them expand into cold-climate markets by engaging with stakeholders in those regions, a DOE spokesperson told IEEE Spectrum. The challenge will conclude later this year, and prototypes will likely be ready for commercialization in 2025.

How heat pumps beat the cold

Advances in the technology came primarily through improvements in one key heat-pump component: the compressor. Heat pumps work by moving and compressing fluids. In the winter, the systems draw heat from outside the home, most commonly from the air. (There is heat in the air even in subzero temperatures.) An outdoor heat exchanger, or coil, absorbs the heat into the heat-pump system.

The outdoor air passes over a heat exchanger containing a fluid, or refrigerant, that has a very low boiling point. A common refrigerant, called R410a, boils at -48.5 °C. The refrigerant boils and evaporates into a vapor, and a compressor increases its temperature and pressure. The superheated vapor then moves through an indoor coil, where fans blow air across it, moving heat into the home. In the summer, the system reverses, moving heat from inside the building to the outside, and cooling the home.

“They couldn’t get the lab any colder than [-30 °C], so we had to cut the power to get the heat pump to turn off.” —Katie Davis, Trane Technologies

The colder the temperature outside, the harder heat pumps must work to extract and move enough heat to maintain the home’s temperature. At about 4 °C, most air-source heat pumps currently on the market start operating at less than their full capacity, and at some point (usually around -15 °C), they can no longer do the job at all. At that point, an auxiliary heat source kicks on, which is less efficient.

But advancements in compressor technology over the past five years have addressed that issue. By controlling the compressor motor’s speed, and improving the timing of when vapor is injected into the compressor, engineers have made heat pumps more efficient in colder temperatures.

For example, Trane Technologies, headquartered in Dublin, “played with the vapor compression cycle” so that it gets an extra injection of refrigerant, says Katie Davis, vice president of engineering and technology in Trane’s residential business. “It’s works a little like fuel injection,” she says. When the system begins to lose its capacity to heat, the system injects refrigerant to give it a boost, she says.

In the lab portion of the DOE’s heat pump challenge, Trane’s unit operated at 100 percent capacity at -15 °C and kept running even as the lab’s temperature dropped to -30 °C, although no longer at full capacity. “They couldn’t get the lab any colder than that, so we had to cut the power to get the heat pump to turn off,” Davis says.

Vapor-injection compressor technology has been around for years, but until recently, had not been optimized for heat pumps, Davis says. That, plus the introduction of smart systems that enable the indoor and outdoor units to communicate with each other and the thermostat, has enabled heat pumps to take on colder weather.

Heat pumps can reduce emissions and cut energy costs

The DOE is pushing for wider adoption of heat pumps because of their potential to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Such systems run on electricity rather than fossil fuels, and when the electricity comes from renewable sources, the greenhouse gas savings are substantial, the DOE says. Because heat pumps transfer heat rather than generate it, they are significantly more efficient than traditional heating systems, the agency says.

A two-year study published 12 February in the journal Joule supports the DOE’s claim. The study found that if every heated home in the United States switched to a heat pump, home energy use would drop by 31 to 47 percent on average, and national carbon dioxide emissions would fall by 5 to 9 percent, depending on how much electricity is provided by renewable energy. Those figures are based on heat pumps that draw heat from an air source (rather than ground or water) and includes both homes that pull heat through ductwork, and homes that are ductless.

The energy savings should lower bills for 62 to 95 percent of homeowners, depending on the efficiency and cold-climate performance of the heat pump being installed. How well a home is insulated and the type of heating system being replaced also makes a big difference in energy bills, the study found. For households that are currently heating with electric resistance heat, fuel oil, or propane, heat pumps could save thousands of dollars annually. For natural gas, the savings are less and depend on the price of natural gas in the local area.

Some homeowners are hesitant to switch to heat pumps because of what’s known as “temperature anxiety.”

