Check out the interior of the self-driving car in Spielberg’s Minority Report that whisks Tom Cruise’s character toward jail: There are only two seats.

Perhaps taking a page from that sleekly designed sci-fi, Lucid Motors revealed the Lunar, a hyperefficient robotaxi concept, at its recent Investor Day in New York City. With its two side-by-side seats, compact size, and a cabin freed from a steering wheel, pedals, and garrulous cabbie, the Lunar defies more than a century of taxi tradition.

Lucid, which has partnered with Uber to deploy up to 20,000 of its seven-passenger Gravity SUVs as robotaxis, says that as many as 90 percent of taxi trips involve one or two passengers. Since passengers almost never sit up front in a human-driven taxi, having two rows of seats in this energy-saving model makes little sense, says Zach Walker, Lucid’s chief of advanced product creation. “People already view the front seat of a taxi as a no-go land,” he declares.

The Lunar is a scaled-down version of Lucid’s forthcoming midsize Cosmos and Earth SUV’s. Walker explains that for the project his team was freed for a “technical moonshot” that could make this car among the world’s most energy-efficient production EVs. That kind of efficiency could be critical for a fledgling robotaxi business that seeks to squeeze every kilowatt and penny from cars that could might be cruising up to 20 hours a day, seven days a week.

The Cosmos, a Tesla Model Y competitor, is no slouch, at up to 7.24 kilometers (4.5 miles) of driving range for every kilowatt-hour of battery energy, thanks to its new Atlas power train and a class-best 0.22 coefficient of drag. The Lunar advances the company’s goal of “radical efficiency” by further shrinking its battery size, to about 55 kilowatt-hours, down from 69 kWh in the Cosmos. Walker says the Lunar could deliver up to 9.7 kilometers (6 miles) of driving range for every kilowatt-hour of battery—nearly double the efficiency of a typical four-seat electric SUV. A quick calculation suggests that would be enough to travel more than 500 kilometers (310 miles) on a charge, despite the Lunar’s relatively pint-size battery.

Downsizing Can Be a Virtuous Circle

Downsizing batteries is a design tactic expounded by Lucid founder and former CEO Peter Rawlinson. He believed it sets off a virtuous circle or “convergent series” of efficiency gains, allowing less nonactive battery-pack material, supporting structures, and downsized brakes and suspension components. In other words, each weight reduction means that slightly less battery can deliver the same driving range. Up to a point, anyway.

Sam Abuelsamid, an engineer and vice-president of market research for Telemetry, agrees the weight of a power train or battery can lead to a virtuous—or vicious—circle in engineering. “A Hummer EV is the worst example on the electric side, carrying almost 3,000 pounds of battery, but also all the structure (and associated components) to support it,” he notes.

Taxis have traditionally been big, lumbering, and fuel-thirsty. Consider the iconic yellow cabs that Checker Motors built in Michigan from 1922 to 1982, or London’s tall-roofed hackney cabs, originally designed to provide head room for men’s top hats and bowlers. But today, Abuelsamid says, two-passenger robotaxis make obvious sense for urban areas where they are most likely to proliferate.

“They have a smaller footprint, use less energy, and reduce congestion in cities,” Abuelsamid says. “You just wouldn’t want them for your entire fleet.”

Efficiency gains can pay special dividends in robotaxis, which some industry leaders envision logging up to 100,000 miles a year. For every 1 kWh reduction in battery size, Walker calculates, that robotaxi workhorse would save up to $1,000 a year in operating costs. Lucid says the Lunar could reduce operating costs by 40 percent versus larger robotaxis retrofitted from passenger cars, such as Waymo’s Jaguar iPace models.

Regarding charging, the larger Cosmos can already add 200 miles of range in 14 minutes on a DC fast charger. With its superior per-kilometer efficiency, the Lunar could likely add 200 miles in closer to 10 minutes, reducing service downtime that’s another critical calculation for taxi operators.

At Investor Day in New York City, Lucid’s interim CEO March Winterhoff and Uber President Andrew Macdonald sat inside a Lunar concept car, which was shown with no doors—the better to flaunt its 36-inch display screen and spacious cabin. The Lunar integrates a large array of sensors to create a bird’s-eye view of its environment, including lidar, cameras, and radar. It’s powered by Nvidia’s new Drive Thor system-on-a-chip, designed to support Level-4 or Level-5 autonomy with 1,000 teraflops of compute performance for critical inference processing.

Dispensing With the Giggle Factor

Where Lucid’s Air and Gravity models are known for blistering acceleration and sporty handling, a utilitarian robotaxi has no need for “the giggle factor,” as Walker dubs it. That creates more opportunities for savings, and passenger comfort. A chassis can be optimized for a comfy ride and low NVH (noise, vibration, and harshness). Meanwhile, driver pedals, a steering wheel and complex linkages, and electrified assists are all eliminated. Dynamic steering, beefed-up body control or massive wheels and tires to boost cornering? No need. After all, there’s no human driver to experience those sensations. And a taxi passenger’s worst nightmare is a driver who thinks he’s Max Verstappen.

Of course, robotaxis bring their own set of tech challenges. According to Walker, a current robotaxi might use up to 24 kWh of energy over 20 hours to sense its environment and operate safely. Most of that goes to processors and onboard sensors, with lidar an especial energy hog.

Though the Lunar remains a concept for now, it’s no sci-fi fantasy. The Lunar was designed to use the same components front and rear as other midsize Lucids, differing only in its downsized battery and center passenger section. No complex, costly reengineering is required, and the Lunar could share a production line with those showroom SUVs. For all those reasons, Walker says the Lunar is fundamentally sound and ready to scale. All Lucid needs are customers.

“We still have our day jobs, but this was like our midnight project that we were all obsessed with making,” Walker says. “We think the [robotaxi] industry is primed for a really cool takeoff.”

Kentucky’s bourbon industry produces vast quantities of waste grain that is costly to transport and process. Researchers have now found a way to turn that by-product into high-performance energy-storage materials with potential applications in electric vehicles and large-scale grid storage.

More than 95 percent of all bourbon whiskey is made in Kentucky. For each barrel of bourbon, the industry also produces between six and 10 times as much “stillage”—a slurry of spent grain and water. This is normally sold to farmers as a livestock feed or soil additive, but it needs to be dried out first to reduce the weight and make it easier to process.

This is a major burden on distilleries, says Josiel Barrios Cossio, a graduate student in the University of Kentucky’s chemistry department. It either requires a lot of time and space to dry the stillage out via evaporation, or an expensive heating process. He and his colleagues have demonstrated that they can instead directly convert the wet stillage into useful carbon materials that can be used to make electrodes for batteries and supercapacitors.

RELATED: 4 Weird Things You Can Turn Into a Supercapacitor

In research presented at the spring meeting of the American Chemical Society in Atlanta today, Barrios Cossio showed that the carbon materials could be used to create supercapacitors that match or exceed the energy density of commercial devices, and hybrid lithium-ion supercapacitors that can store up to 25 times as much energy as conventional designs. While the work is just a proof-of-concept, Barrios Cossio says, it could ultimately allow distilleries to turn a waste stream into a source of profit.

“And it’s a win-win scenario, because we can potentially have a more renewable and abundant biomass source, or feedstock, to produce these materials that are every day more in demand from the car industry and renewable energy applications,” he says.

Innovative Energy-Storage Solutions

Barrios Cossio first conceived of the idea while taking part in a research traineeship run by the U.S. National Science Foundation aimed at finding solutions to problems related to water, energy, and food systems. After visiting several distilleries and seeing the scale of the waste produced, as well as the challenges these businesses face in disposing of it, he began thinking of ways to put the stillage to more productive use.

He discovered a group at the Friedrich Schiller University Jena, in Jena, Germany, that had developed a process for converting waste grain from beer breweries into electrode materials for energy-storage devices. Barrios Cossio then spent a summer internship at the lab to learn about their techniques.

After returning to the United States, Barrios Cossio contacted several distilleries to source some stillage to experiment with and soon got a response from the Wilderness Trail Distillery in Danville, Kentucky. “I asked them, ‘Can I take a gallon of stillage?’” he says. “They replied to me some days later saying, ‘Yeah, you are welcome to take it. I would prefer that you take 10,000 gallons and get rid of the stillage from that day.’”

University of Kentucky researchers developed supercapacitor electrodes using bourbon distillery waste that can store more energy per kilogram than commercial devices.Josiel Barrios Cossio

To turn the stillage into useful materials, the researchers relied on a process called hydrothermal carbonization. This involves heating the wet slurry at high pressure to create a fine black carbon powder called hydrochar. One benefit of the process, says Barrios Cossio, is that the high water content of the stillage helps generate the pressure required to power the conversion.

The resulting hydrochar was then used to create two different high-value carbon materials. In one experiment, the team combined the hydrochar with potassium hydroxide and heated the mixture to around 800 °C, creating a material called activated carbon. This material is extremely porous, which means it can have a surface area higher than 1,000 square meters per gram, says Barrios Cossio. That makes it ideal for creating high-capacity supercapacitors, which store energy as charged ions on the surface of the electrode material.

The team showed that a coin-sized double-layer capacitor built using their hydrochar-derived electrodes could store up to 48 watt hours per kilogram—on par with commercially available supercapacitors.

The team also showed that they could create “hard carbon” by heating their hydrochar in a furnace at 200 °C. This material has a similar structure to graphite, which is made up of orderly stacks of single-atom-thick graphene sheets. Unlike graphite, however, in hard carbon the sheets are arranged more haphazardly. This leads to many small pores and defects, which are ideal for storing alkali metal ions, such as lithium and sodium, commonly used in batteries.

Barrios Cossio used their hydrochar-derived hard carbon to create a batterylike electrode infused with lithium ions, and then combined this with an electrode made of activated carbon to produce a hybrid supercapacitor. The device represents a balance between the high-energy capacity of batteries and the fast discharging speeds of capacitors, which Barrios Cossio says could be particularly useful for applications like electric vehicles and grid stabilization.

At present, the devices are just a proof-of-concept. Barrios Cossio admits that scaling up the process to industrial levels will require considerable refinement. The team is also currently conducting a techno-economic analysis to assess whether the approach is commercially viable. But project supervisor Marcelo Guzman, a professor of chemistry at the University of Kentucky, says it could be a promising and sustainable way to meet the growing demand for energy storage.

“Kentucky is a state that has been investing since 2019 heavily in trying to develop an industry for batteries for cars,” he says. “There has been billions of dollars going into that sector, so there is going to be a big need for material supply. We think we came on board with that problem at the right time, in the right place, and we could have materials that could be really interesting to the battery industry.”

Last week’s Nvidia GTC conference highlighted new chip architectures to power AI. But as the chips become faster and more powerful, the remainder of data center infrastructure is playing catch-up. The power-delivery community is responding: Announcements from Delta, Eaton, Schneider Electric, and Vertiv showcased new designs for the AI era. Complex and inefficient AC-to-DC power conversions are gradually being replaced by DC configurations, at least in hyperscale data centers.

“While AC distribution remains deeply entrenched, advances in power electronics and the rising demands of AI infrastructure are accelerating interest in DC architectures,” says Chris Thompson, vice president of advanced technology and global microgrids at Vertiv.

AC-to-DC Conversion Challenges

Today, nearly all data centers are designed around AC utility power. The electrical path includes multiple conversions before power reaches the compute load. Power typically enters the data center as medium-voltage AC (1 to 35 kilovolts), is stepped down to low-voltage AC (480 or 415 volts) using a transformer, converted to DC inside an uninterruptible power supply (UPS) for battery storage, converted back to AC, and converted again to low-voltage DC (typically 54 V DC) at the server, supplying the DC power computing chips actually require.

“The double conversion process ensures the output AC is clean, stable, and suitable for data center servers,” says Luiz Fernando Huet de Bacellar, vice president of engineering and technology at Eaton.

That setup worked well enough for the amounts of power required by traditional data centers. Traditional data center computational racks draw on the order of 10 kW each. For AI, that is starting to approach 1 megawatt. At that scale, the energy losses, current levels, and copper requirements of AC-to-DC conversions become increasingly difficult to justify. Every conversion incurs some power loss. On top of that, as the amount of power that needs to be delivered grows, the sheer size of the convertors, as well as the connector requirements of copper busbars, becomes untenable. According to an Nvidia blog, a 1-MW rack could require as much as 200 kilograms of copper busbar. For a 1-gigawatt data center, it could amount to 200,000 kg of copper.

Benefits of High-Voltage DC Power

By converting 13.8-kV AC grid power directly to 800 V DC at the data center perimeter, most intermediate conversion steps are eliminated. This reduces the number of fans and power-supply units, and leads to higher system reliability, lower heat dissipation, improved energy efficiency, and a smaller equipment footprint.

“Each power conversion between the electric grid or power source and the silicon chips inside the servers causes some energy loss,” says Bacellar.

Switching from 415-V AC to 800-V DC in electrical distribution enables 85 percent more power to be transmitted through the same conductor size. This happens because higher voltage reduces current demand, lowering resistive losses and making power transfer more efficient. Thinner conductors can handle the same load, reducing copper requirements by 45 percent, a 5 percent improvement in efficiency, and 30 percent lower total cost of ownership for gigawatt-scale facilities.

“In a high-voltage DC architecture, power from the grid is converted from medium-voltage AC to roughly 800-V DC and then distributed throughout the facility on a DC bus,” said Vertiv’s Thompson. “At the rack, compact DC-to-DC converters step that voltage down for GPUs and CPUs.”

A report from technology advisory group Omdia claims that higher voltage DC data centers have already appeared in China. In the Americas, the Mt. Diablo Initiative (a collaboration among Meta, Microsoft, and the Open Compute Project) is a 400-V DC rack power distribution experiment.

Innovations in DC Power Systems

A handful of vendors are trying to get ahead of the game. Vertiv’s 800-V DC ecosystem that integrates with Nvidia Vera Rubin Ultra Kyber platforms will be commercially available in the second half of 2026. Eaton, too, is well advanced in its 800-V DC systems innovation courtesy of a medium-voltage solid-state transformer (SST) that will sit at the heart of DC power distribution system. Meanwhile Delta, has released 800-V DC in-row 660-kW power racks with a total of 480 kW of embedded battery backup units. And, SolarEdge is hard at work on a 99%-efficient SST that will be paired with a native DC UPS and a DC power distribution layer.

But much of the industry is far behind. Patrick Hughes, senior vice president of strategy, technical, and industry affairs for the National Electrical Manufacturers Association, says most innovation is happening at the 400-V DC level, though some are preparing 800-V DC. He believes the industry needs a complete, coordinated ecosystem, including power electronics, protection, connectors, sensing, and service‑safe components that scale together rather than in isolation. That, in turn, requires retooling manufacturing capacity for DC‑specific equipment, expanding semiconductor and materials supply, and clear, long‑term demand commitments that justify major capital investment across the value chain.

“Many are taking a cautious approach, offering limited or adapted solutions while waiting for clearer standards, safety frameworks, and customer commitments,” said Hughes. “Building the supply chain will hinge on stabilizing standards and safety frameworks so suppliers can design, certify, manufacture, and install equipment with confidence.”

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As electronics demand higher energy density, one component has proved challenging to shrink: the capacitor. Making a smaller capacitor usually requires thinning the dielectric layer or electrode surface area, which has often resulted in a reduction of power. A new polymer material could help change that.

In a study published 18 February in Nature, a Pennsylvania State University–led team reported a capacitor crafted from a polymer blend that can operate at temperatures up to 250 °C while storing roughly four times as much energy as conventional polymer capacitors. Today’s advanced polymer capacitors typically function only up to about 100 °C, meaning engineers often rely on bulky cooling systems in high-power electronics. The research team has filed a patent for the polymer capacitors and plans to bring them to market.

Capacitors deliver rapid bursts of energy and stabilize voltage in circuits, making them essential in applications ranging from electric vehicles and aerospace electronics to power-grid infrastructure and AI data centers. Yet while transistors have steadily shrunk with advances in semiconductor manufacturing, passive components such as capacitors and inductors have not scaled at the same pace.

“Capacitors can account for 30 to 40 percent of the volume in some power electronics systems,” says Qiming Zhang, an electrical engineering researcher at Penn State and study author, explaining why it’s important to make smaller capacitors.

A Plastics Blend More Powerful Than Its Parts

The research team combined two commercially available engineered plastics: polyetherimide (PEI), originally developed by General Electric and widely used in industrial equipment, and PBPDA, known for strong heat resistance and electrical insulation. When processed together under controlled conditions, the polymers self-assemble into nanoscale structures that form thin dielectric films inside capacitors. Those structures help suppress electrical leakage while allowing the material to polarize strongly in an electric field, allowing greater energy storage.

The resulting material exhibits an unusually high dielectric constant—a measure of how much electrical energy a material can store. Most polymer dielectrics have values around four, but the blended polymer dielectric in the new work had a value of 13.5.

“If you look at the literature up to now, no one has reached this level of dielectric constant in this type of polymer system,” Zhang says. “Putting two commonly used polymers together and seeing this kind of performance was a surprise to many people.”

Because the material can remain operational even at elevated temperatures—such as those from extreme environmental heat or hot spots in densely built components—capacitors built from this polymer could potentially store the same amount of energy in a smaller package.

“With this material, you can make the same device using about [one-fourth as much] material,” Zhang says. “Because the polymers themselves are inexpensive, the cost does not increase. At the same time, the component can become smaller and lighter.”

How the Polymer Mix Improves Capacitors

The researchers’ finding is “a big advancement,” says Alamgir Karim, a polymer research director at the University of Houston who was not involved in the Penn State development. “Normally when you mix polymers, you don’t expect the dielectric constant to increase.”

Karim says the effect likely arises from nanoscale interfaces created when the polymers partially separate. “At about a 50–50 mixture, the polymers don’t fully mix and instead create a very large interfacial area,” he says. “Those interfaces may be where the unusual electrical behavior comes from.”

If the material can be produced at scale, it could help address a key bottleneck in high-power electronics. Higher-temperature capacitors could reduce cooling requirements and allow engineers to pack more power into smaller systems—an advantage for aerospace platforms, electric vehicles, the electric grid, and other high-temperature environments.

But translating the concept from laboratory methods to commercial manufacturing may present challenges, says Zongliang Xie, a postdoctoral researcher at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, in California. The Penn State team is now producing small dielectric films, but industrial capacitor manufacturing typically requires continuous rolls of material that can extend for kilometers.

“Industry generally prefers extrusion-based processing because it’s easier and cheaper to control,” Xie says. “Scaling to produce great lengths of film while maintaining the same structure and performance could complicate matters. There’s potential, but it’s also challenging.”

Still, researchers say the discovery demonstrates that new performance limits may still be unlocked using familiar materials. “Developing the material is only the first step,” Zhang says. “But it shows people that this barrier can be broken.”

In the fictional nation of Beryllia, the 2026 World Chalice Games were set to begin as the country faced an unrelenting heat wave. The grid, already under strain from the circumstances, was dealt a further blow when a coordinated set of attacks including vandalism, drone, and ballistic attacks by an adversary, Crimsonia, crippled the grid’s physical infrastructure.

This scenario, inspired by the upcoming 2026 World Cup and the 2028 Olympic Games in Los Angeles, was an exercise in studying how utilities can prevent and mitigate, among other dangers, physical attacks on power grids. Called GridEx, the exercise was hosted by the Electricity Information Sharing and Analysis Center (E-ISAC) from 18 to 20 November 2025, and was described in a report released on 2 March. GridEx has been held every two years since 2011.

“We know that threat actors look to exploit certain circumstances,” says Michael Ball, CEO of E-ISAC, which is a program of the North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC), about designing the Beryllia scenario. “The Chalice Games became a good example of how we could build a scenario around a threat actor.”

Physical attacks on the grid are rising in the U.S., and GridEx attendance was up in November as utilities grapple with how to prevent and mitigate attacks. Participation in the exercise was at its highest level since 2019, according to the new report. Given the number of organizations present, GridEx estimates that more than 28,000 individual players participated, including utility workers and government partners, an all-time high since the exercise began.

Rising Physical Threats to Power Grids

The U.S. and Canadian grids face growing security issues from physical threats, including vandalism, assault of utility workers, intrusion of property, and theft of components, like copper wiring. NERC’s 2025 E-ISAC end-of-year report cites more than 3,500 physical security breaches that calendar year, about 3 percent of which disrupted electricity. That’s up from 2,800 events cited in the 2023 report (3 percent of those also resulted in electricity disruptions). Yet despite a number of recent high-profile attacks in the United States, physical attacks on the grid are happening worldwide.