Cold-climate heat pumps will likely boost energy savings for homeowners, but will require higher up-front costs, says Eric Wilson, a senior research engineer at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Golden, Colo., and an author of the paper. “It’s generally well known that heat pumps can save money, but there’s a lot of confusion around whether they’re a good idea in all climates,” he says. His study and the DOE’s cold-climate heat pump challenge will help provide a clearer picture, he says.

The DOE is one of several government entities trying to expedite adoption of residential high-efficiency heat pumps. Nine U.S. states earlier this month pledged to accelerate heat-pump sales. Their pledge builds on an announcement in September from 25 governors, who vowed to quadruple heat-pump installation in their states by 2030. The U.S. federal government also offers tax credits and states will be rolling out rebates to offset the cost of installation.

So far, the efforts seem to be working. In the U.S., heat pumps outsold furnaces for a second year in a row in 2023, according to data released 9 February by the Air-Conditioning, Heating, and Refrigeration Institute, in Arlington, Va.

Europe is making a similar push. The European Commission has called for expedited deployment of heat pumps, and recommended that member states phase out the use of fossil-fuel heating systems in all buildings by 2035. Many European countries are subsidizing residential heat pump installation by offering grants to homeowners.

But some homeowners are hesitant to switch to heat pumps because of what’s known as “temperature anxiety.” It’s like electric-vehicle range anxiety: Homeowners are concerned about getting stuck in a cold house.

And some just like the feel of old fashioned heat. “Folks who have furnaces say they really like the way that hot heat feels when it’s coming out,” says Davis at Trane. “Heat pumps put out warm heat and it’s going to do a good job heating your home, but it’s not that hot heat that comes out of a furnace.”

Trane’s cold-climate heat pump—the one entered into the DOE’s challenge—is currently heating the home of a family in Boise, Idaho, Davis says. “We’ve had excellent feedback from our customer there, who said their energy bills went down,” she says.

Heat Pump Challenge Specs

To pass the DOE’s field test, heat pumps must operate at -15 °C with the following specifications:

• Operate at 100 percent heating capacity without relying on backup electrical resistance heat
• Demonstrate 40 percent greater efficiency than current heat pumps on the market
• Function in homes that distribute air through ductwork
• Draw heat from the air (rather than the ground or water)

The world-famous Bayreuth Festival in Germany, annually centered around the works of composer Richard Wagner, launched this summer on July 25 with a production that has been making headlines. Director Jay Scheib, an MIT faculty member, has created a version of Wagner’s celebrated opera “Parsifal” that is set in an apocalyptic future (rather than the original Medieval past), and uses augmented reality headset technology for a portion of the audience, among other visual effects. People using the headsets see hundreds of additional visuals, from fast-moving clouds to arrows being shot at them. The AR portion of the production was developed through a team led by designer and MIT Technical Instructor Joshua Higgason.

The new “Parsifal” has engendered extensive media attention and discussion among opera followers and the viewing public. Five years in the making, it was developed with the encouragement of Bayreuth Festival general manager Katharina Wagner, Richard Wagner’s great-granddaughter. The production runs until Aug. 27, and can also be streamed on Stage+. Scheib, the Class of 1949 Professor in MIT’s Music and Theater Arts program, recently talked to MIT News about the project from Bayreuth.

Q: Your production of “Parsifal” led off this year’s entire Bayreuth festival. How’s it going?

A: From my point of view it’s going quite swimmingly. The leading German opera critics and the audiences have been super-supportive and Bayreuth makes it possible for a work to evolve … Given the complexity of the technical challenge of making an AR project function in an opera house, the bar was so high, it was a difficult challenge, and we’re really happy we found a way forward, a way to make it work, and a way to make it fit into an artistic process. I feel great.

Q: You offer a new interpretation of “Parsifal,” and a new setting for it. What is it, and why did you choose to interpret it this way?

A: One of the main themes in “Parsifal” is that the long-time king of this holy grail cult is wounded, and his wound will not heal. [With that in mind], we looked at what the world was like when the opera premiered in the late 19th century, around the time of what was known as the Great African Scramble, when Europe re-drew the map of Africa, largely based on resources, including mineral resources.