“They’re not uniquely a U.S. thing,” says Danielle Russo, executive director of the Center for Grid Security at Securing America’s Future Energy, a nonpartisan organization focused on advancing national energy security. Russo says that while attacks are common in places like Ukraine, they’re not limited to wartime scenarios. “Other countries that are not experiencing direct conflict are experiencing increasing amounts of physical attacks on their energy infrastructure,” she says. Take Germany for example: On 3 January, an arson attack by left-wing activists in Berlin caused a five-day blackout affecting 45,000 households. That came after a suspected arson attack on two pylons in September 2025 left 50,000 Berlin households without power. Some German officials cite domestic extremism and fears of Russian sabotage in recent years as reasons for heightened security concerns over critical infrastructure.

Henrik Beuster, spokesman for grid operator Stromnetz Berlin, stands in front of the Lichterfelde power plant on 7 January after a suspected attack disrupted power supply in the area. Britta Pedersen/Picture Alliance/Getty Images

The uptick in attacks on the U.S. grid has been anchored by a number of incidents in recent years. In December 2025, an engineer in San Jose, Calif., was sentenced to 10 years in prison for bombing electric transformers in 2022 and 2023. A Tennessee man was arrested in November 2024 for attempting to attack a Nashville substation using a drone armed with explosives. And in 2023, a neo-Nazi leader was among two arrested in a plot to attack five substations around Baltimore with firearms, part of an increasing trend in white supremacist groups planning to attack the U.S. energy sector.

“Since [E-ISAC] started publishing data back in 2016, we’ve seen a large and consistent increase in the number of reported physical security incidents per year,” says Michael Coe, the vice president of physical and cyber security programs at the American Public Power Association, a trade group that works with E-ISAC to plan GridEx. While not all data is publicly available, Coe says there’s been a “tenfold” increase over the past decade in the number of reported physical attacks on the grid.

Drone Attacks: A Grid Security Challenge

During the fictional World Chalice Games scenario, drone attacks destroyed Beryllia’s substation equipment, highlighting a threat that’s gained traction as more drones enter the airspace.

“The question we get all the time is, how do you tell if it’s a bad actor, or if it’s a 12-year-old kid that got the drone for their birthday?” says Erika Willis, the program manager for the substations team at the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI).

One strategy to track and alert utilities to potential threats such as drones is called sensor fusion. The system includes a pan-tilt-zoom camera capable of 360-degree motion mounted on top of a tripod or pole with four installed radars. The radars combine with the camera for a dual system that can track drones even if they’re obstructed from view, says Willis. For instance, if a nearby drone flies behind a tree, hidden from the camera, the radars will still pick up on it. The technology is currently being tested at EPRI’s labs in Charlotte, N.C., and Lenox, Mass.

EPRI is also exploring how robotics and AI can improve security systems, Willis says. One approach involves integrating AI analysis into robotic technology already surveilling substation perimeters. Using AI can improve detection of break-ins and damage to fencing around substations, Willis says. “As opposed to a human having to go through 200 images of a fence, you can have the AI overlays do some of those algorithms…. If the robot has done the inspection of the substation 100 times, it can then relay to you that there’s an anomaly,” Willis says.

Prisma Photonics deploys fiber sensing technology that uses reflected optical signals to detect perturbations from vehicles and other sources near underground fiber cable.Prisma Photonics

Already, a number of utilities in the United States are using AI integrations in their security and monitoring processes. That’s thanks in part to Tel Aviv–based Prisma Photonics, a software company that launched in 2017 and has since deployed its fiber-sensing technology across thousands of miles of transmission infrastructure in the U.S., Canada, Europe, and Israel. A file-cabinet-size unit plugs into a substation and sends light pulses down existing fiber optic cables 30 miles in each direction. As the pulses travel down the cables, a tiny fraction of the light is reflected back to the substation unit. An AI model processes the results and can classify events based on patterns in the optical signal as a result of perturbations happening around the fiber cable.

“If we identify an event that we don’t have a classification for, and we get a feedback from a customer saying, ‘Oh, this was a car crash,’ then we can classify that in the model to say this is actually what happened,” says Tiffany Menhorn, Prisma Photonics’ vice president of North America.

As preparations get underway for the ninth GridEx, in 2027, Ball says participation in the exercises alone isn’t enough to bolster grid security. Instead, he wants utilities to take what they learn from the training and apply it in their own operations. “It’s the action of doing it, versus our statistic of saying, ‘Here’s what our growth was.’ That growth should relate to the readiness and capability of the industry.”

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When the Trump administration last year sought to freeze construction of offshore wind farms by citing concerns about interference with military radar and sonar, the implication was that these were new issues. But for more than a decade, the United States, Taiwan, and many European countries have successfully mitigated wind turbines’ security impacts. Some European countries are even integrating wind farms with national defense schemes.

“It’s not a choice of whether we go for wind farms or security. We need both,” says Ben Bekkering, a retired vice admiral in the Netherlands and current partner of the International Military Council on Climate and Security.

It’s a fact that offshore wind farms can degrade radar surveillance systems and subsea sensors designed to detect military incursions. But it’s a problem with real-world solutions, say Bekkering and other defense experts contacted by IEEE Spectrum. Those solutions include next-generation radar technology, radar-absorbing coatings for wind turbine blades, and multi-mode sensor suites that turn offshore wind farm security equipment into forward eyes and ears for defense agencies.

How Do Wind Farms Interfere With Radar?

Wind turbines interfere with radar because they’re large objects that reflect radar signals. Their spinning blades can introduce false positives on radar screens by inducing a wavelength-shifting Doppler effect that gets flagged as a flying object. Turbines can also obscure aircraft, missiles, and drones by scattering radar signals or by blinding older line-of-sight radars to objects behind them, according to a 2024 U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) report.

“Real-world examples from NATO and EU Member States show measurable degradation in radar performance, communication clarity, and situational awareness,” states a 2025 presentation from the €2 million (US $2.3 million) offshore wind Symbiosis Project, led by the Brussels-based European Defence Agency.

However, “measurable” doesn’t always mean major. U.S. agencies that monitor radar have continued to operate “without significant impacts” from wind turbines thanks to field tests, technology development, and mitigation measures taken by U.S. agencies since 2012, according to the DOE. “It is true that they have an impact, but it’s not that big,” says Tue Lippert, a former Danish special forces commander and CEO of Copenhagen-based security consultancy Heimdal Critical Infrastructure.

To date, impacts have been managed through upgrades to radar systems, such as software algorithms that identify a turbine’s radar signature and thus reduce false positives. Careful wind farm siting helps too. During the most recent designation of Atlantic wind zones in the U.S., for example, the Biden administration reduced the geographic area for a proposed zone off the Maryland coast by 79 percent to minimize defense impacts.

Radar impacts can be managed even better by upgrading hardware, say experts. Newer solid-state, phased-array radars are better at distinguishing turbines from other objects than conventional mechanical radars. Phased arrays shift the timing of hundreds or thousands of individual radio waves, creating interference patterns to steer the radar beams. The result is a higher-resolution signal that offers better tracking of multiple objects and better visibility behind objects in its path. “Most modern radars can actually see through wind farms,” says Lippert.

One of the Trump administration’s first moves in its overhaul of civilian air traffic was a $438 million order for phased-array radar systems and other equipment from Collins Aerospace, which touts wind farm mitigation as one of its product’s key features.

Saab’s compact Giraffe 1X combined surface-and-air-defense radar was installed in 2021 on an offshore wind farm near England.Saab

Can Wind Farms Aid Military Surveillance?

Another radar mitigation option is “infill” radar, which fills in coverage gaps. This involves installing additional radar hardware on land to provide new angles of view through a wind farm or putting radar systems on the offshore turbines to extend the radar field of view.

In fact, wind farms are increasingly being tapped to extend military surveillance capabilities. “You’re changing the battlefield, but it’s a change to your advantage if you use it as a tactical lever,” says Lippert.

In 2021, Linköping, Sweden–based defense contractor Saab and Danish wind developer Ørsted demonstrated that air defense radar can be placed on a wind farm. Saab conducted a two-month test of its compact Giraffe 1X combined surface-and-air-defense radar on Ørsted’s Hornsea 1 wind farm, located 120 kilometers east of England’s Yorkshire coast. The installation extended situational awareness “beyond the radar horizon of the ground-based long-range radars,” claims Saab. The U.K. Ministry of Defence ordered 11 of Saab’s systems.

Putting surface radar on turbines is something many offshore wind operators do already to track their crew vessels and to detect unauthorized ships within their arrays. Sharing those signals, or even sharing the equipment, can give national defense forces an expanded view of ships moving within and around the turbines. It can also improve detection of low altitude cruises missiles, says Bekkering, which can evade air defense radars.

Sharing signals and equipment is part of a growing trend in Europe toward “dual use” of offshore infrastructure. Expanded dual-use sensing is already being implemented in Belgium, the Netherlands, and Poland, and was among the recommendations from Europe’s Symbiosis Project.

Baltic Power

In fact, Poland mandates inclusion of defense-relevant equipment on all offshore wind farms. Their first project carries radar and other sensors specified by Poland’s Ministry of Defense. The wind farm will start operating in the Baltic later this year, roughly 200 km south of Kaliningrad, a Russian exclave.

The U.K. is experimenting too. Last year, West Sussex–based LiveLink Aerospace demonstrated purpose-built, dual-use sensors atop wind turbines offshore from Aberdeen. The compact equipment combines a suite of sensors including electro-optical sensors, thermal and visible light cameras, and detectors for radio frequency and acoustic signals.

In the past, wind farm operators tended to resist cooperating with defense projects, fearing that would turn their installations into military targets. And militaries were also reluctant to share, because they are used to having full control over equipment.

But Russia’s increasingly aggressive posture has shifted thinking, say security experts. Russia’s attacks on Ukraine’s power grid show that “everything is a target,” says Tobhias Wikström, CEO for Luleå, Sweden–based Parachute Consulting and a former lieutenant colonel in Sweden’s air force. Recent sabotage of offshore gas pipelines and power cables is also reinforcing the sense that offshore wind operators and defense agencies need to collaborate.

Why Is Sweden Restricting Offshore Wind?

Contrary to Poland and the U.K., Sweden is the one European country that, like the U.S. under Trump’s second administration, has used national security to justify a broad restriction on offshore wind development. In 2024, Sweden rejected 13 projects along its Baltic coast, which faces Kaliningrad, citing anticipated degradation in its ability to detect incoming missiles.

Saab’s CEO rejected the government’s argument, telling a Swedish newspaper that the firm’s radar “can handle” wind farms. Wikström at Parachute Consulting also questions the government’s claim, noting that Sweden’s entry into NATO in 2024 gives its military access to Finnish, German, and Polish air defense radars, among others, that together provide an unobstructed view of the Baltic. “You will always have radars in other locations that will cross-monitor and see what’s behind those wind turbines,” says Wikström.

Politics are likely at play, says Wikström, noting that some of the coalition government’s parties are staunchly pro-nuclear. But he says a deeper problem is that the military experts who evaluate proposed wind projects, as he did before retiring in 2021, lack time and guidance.

By banning offshore wind projects instead of embracing them, Sweden and the U.S. may be missing out on opportunities for training in that environment, says Lippert, who regularly serves with U.S. forces as a reserves liaison officer with Denmark’s Greenland-based Joint Arctic Command. As he puts it: “The Chinese and Taiwanese coasts are plastered with offshore wind. If the U.S. Navy and Air Force are not used to fighting in littoral environments filled with wind farms, then they’re at a huge disadvantage when war comes.”

As data-center developers frantically seek to secure power for their operations, one startup is proposing a novel solution: Build them into floating offshore wind turbines.

San Francisco–based offshore wind-power developer Aikido Technologies today announced its plans to start housing data centers in the underwater tanks that keep its turbine platforms afloat. The turbines will supply the power for the servers, and onboard batteries and grid connection will provide backup.

The company’s first prototype, a 100-kilowatt unit, is scheduled to launch in the North Sea off the coast of Norway by the end of this year. A 15-to-18-megawatt project off the coast of the United Kingdom may follow in 2028.

Aikido is one of several companies planning data centers in unusual places—underwater, on floating buoys, in coal mines and now on offshore wind turbines. The creativity stems from the forces of several trends: rapidly rising energy demand from data centers, the need for domestic renewable power production, and limited real estate.

The North Sea serves as an ideal first spot for floating, wind-powered data centers because European policymakers and companies are looking to regain domestic control over energy production. They’re also looking to host an AI economy on servers within the continent’s boundaries. Floating wind platforms keep the compute out of sight while tapping the stronger, more consistent air streams that blow over deep waters, where traditional, seabed-mounted turbine monopiles can’t go.

“A lot of energy in the clean-energy space is focused on powering AI data centers quickly, reliably, and cleanly in a way that does not upset neighbors and remains safe, fast, and cheap,” says Ramez Naam, an independent clean-energy investor who does not have a stake in Aikido. “Aikido has that, and a smart team,” he says.

Floating Wind-Power Designs Evolve

Aikido’s design builds on many iterations tested by the growing floating wind industry. When Norwegian energy giant Equinor finished construction on the world’s first floating wind farm in 2017, it kept the turbines upright with ballasted steel columns extending 78 meters into the water—a design called a spar platform. This gave it a dense mass like the keel of a boat. Since then, the floating wind industry has largely coalesced around a semisubmersible design based on oil and gas platforms. Semisubmersibles don’t go as deep as spar platforms; instead, they extend buoyancy horizontally. Anchors, chains, and ropes keep the platform floating within a certain radius.

Aikido is taking the semisubmersible approach. Its football-field-size platform holds the turbine in the center, and three legs extend tripod-like outward, like a Christmas-tree stand. At the end of each leg is a ballast that reaches 20 meters deep. This holds tanks largely filled with fresh water to maintain the platform’s buoyancy in the salty ocean.

The data centers will go in the upper part of each ballast tank. There’s room for a 3- to 4-MW data hall in each tank, giving the platform a combined compute of 10 to 12 MW. Below the data halls is an open chamber used as a safety barrier, and below that sit the freshwater tanks. The water is piped up to the data center for liquid cooling of the servers. The warmed water is then funneled back down the ballast into the tank. There, proximity to the cold ocean water cools it again as the heat is conducted out through the tank’s steel walls.

“We have this power from the wind. We have free cooling. We think we can be quite cost competitive compared to conventional data-center solutions,” says Aikido CEO Sam Kanner. “This crunch in the next five years is an opportunity for us to prove this out and supply AI compute where it’s needed.”

One challenge, he says, is that liquid cooling can’t cover all the data center’s needs. For example, heat generated from Ethernet switches that connect the GPUs can’t be liquid-cooled with commercially available technology. So Aikido installed an air-conditioning method for that.

Another challenge is the marine environment, which is “pretty brutal to engineer around because there’s the increased salinity, there’s debris, and there’s various kinds of corrosion and fouling of metal piping that you wouldn’t have in a freshwater environment,” says Daniel King, a research fellow at the Foundation for American Innovation in Washington who focuses on AI infrastructure.

Offshore Data Centers Face Challenges

Aikido’s plan avoids the prickly not-in-my-backyard complaints that are dogging both onshore wind and data-center projects. It might also circumvent some inquiries into water usage and power demand too, or so Aikido’s thinking goes.

But it might not be that easy. “Instinctively many people reach for offshore or even orbital outer-space data centers as a way to circumvent the typical burdens of environmental reviews,” says King. “But there could be more or additional requirements around discharging heat and the effects that has on marine life that are different from the considerations of a terrestrial data center. It’s unclear to me whether this actually makes life easier or harder for a developer.”

Prefabricated data halls could be installed quayside, followed by final electrical and plumbing connections to commission the data center.Aikido

Aikido’s “design choice to use the fresh water in the ballast as a working fluid is a novel one” that, thanks to the closed-loop system, may “alleviate some of the engineering problems you see when a really high temperature fluid is pumping its heat directly into a marine environment,” King says.

Offshore sites are also vulnerable to sabotage, King notes. Since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, fleets of vessels directed by the Kremlin have reportedly started messing with offshore wind and communications infrastructure in northern Europe. Russian and Chinese boats have allegedly cut subsea cables in recent years.

But vandalism is a risk anywhere, including at conventional data centers, Aikido CEO Kanner notes. Unlike those on land, where the local police have jurisdiction, Aikido’s data centers would enjoy protection from national coast guards, which he suggests gives an added degree of security.

North Sea Hosts Clean Energy

Kanner first began thinking about offshore wind turbines as a place to build data centers after a chance phone call with a cryptocurrency billionaire. The financier wanted to know whether turbines in international waters could power servers generating digital tokens at a moment when crypto-mining faced increased scrutiny from regulators. The talks fizzled. But that encounter sparked Kanner’s curiosity about how to use power generated onboard floating turbines.

When ChatGPT emerged in 2022 and sparked a heated debate over how to power and cool such technology, the idea to put the data center in the floating turbine clicked for Kanner. The idea really congealed after he met with the chief executive of Portland, Ore.–based Panthalassa. The wave-energy company was proposing to enclose small, remote data centers in buoys attached to equipment that generates power from the surf. Panthalassa just completed its full-scale prototype tests off the coast of Washington state last summer.

At that point, Aikido had already designed a modular platform for floating wind turbines. Each platform consists of 13 major steel components that are snapped together with pin joints—like IKEA furniture. The platforms fold up in a flat configuration that takes up roughly half the space of other designs, allowing it to be transported by a wider range of ships, according to Aikido. From there, it was a matter of figuring out how to accommodate a data center in the unused space.

Aikido’s prototype will use a refurbished Vesta V-17 turbine. It will need onboard batteries for backup power and will also be connected to the grid for additional power during seasons with less wind. Aikido envisions eventually sprinkling its data centers among large arrays of offshore turbines to tap into that larger power infrastructure.

Between Russia’s threat to expand its war in Ukraine to EU countries and the Trump administration’s bid to pressure Denmark into ceding sovereignty of Greenland to Washington, Europe is scrambling to build up its own energy production and AI capabilities. The North Sea, increasingly, looks like a primary theater of that effort. In January, nearly a dozen European nations banded together in a pact to transform the North Sea into a “reservoir” of clean power from offshore wind.

This webinar looks at a Battery Electric Virtual Vehicle Model of a mid-size BEV, and uses Simulink and Simscape to facilitate design exploration, component refinement, and system-level optimization. The virtual vehicle comprises five subsystems: Electric powertrain, driveline, refrigerant cycle, coolant cycle, and passenger cabin. The model will be tested using different drive cycles, cooling, and heating scenarios. The results will be analyzed to determine the impact of the different design parameters on vehicle consumption.

The resulting virtual vehicle will be used to:

• Test different drive cycles and environmental conditions
• Perform sensitivity analysis
• Optimize model to improve thermal performance and consumption

Every time Russia attacks Ukraine’s power infrastructure, Ukrainian engineers risk their lives in the scramble to get electricity flowing again. It’s a dangerous job at best, and a lethal one at worst. It also requires creativity. Time pressure and equipment shortages make it nearly impossible to rebuild things exactly as they were, so engineers must redesign on the fly.

These dangerous, stressful conditions have led to more engineers being hurt or killed. The rate of injuries among Ukrainian workers in electricity generation, transmission, and distribution jumped nearly 50 percent after Russia’s full-scale invasion began four years ago, according to data provided by Antonina Nagorna, who leads the Department of Epidemiology and Physiology of Work at the Kundiiev Institute of Occupational Health, in Kiev. By her count at least 48 people had died on the job through the end of 2025, either while repairing damage or during the bombardment itself.

Transmission mastermind Oleksiy Brecht joined that grim count in January. Brecht, who was director for network operations and development at the Ukrainian grid operator Ukrenergo, died while coordinating work at Ukraine’s most attacked electrical switchyard, Kyivska, west of the capital. He was 47 years old.

Brecht’s life and death are a window into the realities of thousands of Ukrainian engineers who face conditions beyond what most engineers could imagine. “The war completely transformed the professional life of a top-manager engineer,” says Mariia Tsaturian, an energy analyst and chief communication officer at the think tank Ukraine Facility Platform, who previously worked with Brecht at Ukrenergo. “As for junior staff, their world was turned upside down entirely. A substation engineer working under shelling is something no one had ever seen or experienced before,” she says.