Cobalt remains [the focus of] dirty mining practices in the Democratic Republic of Congo, and is a requirement for a lot of our electronic objects, in particular batteries. There are also these massive copper deposits discovered under a Buddhist temple in Afghanistan, and lithium under a sacred site in Nevada. We face an intense challenge in climate change, and the predictions are not good. Some of our solutions like electric cars require these materials, so they’re only solutions for some people, while others suffer [where minerals are being mined]. We started thinking about how wounds never heal, and when the prospect of creating a better world opens new wounds in other communities. … That became a theme. It also comes out of the time when we were making it, when Covid happened and George Floyd was murdered, which created an opportunity in the U.S. to start speaking very openly about wounds that have not healed.

We set it in a largely post-human environment, where we didn’t succeed, and everything has collapsed. In the third act, there’s derelict mining equipment, and the holy water is this energy-giving force, but in fact it’s this lithium-ion pool, which gives us energy and then poisons us. That’s the theme we created.

Q: What were your goals about integrating the AR technology into the opera, and how did you achieve that?

A: First, I was working with my collaborator Joshua Higgason. No one had ever really done this before, so we just started researching whether it was possible. And most of the people we talked to said, “Don’t do it. It’s just not going to work.” Having always been a daredevil at heart, I was like, “Oh, come on, we can figure this out.”

We were diligent in exploring the possibilities. We made multiple trips to Bayreuth and made these milimeter-accurate laser scans of the auditorium and the stage. We built a variety of models to see how to make AR work in a large environment, where 2,000 headsets could respond simultaneously. We built a team of animators and developers and programmers and designers, from Portugal to Cambridge to New York to Hungary, the UK, and a group in Germany. Josh led this team, and they got after it, but it took us the better part of two years to make it possible for an audience, some of whom don’t really use smartphones, to put on an AR headset and have it just work.

I can’t even believe we did this. But it’s working.

Q: In opera there’s hopefully a productive tension between tradition and innovation. How do you think about that when it comes to Wagner at Bayreuth?

A: Innovation is the tradition at Bayreuth. Musically and scenographically. “Parsifal” was composed for this particular opera house, and I’m incredibly respectful of what this event is made for. We are trying to create a balanced and unified experience, between the scenic design and the AR and the lighting and the costume design, and create perfect moments of convergence where you really lose yourself in the environment. I believe wholly in the production and the performers are extraordinary. Truly, truly, truly extraordinary.

Q: People have been focused on the issue of bringing AR to Bayreuth, but what has Bayreuth brought to you as a director?

A: Working in Bayreuth has been an incredible experience. The level of intellectual integrity among the technicians is extraordinary. The amount of care and patience and curiosity and expertise in Bayreuth is off the charts. This community of artists is the greatest. … People come here because it’s an incredible meeting of the minds, and for that I’m immensely filled with gratitude every day I come into the rehearsal room. The conductor, Pablo Heras-Casado, and I have been working on this for several years. And the music is still first. We’re setting up technology not to overtake the music, but to support it, and visually amplify it.

It must be said that Katharina Wagner has been one of the most powerfully supportive artistic directors I have ever worked with. I find it inspiring to witness her tenacity and vision in seeing all of this through, despite the hurdles. It’s been a great collaboration. That’s the essence: great collaboration.

This work was supported, in part, by an MIT.nano Immersion Lab Gaming Program seed grant, and was developed using capabilities in the Immersion Lab. The project was also funded, in part, by a grant from the MIT Center for Art, Science, and Technology.

According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, approximately 15 percent of net anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions come from the transportation sector. To meet global climate targets, we must devise ways to get people and goods from point A to point B without burning fossil fuels.

In this month’s special report on the greening of transportation, we examine a moonshot idea for powering electric vehicles, the biggest change in aviation since the jet engine, and cargo ships with a battle-tested mode of generation.