How Russia Attacks Ukraine’s Grid

Over the course of the war, Russia has increasingly focused on destroying Ukraine’s energy infrastructure. It sends attack drones almost daily during the winter there, when heat and electricity is needed most to survive the bitter cold. Every 10 days or so it barrages Ukraine’s power system with combinations of missiles and hundreds of drones, repeatedly mangling equipment and cutting off power. The cold imposed on Ukrainian homes is especially hard on former prisoners of war held in Russia, where cold is routinely employed as a form of torture.

In the first two years of the war, keeping the grid flowing was a 24/7 job. But Ukrenergo has adapted to the impossible since then, says Vitaliy Zaychenko, Ukrenergo’s CEO, who somehow found a moment to speak with IEEE Spectrum via video call. Now, “we are more prepared for each attack. We have well-trained teams. We have support from Europe,” he says.

But the risk involved in repairing the grid remains unnerving. Last month a crew from DTEK, Ukraine’s biggest private-sector energy firm, was traveling between locations when it was targeted by a Russian drone. They heard the drone coming and escaped before their bucket truck was destroyed. Russian forces have employed “double tap” attacks against DTEK’s crews, targeting their power infrastructure with a follow-up strike designed to kill first responders—a practice confirmed by the U.N.

When Russia began targeting power infrastructure in October 2022, Brecht’s job shifted from high-level direction of grid planning and maintenance to near-constant triage and real-time system reengineering. Most weeks, Brecht spent several days in the field, crisscrossing the country to coordinate work at smashed substations. Brecht would often be found on site figuring out how to restart power using whatever equipment was available. “It was a unique decision every time,” says Zaychenko.

Oleksiy Brecht died in January while overseeing repairs to a bombed-out substation near Kyiv. He called his employees at Ukrenergo “my fighters. They called him “our general.”Ukrenergo

Zaychenko noted Brecht’s “genius” for finding creative grid fixes, his passion and leadership skills, and his credibility with power brokers in Ukraine and abroad. Brecht scoured the globe sourcing critical replacement parts, including stockpiled or older equipment from international utilities. Transformers, which can take a year or more to source, are especially precious.

When the right equipment wasn’t forthcoming, Brecht figured out how to make do. For example, he would deploy transformers from Western Europe rated for 400 kilovolts to restart a 330-kV circuit. He would adapt transformers designed for 60-hertz alternating current for emergency use on Ukraine’s 50-Hz grid. “He would find a way,” says Zaychenko, who worked closely with Brecht for over 20 years.

Brecht’s assistant at Ukrenergo, Svitlana Dubas-Veremiienko, says he also contributed to the teams’ morale and confidence. She shared on Facebook that he smoked “like a locomotive” at the worst times, and yet exuded calm: “In his presence, chaos subsided,” she wrote. Brecht was not easy to intimidate. “He was someone who never feared anything or anyone,” adds Tsaturian.

Brecht’s work proved so essential that Ukrenergo’s former Deputy CEO Andrii Nemyrovskyi recalls telling Ukraine’s Ministry of Defense in 2022 that the military must protect two people: Zaychenko, because he ran grid operations, and Brecht because “system operations requires that the system exists.” Last week, President Zelenskyy posthumously named Brecht a “Hero of Ukraine” for “strengthening the energy security of Ukraine under martial law.”

Ukraine’s Power Infrastructure Under Fire

Brecht joined Ukrenergo in 2002 after earning his degree in power engineering from Igor Sikorsky Kyiv Polytechnic Institute. Over the next 20 years, he held leadership positions in dispatching and grid planning and development. He joined Ukrenergo’s management board in June 2022 and served as its interim leader in 2024.

Brecht’s contributions to Ukraine’s wartime survival began with several key upgrades to Ukrenergo’s technical capabilities ahead of the February 2022 invasion. He reintroduced “live line” techniques, providing training and equipment that enable crews to work on circuits while they continue to carry power to homes and to sustain critical needs.

Brecht also led preparations for Ukraine’s disconnection from the Russian grid and synchronization with Europe’s. When the invasion began, Ukraine’s Minister of Energy at the time, Herman Halushchenko, had argued that switching from Russia’s grid to Europe’s was too risky, according to Tsaturian and Nemyrovskyi. But Brecht insisted—correctly, as hindsight has shown—that synchronizing with Europe would provide crucial stability and backup power. At his urging, the switch was completed in daring fashion during the first weeks of the invasion.

(Halushchenko was dismissed last year following longstanding allegations of corruption and Russian influence in Ukraine’s energy sector that gave way to indictments in November 2025 that have rocked President Zelenskyy’s government. In January, Halushchenko was detained while attempting to leave the country and charged with money laundering.)

DTEK workers conduct repairs on 26 January following a Russian attack in Kyiv.Danylo Antoniuk/Cover Images/AP

A Ukrainian Electrical Engineer’s Final Day

Brecht’s final act of service followed the mass destruction of January 19—a day when Kyiv’s high temperature was –10° C. That night, Russian forces targeted Ukraine’s energy infrastructure with 18 ballistic missiles, a hypersonic cruise missile, 15 conventional cruise missiles, and 339 drones.

The impact included catastrophic damage at the 750-kV Kyivska substation, which feeds electricity to the capital and ensures cooling power for two nuclear power plants.

Brecht was leading a team of about 100 people who were undoing the damage when he made a deadly choice. He picked up a section of busbar—solid conduits that connect circuits within substations. It had been blasted to the ground and, unbeknownst to Brecht, was carrying lethal voltage. It’s unclear whether its circuit was still connected, or if it had picked up voltage from another circuit.

Zaychenko says an investigation is ongoing to provide answers. “I don’t know why he touched this busbar. Maybe because of tiredness. Maybe something else,” he says. “He was trying to help the team to do this job quickly. It was a huge mistake and a huge loss for us.”

Charles Proteus Steinmetz was a towering figure in the early decades of electrical engineering, easily the intellectual equal of Thomas Edison and Nikola Tesla—men he considered his friends. One of Steinmetz’s most significant achievements was to quantify and characterize the phenomenon of magnetic hysteresis—the behavior of magnetism in materials—and then devise a simple law that allowed for predictable transformer and motor design. He also established a revolutionary framework for analyzing AC circuits, which is still taught today in power engineering. And from 1893, he served as chief consulting engineer at General Electric at a pivotal moment for the young company and for the U.S. effort to expand its power grid. For these and other accomplishments, he was well known in his time, even if he’s not exactly a household name today.

Steinmetz was also an evangelist for electric vehicles. In March 1920, he typed out his thoughts, comparing the pros and cons of EVs to the gasoline-propelled alternative. Among the advantages: low cost of maintenance, reliability, simplicity of operation, and lower cost of operation. The disadvantages: dependence on charging stations, limited range on a single charge, and lower speeds. More than a century later, his list remains remarkably pertinent.

Steinmetz could often be seen decked out in a suit and top hat, smoking his trademark BlackStone panatela cigar while riding around Schenectady, N.Y., in his 1914 Detroit Electric sedan. According to John Spinelli, emeritus professor of electrical and computer engineering at Union College, in Schenectady, sometimes both Steinmetz and his chauffeur sat in the backseat—you could control the car from both the front and the rear—so that it would appear to be a driverless car. With a top speed of 40 kilometers per hour (25 miles per hour), the car ran on 14 six-volt batteries and could go about 48 km between charges.

Steinmetz’s 1914 Detroit Electric car is now at Union College in Schenectady, N.Y., where Steinmetz had founded, chaired, and taught in the department of electrical engineering.Paul Buckowski/Union College

In 1971, the car was purchased by Union College, where Steinmetz had founded, chaired, and taught in the department of electrical engineering. The car had been discovered rotting in a field, so it needed some work. Over the next decade, faculty and engineering students restored it to its former glory. Still in running condition, it’s now on permanent display at the college.

Steinmetz’s Contributions to Electrical Engineering

Karl August Rudolf Steinmetz was born in 1865 in Breslau, Prussia (now known as Wrocław, Poland). He studied mathematics, physics, and the burgeoning field of electricity at the University of Breslau. He also joined a student socialist club and edited the party newspaper, The People’s Voice. He completed his doctoral studies, but before receiving his degree, Steinmetz fled to Switzerland in 1888, after his socialist writings came under the scrutiny of the Bismarck government.

Steinmetz immigrated to New York the following year, anglicized his first name, dropped his two middle names, and added Proteus, a nickname he had picked up at university (after the shape-shifting sea god of Greek mythology). Eventually, he became a U.S. citizen.

Charles Proteus Steinmetz solved a number of important problems that helped the power grid expand.Bettmann/Getty Images

In January 1892, Steinmetz burst onto the engineering scene when he read his paper “On the Law of Hysteresis” before the American Institute of Electrical Engineers, a forerunner of today’s IEEE. I can’t quite imagine sitting through the delivery of its 62 pages, but those assembled recognized its groundbreaking nature. The ideas Steinmetz outlined allowed engineers to calculate power losses in the magnetic components of electrical machinery during the design phase. Prior to this, the design process for transformers and electric motors was largely trial and error, and power losses could be measured only after the machine was built, which greatly added to the cost.

Steinmetz was not just an equations and theory guy, though. He loved working in the lab and building things. In 1893, General Electric acquired the small manufacturing firm of Eickemeyer & Osterheld, in Yonkers, N.Y., where Steinmetz had worked since shortly after his arrival in the United States. So Steinmetz began his new life as a corporate engineer, an interesting turn for the socialist. During his first few years with GE, he mostly designed generators and transformers. But he also created an informal position for himself as a consultant, giving expert opinions on various problems across divisions. He eventually formalized this role, becoming GE’s chief consulting engineer, and he maintained a relationship with the company for the rest of his life, even after joining the faculty of Union College in 1902.

By the time Steinmetz died in 1923 at the age of 58, he had been granted more than 200 patents and had made major contributions to various subfields in electrical engineering, including phasors and complex numbers (for steady-state AC analysis); electrical transients, switching surges, and surge protection (based on his research on lightning); industrial research (including how to run a corporate lab); and engineering methods (by writing textbooks that standardized practice).

Why Steinmetz Believed in Electric Cars

By 1914, Steinmetz was convinced that the future of transportation was electric. In June, he addressed the National Electric Light Association convention in Philadelphia with a bold prediction: “I have no doubt that in 10 years, more or less—rather less than more—we will see the field of the pleasure and business vehicle covered by such an electric car in large numbers. And I believe I underestimate when I say that 1,000,000 or more will be used.”

As we now know, Steinmetz was overly optimistic. At the time, there were about 1.2 million gasoline-powered cars in use in the United States, and only about 35,000 EVs. It would take until 2018 for the number of EVs (including plug-in hybrids) on U.S. roads to surpass a million. Worldwide, there are now about 60 million electric vehicles in use.

But Steinmetz had his reasons. He firmly believed that electric vehicles would flourish in urban areas, where most rides involved short distances at low speed. He also thought EVs would be a boon for power companies, which were eager to drum up more business, especially at night. With 1 million electric cars being charged about 5 kilowatt-hours on most nights, and at a rate of 5 cents per kilowatt-hour, Steinmetz predicted US $75 million (about $2.5 billion today) of new business for central power stations each year.

In 1971, Union College purchased Steinmetz’s car, which had been found rotting in a field, and faculty and students restored it to working condition.Special Collections & Archives/Schaffer Library/Union College

Steinmetz went to work to improve the electric car. He developed a double-rotor motor that was integrated into the rear axle, which did away with the need for a mechanical differential or drive shaft and drastically reduced the overall weight, which improved the mileage. Dey Electric Corp. incorporated Steinmetz’s design into its electric roadster and priced it under $1,000. Unfortunately, an internal combustion engine Ford Model T cost about half as much, and the Dey roadster flopped, ending production within a year.

Undeterred, Steinmetz formed the Steinmetz Electric Motor Car Corp. in 1920 with the initial goal of bringing to market an electric truck for deliveries and light industrial use. The first truck debuted on a cold February day in 1922 with a publicity stunt of climbing the steep Miller Avenue hill in Brooklyn, N.Y. According to a report in The New York Times, the vehicle went up the 14.5 percent grade between Jamaica Avenue and Highland Boulevard in 51 seconds. During a second climb, it stopped a number of times to show how easily it restarted. The truck had a range of 84 km (52 miles).

The company planned to manufacture 1,000 trucks per year and 300 lightweight delivery cars, plus a five-passenger coupe, but it made a total of only 48 vehicles. After Steinmetz died in 1923, the company soon ceased operation.

Steinmetz wasn’t only bullish on the electric car, but on electricity in general. A New York Times article recorded his belief that by 2023, we would work no more than 4 hours a day, 200 days a year because electricity would have eliminated the drudgery and unpleasantness of labor. He also predicted that electricity would bring about an end to urban pollution: “Every city would be a spotless town.” With an expansion of leisure time, people would be healthier, engaging in gardening (especially growing their own food) and pursuing educational interests to become “much more intelligent and self-expressive creature[s].”

Steinmetz’s Chosen Family

I decided to write about Steinmetz last year, after IEEE Spectrum published an essay I wrote about why engineering needs the humanities. The article contains this line: “In 1909, none other than Charles Proteus Steinmetz advocated for including the classics in engineering education.” I had been impressed to learn of Steinmetz’s recognition of the value of a liberal arts education. But my copy editor didn’t know who Steinmetz was or why he merited the qualifier “none other.” More people should know about this remarkable man, I decided. And so I went looking for a museum object associated with him, so I could include him in a Past Forward column.

Steinmetz [left] was easily the intellectual equal of Thomas Edison [right], whom he considered a friend.Corbis/Getty Images

The electric car is only one avenue into Steinmetz’s life. I could instead have looked into Steinmetz solids (the geometric shapes that form when two or three identical cylinders intersect at right angles), Steinmetz curves (the edges of a Steinmetz solid), or the Steinmetz equivalent circuit (a mathematical model that describes a transformer using resistors and inductors). But none of those concepts could be easily captured in a picture-worthy object. His love of his electric car, on the other hand, was a fun and fitting entry point for this most unusual engineer.

I also saw an opportunity to highlight how Steinmetz became a family man. Steinmetz had dwarfism—he stood just 122 centimeters tall—as well as kyphosis, a severe curvature of the spine, as did his father and grandfather. He didn’t wish to pass along those traits, and so he never married or had children of his own. But that didn’t mean he didn’t want a family.

In 1903, Steinmetz’s favorite lab assistant, Joseph LeRoy Hayden, told his boss that he was getting married. Steinmetz invited the couple to dinner, and then invited them to live in his large home. They agreed to this unusual living arrangement, with Corinne Rost Hayden running the household and cooking for her husband and Steinmetz. She forced the men to set aside their work for regular family meals.

Eventually, the Hayden family expanded, welcoming Joe, Midge, and Billy. Steinmetz legally adopted the elder Hayden, thereby gaining three grandchildren as well. Steinmetz, whom The New York Times had named a “modern Jove” who “hurls thunderbolts at will” (from a high-voltage lightning generator), delighted at entertaining the grandkids with wondrous tricks of electricity and chemistry.

In writing about the history of electrical engineering, I sometimes fall into the trap of focusing too much on the technology. But it’s just as important to recognize the people behind the technology—their personalities, their frailties, their feelings, their challenges. Steinmetz faced adversity for his political beliefs, for being an immigrant, and for his physical stature, yet none of that ever stopped him. In word and deed, he showed that he had a generous heart as mighty as his intellect.

Part of a continuing series looking at historical artifacts that embrace the boundless potential of technology.

An abridged version of this article appears in the March 2026 print issue as “Charles Proteus Steinmetz Loved His Electric Car.”

References

IEEE Power & Energy Magazine published Steinmetz’s pro/con list comparing electric cars to those with internal combustion engines in the September/October 2005 issue, along with a good biographical overview of Steinmetz by Carl Sulzberger.

Union College published a nice story about the restoration of Steinmetz’s electric car in 2014, when it received its permanent home on campus.

There are many biographies of Steinmetz, one published as early as 1924, but I am particularly fond of Steinmetz: Engineer and Socialist by Ronald Kline (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992).

Gilbert King’s 2011 article “Charles Proteus Steinmetz, the Wizard of Schenectady” for Smithsonian magazine describes Steinmetz’s chosen family and includes several fun anecdotes not mentioned above.

As electric vehicles roll off assembly lines, a bottleneck sits upstream: lithium refinement. Turning raw lithium into the compounds needed for batteries is expensive, messy, and energy intensive, but Mangrove Lithium, a Vancouver-based startup, has a better way. The company has developed an electrochemical refining process that converts lithium feedstocks into battery-grade lithium hydroxide.

Converting raw lithium to lithium hydroxide typically requires roasting spodumene—a mineral from which lithium is derived—at high temperatures, and then leaching it with acid to convert it to lithium sulfate. That compound then needs to be converted to lithium hydroxide. “It’s a thermochemical reaction that uses heavy amounts of reagent chemicals, and generates a sodium sulfate waste stream,” says Ryan Day, Mangrove Lithium’s director of operations.

Further tightening the bottleneck, the majority of the world’s lithium—60 to 70 percent—is now refined in China, and export restrictions and geopolitical tensions have disrupted supply chains in recent years. Shipping raw lithium overseas to be refined also adds to batteries’ total carbon footprint. A new model for lithium refining could reshape not just the economics of electric vehicles but also the geography and environmental footprint of the global battery supply chain.

Mangrove’s demo plant in British Columbia is scheduled to start production in the second half of 2026.

How Does Mangrove’s Refinement Work?

Mangrove replaces the conventional, resource-intensive reaction with a process that uses electricity, water, and oxygen. In an electrochemical cell, they flow brine through an electrolyzer, which consists of a metal box with three compartments between the cathode and anode. The compartments are separated by ion exchange membranes, semipermeable barriers that allow only certain ions to pass. Lithium sulfate flows through the central compartment, and the cell’s electric field splits the salt apart. “Lithium, which is a positive ion, will move across a membrane toward the cathode,” says Day. There, “we are reacting oxygen and water to create hydroxide ions, which join with the lithium from the salt to make lithium hydroxide.”

Meanwhile, on the opposite side of the cell, the sulfate—a negative ion—moves toward the anode, where water is being split to produce protons and oxygen gas. The protons combine with sulfate ions to make sulfuric acid.

“You run that process continuously, and over time you’re generating lithium hydroxide, which you can send to a crystallizer,” Day says. “There’s no significant waste product, and all you’re feeding in is brine, water, oxygen, and electricity.” The sulfuric acid is recovered and can be circulated back upstream to leach more brine from the raw feed material.

In general, keeping the ion exchange membrane intact is one of the biggest challenges for scaling this type of process, says Feifei Shi, assistant professor of energy engineering at Penn State. Shi, who researches electrochemical-based refinement methods, notes that the approach can more easily activate the necessary reactions, but faces limitations for large-scale applications.

The electrochemical process separates out lithium by passing it through three compartments separated by semipermeable barriers. Mangrove Lithium

Mangrove’s Oxygen-Based Cathode

Mangrove’s key innovation and what enables the process is an oxygen-based cathode. “Driving the reaction requires detailed engineering,” says Day. The company designed an electrode that lets a gas and a liquid react together, using just enough water to make the oxygen reaction work—without adding so much that it floods the system and creates hydrogen gas instead.

The electrodes are made with a proprietary process that combines several dedicated layers that allow for a balanced flow of water and oxygen to access the active catalyst sites. This design favors the oxygen-reduction reaction for over 99.5 percent of the total cathode activity. It also reduces the amount of electricity needed to drive the process, because “oxygen reduction requires less voltage than water reduction,” Day says. Demand for battery minerals is surging beyond just lithium, with automakers competing for supplies of nickel, cobalt, graphite, and manganese. Simultaneously, utilities are deploying grid-scale batteries that use the same materials in even larger volumes. Refining capacity—not just mining—could become the critical choke point in this buildout, because battery makers require highly specified, ultrapure compounds.

While Mangrove is initially targeting lithium, their electrochemical architecture is not inherently lithium-specific, and could be adapted to other battery materials that face similar purification bottlenecks. Nickel and cobalt sulfate production, for example, still rely on multistep precipitation and solvent-extraction processes that generate significant waste and require large reagent inputs. “It would work immediately in application to other alkali-metal salts,” Day says.

Mangrove’s demo plant in British Columbia will make 1,000 tonnes per year of lithium hydroxide. If the company can scale its technology as it hopes, it could begin to reshape not just the battery supply chain but also the geopolitics of the energy transition.