Internal combustion engines (ICEs) in cars and vans accounted for almost half of all carbon dioxide emissions attributable to the transportation sector in 2022, according to Statista. And the world is waking up to the staggering challenges of going electric, as Contributing Editor Robert N. Charette pointed out last year in the IEEE Spectrum series “The EV Transition Explained.”

During his reporting for that series, Charette ran across a startup called Influit Energy that is trying to commercialize a new type of flow battery. Flow batteries are typically used in stationary applications like power-grid storage,but as Charette notes in our cover story, “Can Flow Batteries Finally Beat Lithium?” Influit’s battery circulates an energy-dense nanoelectrofuel to store 15 to 25 times as much energy as a similarly sized conventional flow battery. The Influit battery also compares favorably to lithium-based batteries in terms of safety and stability, and it could provide the range of an ICE vehicle. Cars and trucks with these kinds of batteries could fill up with the nanoelectrofuel at the pump, perhaps taking advantage of the existing infrastructure built for gas-guzzlers.

“We are in the early stages of a key transition: Electrification could be the first fundamental change in airplane propulsion systems since the advent of the jet engine.”–Amy Jankovsky, Christine Andrews, and Bill Rogers

The second article in our report looks at how recent innovations in power electronics, electric motors, and batteries for the car industry are beginning to find applications in airplane design. In one effort, GE Aerospace and Boeing’s Aurora Flight Sciences are working together on a hybrid-electric propulsion system for a 150-to-180-seat airplane. The project, described by Amy Jankovsky, Christine Andrews, and Bill Rogers in “Fly the Hybrid Skies,” started in 2021 and aims to modify a Saab 340 aircraft using two GE CT7 engines combined with electric propulsion units for a megawatt-class system. As the authors note, “We are in the early stages of a key transition: Electrification could be the first fundamental change in airplane propulsion systems since the advent of the jet engine.”

The maritime industry needs a similar fundamental advance, reports Prachi Patel in “Merchant Shipping’s Nuclear Option.” Almost all of the world’s commercial fleets still run on diesel fuel. The industry needs to move much faster if it’s to reach the target of net-zero emissions by 2050 set by the United Nations’ International Maritime Organization.

One way to meet this goal is to go nuclear. Some 160 nuclear-powered vessels ply the high seas today, though almost all are navy ships and submarines. Next-generation small modular reactors (SMRs) could be a game changer for commercial cargo ships. Patel describes several efforts around the world to adapt SMRs to the marine environment. In theory, the small reactors should be safer and simpler to operate than conventional nuclear reactors.

It’s easy to look at the challenges posed by climate change and sigh. Or cry. The engineers you’ll find in this issue don’t have time for despair. They’re too busy working the problem.

The world-famous Bayreuth Festival in Germany, annually centered around the works of composer Richard Wagner, launched this summer on July 25 with a production that has been making headlines. Director Jay Scheib, an MIT faculty member, has created a version of Wagner’s celebrated opera “Parsifal” that is set in an apocalyptic future (rather than the original Medieval past), and uses augmented reality headset technology for a portion of the audience, among other visual effects. People using the headsets see hundreds of additional visuals, from fast-moving clouds to arrows being shot at them. The AR portion of the production was developed through a team led by designer and MIT Technical Instructor Joshua Higgason.

The new “Parsifal” has engendered extensive media attention and discussion among opera followers and the viewing public. Five years in the making, it was developed with the encouragement of Bayreuth Festival general manager Katharina Wagner, Richard Wagner’s great-granddaughter. The production runs until Aug. 27, and can also be streamed on Stage+. Scheib, the Class of 1949 Professor in MIT’s Music and Theater Arts program, recently talked to MIT News about the project from Bayreuth.

Q: Your production of “Parsifal” led off this year’s entire Bayreuth festival. How’s it going?

A: From my point of view it’s going quite swimmingly. The leading German opera critics and the audiences have been super-supportive and Bayreuth makes it possible for a work to evolve … Given the complexity of the technical challenge of making an AR project function in an opera house, the bar was so high, it was a difficult challenge, and we’re really happy we found a way forward, a way to make it work, and a way to make it fit into an artistic process. I feel great.