A new type of hydroelectric energy system that doesn’t use water was cause for the champagne to flow in January when engineers at RheEnergise in the United Kingdom succeeded in driving a pilot project to a peak power of 500 kilowatts. The system is a fresh take on pumped-storage hydroelectricity (PSH) power, a century-old technology first implemented in Switzerland in 1907 that has since been adopted globally and grown into a major form of energy storage. In 2023, pumped storage provided nearly 200 gigawatts in global installed capacity—over 90 percent of the world’s long-duration energy storage. Hence its nickname: the world’s biggest battery.

PSH works by pumping water up to a higher reservoir during periods of excess electricity from renewables or when demand from the grid is low, and letting the water flow back down under gravity through turbines to a lower reservoir when demand is high. The simplicity of the concept makes PSH efficient, cost-effective, long-lasting, and reliable with relatively low running costs once constructed.

“Pumped hydro is very mature,” says Tamas Bertenyi, a cofounder and chief technology officer of RheEnergise. “In terms of long-duration storage—let’s say 8 to 10 hours—it’s incredibly low cost. So there’s probably a hydro industry in most countries of the world.”

But PSH also has its downsides. Besides high upfront costs and long construction times, Bertenyi says the biggest disadvantage is its lack of scalability. “You need a suitable mountain, and you need to have a river running along the bottom. You also need an alpine valley you can dam up, and there are just not a lot of sites where you can do that.”

To make PSH scalable, RheEnergise has revamped the technology by constructing a closed-loop system and replacing water with a proprietary fluid it calls High-Density Fluid, which has 2.5 times the density of water. “It is so dense that if you threw a block of concrete into a pool of the fluid, it would float,” says Bertenyi.

In developing the fluid, RheEnergise worked with the University of Exeter in England, where Richard Cochrane (now deceased), a cofounder of the company, was a professor of renewable energy systems. The researchers sought to engineer a mineral-rich fluid that is not only much denser than water but has a manageable viscosity, is environmentally benign, and causes minimal abrasion or corrosion. That took “a lot of engineering and a lot of science,” says Bertenyi, because it raised two contradictory challenges: Have a low enough viscosity to flow like water but be dense enough to not go anywhere in the case of an accident.

How does RheEnergise’s High-Density Fluid work?

To reduce the fluid’s risk to the environment (from spills or entering the food chain), it’s formulated as a suspension mixture that suspends the particulate minerals, rather than dissolving them as a solution might. The fluid’s high density solved this problem: In the event of spillage, the particles will simply dry and settle, and not seep deep into soil or groundwater, according to Bertenyi.

RheEnergise formulated a dense yet low-viscosity fluid in its effort to make pumped-storage hydroelectricity possible in more places.RheEnergise

At the same time, the fluid—which is actually 80 percent solid particulates by mass—needed to have a viscosity as low as water to flow through pipes and turbines. Thus, the fluid was engineered to have a thick viscosity when it’s not moving, but have a decreased viscosity when pumped through a PSH system: a shear-thinning non-Newtonian behavior.

“Given the system can generate the same energy output from gentler slopes and lower elevations than traditional pumped hydro, it makes far more sites viable worldwide—including low hills and urban fringe areas—not just mountainous regions,” says George Aggidis, a professor emeritus of energy engineering at Lancaster University in the U.K. “And its long-duration storage makes it suitable for balancing generation by renewables, a gap where batteries alone can be expensive.”

The pilot project consists of a higher reservoir constructed at a height of 80 meters, with fiberglass pipes 2.5 meters in diameter feeding a shared chamber; while the lower reservoir is a simple concrete construction, “basically a large swimming pool,” says Bertenyi. Both reservoirs are buried underground and connected by a steel pipe to form a closed loop, leaving just the powerhouse containing the turbine, pump, fluid-management system, and the electrical control system visible.

“We expect our commercial projects to use two or four 5-megawatt turbines, so 10 to 20 MW is the sweet spot,” says Bertenyi. Having achieved peak power with its pilot project, he says the company is working with partners to bring the technology to commercialization, including turbine manufacturers that will produce modular turbines engineered to work with its fluid. The company aims to deliver its first fully commercial system by the end of 2028. Potential customers include independent power producers, utility companies, and energy-project developers.

But RheEnergise can expect to face some challenges along the way. Besides being capital intensive, “larger scale deployment will require substantial civil works, permit requirements, and engineering coordination,” says Aggidis. “This is more complex than plug-and-play battery systems.”

Then there’s the competition. Aggidis points to sodium-ion and flow batteries, which are modular, fast to install and rapidly decreasing in cost. Other emerging technologies include compressed-air energy storage, hydrogen storage, and thermal storage that are also seeking to get a foothold in the rapidly expanding energy-storage market.

This post was updated on 25 February 2026 to clarify that RheEnergise’s name for its proprietary fluid is High-Density Fluid. High-Density Hydro, which was originally used, is the name of the company’s overall system.

The first time she tried to seduce me,
(atoms falling in a vacuum)
she asked about blackberries—
(every mass exerts some gravity)

Did I know their season, where they grow?
(galvanometers, gravimeters)
I could answer both easily—
(tools to measure small attractions)

down the dirt road in September.
(devices that report, don’t interfere)
She eagerly went there with me,
(variations in readings occur)

We ate more berries than we kept.
(electron exchange may explain this)
The sweet dark juice painted our lips.
(equilibrium then entropy)

Data centers for AI are turning the world of power generation on its head. There isn’t enough power capacity on the grid to even come close to how much energy is needed for the number being built. And traditional transmission and distribution networks aren’t efficient enough to take full advantage of all the power available. According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA), annual transmission and distribution losses average about 5 percent. The rate is much higher in some other parts of the world. Hence, hyperscalers such as Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure are investigating every avenue to gain more power and raise efficiency.

Microsoft, for example, is extolling the potential virtues of high-temperature superconductors (HTS) as a replacement for copper wiring. According to the company, HTS can improve energy efficiency by reducing transmission losses, increasing the resiliency of electrical grids, and limiting the impact of data centers on communities by reducing the amount of space required to move power.

“Because superconductors take up less space to move large amounts of power, they could help us build cleaner, more compact systems,” Alastair Speirs, the general manager of global infrastructure at Microsoft wrote in a blog post.

Superconductors Revolutionize Power Efficiency

Copper is a good conductor, but current encounters resistance as it moves along the line. This generates heat, lowers efficiency, and restricts how much current can be moved. HTS largely eliminates this resistance factor, as it’s made of superconducting materials that are cooled to cryogenic temperatures. (Despite the name, high-temperature superconductors still rely on frigid temperatures—albeit significantly warmer than those required by traditional superconductors.)

The resulting cables are smaller and lighter than copper wiring, don’t lower voltage as they transmit current, and don’t produce heat. This fits nicely into the needs of AI data centers that are trying to cram massive electrical loads into a tiny footprint. Fewer substations would also be needed. According to Speirs, next-gen superconducting transmission lines deliver capacity that is an order of magnitude higher than conventional lines at the same voltage level.

Microsoft is working with partners on the advancement of this technology including being a part of a US $75 million Series B funding round into Veir, a superconducting power technology developer. Veir’s conductors use HTS tape, most commonly based on a class of materials known as rare-earth barium copper oxide (REBCO). REBCO is a ceramic superconducting layer deposited as a thin film on a metal substrate, then engineered into a rugged conductor that can be assembled into power cables.

“The key distinction from copper or aluminum is that, at operating temperature, the superconducting layer carries current with almost no electrical resistance, enabling very high current density in a much more compact form factor,” says Tim Heidel, Veir’s CEO and cofounder.

Liquid Nitrogen Cooling in Data Centers

Ruslan Nagimov, the principal infrastructure engineer for cloud operations and innovation at Microsoft, stands near the world’s first HTS-powered rack prototype.Microsoft

HTS cables still operate at cryogenic temperatures, so cooling must be integrated into the power-delivery system design. Veir maintains a low operating temperature using a closed-loop liquid-nitrogen system: The nitrogen circulates through the length of the cable, exits at the far end, is recooled, and then recirculated back to the start.

“Liquid nitrogen is a plentiful, low cost, safe material used in numerous critical commercial and industrial applications at enormous scale,” says Heidel. “We are leveraging the experience and standards for working with liquid nitrogen proven in other industries to design stable, data center solutions designed for continuous operation, with monitoring and controls that fit critical infrastructure expectations rather than lab conditions.”

HTS cable cooling can be done either within the data center or externally. Heidel favors the latter as that minimizes footprint and operational complexity indoors. Liquid nitrogen lines are fed into the facility to serve the superconductors. They deliver power to where it’s needed and the cooling system is managed like other facility subsystems.

Rare earth materials, cooling loops, cryogenic temperatures—all of this adds considerably to costs. Thus, HTS isn’t going to replace copper in the vast majority of applications. Heidel says the economics are most compelling where power delivery is constrained by space, weight, voltage drop, and heat.

“In those cases, the value shows up at the system level: smaller footprints, reduced resistive losses, and more flexibility in how you route power,” says Heidel. “As the technology scales, costs should improve through higher-volume HTS tape manufacturing and better yields, and also through standardization of the surrounding system hardware, installation practices, and operating playbooks that reduce design complexity and deployment risk.”

AI data centers are becoming the perfect proving ground for this approach. Hyperscalers are willing to spend to develop higher-efficiency systems. They can balance spending on development against the revenue they might make by delivering AI services broadly.

“HTS manufacturing has matured—particularly on the tape side—which improves cost and supply availability,” says Husam Alissa, Microsoft’s director of systems technology. “Our focus currently is on validating and derisking this technology with our partners with focus on systems design and integration.”

This story was updated on 26 February, 2026 to correct details of Microsoft’s investment into Veir.

In 2024, Google claimed that its data centers are 1.5 times more energy-efficient than the industry average. In 2025, Microsoft committed billions to nuclear power for AI workloads. The data center industry tracks power-usage effectiveness to three decimal places and optimizes water usage intensity with machine precision. We report direct emissions and energy emissions with religious fervor.

These are laudable advances, but these metrics account for only 30 percent of total emissions from the IT sector. The majority of the emissions are not directly from data centers or the energy they use, but from the end-user devices that actually access the data centers, emissions due to manufacturing the hardware, and software inefficiencies. We are frantically optimizing less than a third of the IT sector’s environmental impact, while the bulk of the problem goes unmeasured.

Incomplete regulatory frameworks are part of the problem. In Europe, the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD) now requires 11,700 companies to report emissions using these incomplete frameworks. The next phase of the directive, covering 40,000+ additional companies, was originally scheduled for 2026 (but is likely delayed to 2028). In the United States, the standards body responsible for IT sustainability metrics (ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 39) is conducting active revision of its standards through 2026, with a key plenary meeting in May 2026.