Q: You offer a new interpretation of “Parsifal,” and a new setting for it. What is it, and why did you choose to interpret it this way?

A: One of the main themes in “Parsifal” is that the long-time king of this holy grail cult is wounded, and his wound will not heal. [With that in mind], we looked at what the world was like when the opera premiered in the late 19th century, around the time of what was known as the Great African Scramble, when Europe re-drew the map of Africa, largely based on resources, including mineral resources.

Cobalt remains [the focus of] dirty mining practices in the Democratic Republic of Congo, and is a requirement for a lot of our electronic objects, in particular batteries. There are also these massive copper deposits discovered under a Buddhist temple in Afghanistan, and lithium under a sacred site in Nevada. We face an intense challenge in climate change, and the predictions are not good. Some of our solutions like electric cars require these materials, so they’re only solutions for some people, while others suffer [where minerals are being mined]. We started thinking about how wounds never heal, and when the prospect of creating a better world opens new wounds in other communities. … That became a theme. It also comes out of the time when we were making it, when Covid happened and George Floyd was murdered, which created an opportunity in the U.S. to start speaking very openly about wounds that have not healed.

We set it in a largely post-human environment, where we didn’t succeed, and everything has collapsed. In the third act, there’s derelict mining equipment, and the holy water is this energy-giving force, but in fact it’s this lithium-ion pool, which gives us energy and then poisons us. That’s the theme we created.

Q: What were your goals about integrating the AR technology into the opera, and how did you achieve that?

A: First, I was working with my collaborator Joshua Higgason. No one had ever really done this before, so we just started researching whether it was possible. And most of the people we talked to said, “Don’t do it. It’s just not going to work.” Having always been a daredevil at heart, I was like, “Oh, come on, we can figure this out.”

We were diligent in exploring the possibilities. We made multiple trips to Bayreuth and made these milimeter-accurate laser scans of the auditorium and the stage. We built a variety of models to see how to make AR work in a large environment, where 2,000 headsets could respond simultaneously. We built a team of animators and developers and programmers and designers, from Portugal to Cambridge to New York to Hungary, the UK, and a group in Germany. Josh led this team, and they got after it, but it took us the better part of two years to make it possible for an audience, some of whom don’t really use smartphones, to put on an AR headset and have it just work.

I can’t even believe we did this. But it’s working.

Q: In opera there’s hopefully a productive tension between tradition and innovation. How do you think about that when it comes to Wagner at Bayreuth?

A: Innovation is the tradition at Bayreuth. Musically and scenographically. “Parsifal” was composed for this particular opera house, and I’m incredibly respectful of what this event is made for. We are trying to create a balanced and unified experience, between the scenic design and the AR and the lighting and the costume design, and create perfect moments of convergence where you really lose yourself in the environment. I believe wholly in the production and the performers are extraordinary. Truly, truly, truly extraordinary.

Q: People have been focused on the issue of bringing AR to Bayreuth, but what has Bayreuth brought to you as a director?

A: Working in Bayreuth has been an incredible experience. The level of intellectual integrity among the technicians is extraordinary. The amount of care and patience and curiosity and expertise in Bayreuth is off the charts. This community of artists is the greatest. … People come here because it’s an incredible meeting of the minds, and for that I’m immensely filled with gratitude every day I come into the rehearsal room. The conductor, Pablo Heras-Casado, and I have been working on this for several years. And the music is still first. We’re setting up technology not to overtake the music, but to support it, and visually amplify it.

It must be said that Katharina Wagner has been one of the most powerfully supportive artistic directors I have ever worked with. I find it inspiring to witness her tenacity and vision in seeing all of this through, despite the hurdles. It’s been a great collaboration. That’s the essence: great collaboration.

This work was supported, in part, by an MIT.nano Immersion Lab Gaming Program seed grant, and was developed using capabilities in the Immersion Lab. The project was also funded, in part, by a grant from the MIT Center for Art, Science, and Technology.