The time to act is now. If we don’t fix the measurement frameworks, we risk locking in incomplete data collection and optimizing a fraction of what matters for the next 5 to 10 years, before the next major standards revision.

The limited metrics

Walk into any modern data center, and you’ll see sustainability instrumentation everywhere. Power-usage efficiency (PUE) monitors track every watt. Water-usage efficiency (WUE) systems measure water consumption down to the gallon. Sophisticated monitoring captures everything from server utilization to cooling efficiency to renewable energy percentages.

But here’s what those measurements miss: End-user devices globally emit 1.5 to 2 times more carbon than all data centers combined, according to McKinsey’s 2022 report. The smartphones, laptops, and tablets we use to access those ultra-efficient data centers are the bigger problem.

Data center operations, as measured by power-usage efficiency, account for only 24 percent of the total emissions.

On the conservative end of the range from McKinsey’s report, devices emit 1.5 times as much as data centers. That means that data centers make up 40 percent of total IT emissions, while devices make up 60 percent.

On top of that, approximately 75 percent of device emissions occur not during use, but during manufacturing—this is so-called embodied carbon. For data centers, only 40 percent is embodied carbon, and 60 percent comes from operations (as measured by PUE).

Putting this together, data center operations, as measured by PUE, account for only 24 percent of the total emissions. Data center embodied carbon is 16 percent, device embodied carbon is 45 percent, and device operation is 15 percent.

Under the EU’s current CSRD framework, companies must report their emissions in three categories: direct emissions from owned sources, indirect emissions from purchased energy, and a third category for everything else.

This “everything else” category does include device emissions and embodied carbon. However, those emissions are reported as aggregate totals broken down by accounting category—capital goods, purchased goods and services, use of sold products—but not by product type. How much comes from end-user devices versus data center infrastructure, or employee laptops versus network equipment, remains murky, and therefore, unoptimized.

Embodied carbon and hardware reuse

Manufacturing a single smartphone generates approximately 50 kilograms CO₂ equivalent (CO₂e). For a laptop, it’s 200 kg CO₂e. With 1 billion smartphones replaced annually, that’s 50 million tonnes of CO₂e per year just from smartphone manufacturing, before anyone even turns them on. On average, smartphones are replaced every two years, laptops every three to four years, and printers every five years. Data center servers are replaced approximately every five years.

Extending smartphone life cycles to three years instead of two would reduce annual manufacturing emissions by 33 percent. At scale, this dwarfs data center optimization gains.

There are programs geared toward reusing old components that are still functional and integrating them into new servers. GreenSKUs and similar initiatives show that 8 percent reductions in embodied carbon are achievable. But these remain pilot programs, not systematic approaches. And critically, they’re measured only in the data center context, not across the entire IT stack.

Imagine applying the same circular economy principles to devices. With over 2 billion laptops in existence globally and two- to three-year replacement cycles, even modest lifespan extensions create massive emission reductions. Extending smartphone life cycles to three years instead of two would reduce annual manufacturing emissions by 33 percent. At scale, this dwarfs data center optimization gains.

Yet data center reuse gets measured, reported, and optimized. Device reuse doesn’t, because the frameworks don’t require it.

The invisible role of software

Leading load balancer infrastructure across IBM Cloud, I see how software architecture decisions ripple through energy consumption. Inefficient code doesn’t just slow things down—it drives up both data center power consumption and device battery drain.

For example, University of Waterloo researchers showed that they can reduce 30 percent of energy use in data centers by changing just 30 lines of code. From my perspective, this result is not an anomaly—it’s typical. Bad software architecture forces unnecessary data transfers, redundant computations, and excessive resource use. But unlike data center efficiency, there’s no commonly accepted metric for software efficiency.

This matters now more than ever. With AI workloads driving massive data center expansion—projected to consume 6.7 to 12 percent of total U.S. electricity by 2028, according to Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory—software efficiency becomes critical.

What needs to change

The solution isn’t to stop measuring data center efficiency. It’s to measure device sustainability with the same rigor. Specifically, standards bodies (particularly ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 39 WG4: Holistic Sustainability Metrics) should extend frameworks to include device life-cycle tracking, software efficiency metrics, and hardware reuse standards.

To track device life cycles, we need standardized reporting of device embodied carbon, broken out separately by device. One aggregate number in an “everything else” category is insufficient. We need specific device categories with manufacturing emissions and replacement cycles visible.

To include software efficiency, I advocate developing a PUE-equivalent for software, such as energy per transaction, per API call, or per user session. This needs to be a reportable metric under sustainability frameworks so companies can demonstrate software optimization gains.

To encourage hardware reuse, we need to systematize reuse metrics across the full IT stack—servers and devices. This includes tracking repair rates, developing large-scale refurbishment programs, and tracking component reuse with the same detail currently applied to data center hardware.

To put it all together, we need a unified IT emission-tracking dashboard. CSRD reporting should show device embodied carbon alongside data center operational emissions, making the full IT sustainability picture visible at a glance.

These aren’t radical changes—they’re extensions of measurement principles already proven in the data center context. The first step is acknowledging what we’re not measuring. The second is building the frameworks to measure it. And the third is demanding that companies report the complete picture—data centers and devices, servers and smartphones, infrastructure and software.

Because you can’t fix what you can’t see. And right now, we’re not seeing 70 percent of the problem.

As the Trump administration doubles down on its energy and AI dominance agenda, U.S. energy companies have found themselves navigating tricky communication strategies. Touting the clean, carbon-free nature of renewable energy no longer carries the clout it did under the Biden administration, and policy has shifted against certain forms of renewables. At the same time, energy companies are being called upon to meet rising power demands of data-center developers, many of which are prioritizing carbon-free options.

This has forced energy companies to shift the way they communicate: They must garner political favor while also positioning themselves as an answer to the coming onslaught of electricity demand.

The wind and solar industries are focusing on electricity affordability and the fact that wind farms and photovoltaics are the cheapest and fastest way to add new energy generation. Battery storage developers are aligning themselves with Trump’s domestic manufacturing push, scaling up efforts to shift supply chains to the United States as they battle uncertainty over tariffs.

Nuclear power companies are touting their ability to go small and modular—theoretically a faster way to get reactors running. Next-generation geothermal developers are staying the course but playing up the industry’s crossovers with oil and gas. Hydrogen, too, is being highlighted as similar to fossil fuels. And the offshore wind industry is mostly preoccupied with using the courts to fight the Trump administration’s repeated attempts to ban development.

It’s not that the renewable technologies themselves have changed, says Samuel Furfari, former European Commission senior energy official and current energy geopolitics professor at ESCP Business School in London. “Mr. Trump has made a communication revolution, not an energy revolution,” he says about the state of the industry in the United States and abroad.

Trump Declares His Energy Darlings

Trump’s affinity for fossil fuels and his disdain for certain renewables, such as wind, have constructed a new federal hierarchy of energy sources. On day one of his second term as U.S. president, Trump issued an executive order listing which energy resources his country should promote. The list mentions fossil fuels, geothermal, and nuclear but excludes solar, wind, and hydrogen.

Then, in July, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act slashed renewable energy incentives for wind and solar while extending the tax credits for geothermal through 2033. On 1 December, Trump’s Department of Energy renamed the National Renewable Energy Laboratory to the National Laboratory of the Rockies—a moniker to demote renewables and reflect the lab’s “expanding mission” under Trump. And in an eleventh-hour move, the Department of the Interior at the end of 2025 halted all offshore wind projects under construction, citing national security risks.

At first, the wind and solar industries attempted to fit into the Trump administration’s agenda by leaning into his energy dominance rhetoric, says clean energy consultant Lloyd Ritter in Washington D.C. But after the government gutted tax incentives for wind and solar, and concerns over high electricity bills became a top election issue, industry players prioritized messaging about affordability for consumers, Ritter says.

“Electricity costs are now a thing in politics, and I don’t think that’s going to change anytime soon,” Ritter says. The cost concerns stem from estimates that electricity use in the United States is projected to increase 32 percent by 2030, mostly from data centers, according to the latest forecast from Grid Strategies.

The solar and storage industries are welcoming these demand projections. That’s because solar is still the “fastest and cheapest form of electronics to get onto the grid,” says Raina Hornaday, cofounder of Austin, Texas–based Caprock Renewables, a solar and storage developer. In her view, meeting the load demands of data centers is going to take care of the political backlash that solar and storage have endured under the Trump administration.

Hornaday sees a particular opening for batteries. “The R&D for battery storage is really the winner across the board, and we don’t consider battery storage renewable. It can utilize renewable energy electrons, but it doesn’t have to,” she says. “It can be power from the grid.”

Sage Geosystems harvests heat from underground water reservoirs. The company has recently shifted from talking about geothermal energy as clean to its ability to get electricity to the grid faster to accommodate data-center growth. Sage Geosystems

Geothermal Inherits Fortuitous Position

The communications framing for next-generation geothermal power has shifted too, despite it being a political favorite. Companies in this sector say they are continuing to emphasize geothermal as a baseload power source—something that can crank out electricity 24/7, like fossil fuels can. But projected increases in power demand have shifted other elements of the conversation.

The leading communication strategies now are less about geothermal’s carbon-free benefits and more about getting energy to the grid faster to address data-center growth, says Cindy Taff, CEO of Houston-based startup Sage Geosystems. Geothermal companies are also talking about how their use of drilling technology, know-how, and other synergies borrowed from the oil and gas industries can fast-track development.

“When we first started Sage four and a half years ago, we were talking about it being clean and renewable, but if you think about it, there’s now a little bit more allergic connotation with clean and renewable,” says Taff, who spent more than 35 years in well construction and project management at Shell before founding Sage.

Lessening the use of climate-focused language is something “the whole industry” is doing, adds Geoffrey Garrison, vice president of operations at Quaise Energy, headquartered in Houston. “I think you have to be cognizant of who’s listening and who has got their hands on the lever.… You tailor your message,” he says.

Other Trump administration priorities, like moving industry and manufacturing back to U.S. soil, are top of mind for geothermal companies, says Sarah Jewett, senior vice president of strategy at Fervo Energy, also in Houston. “We are thinking a lot more about localization of [the] supply chain, in large part due to this administration’s focus,” Jewett says.

In its pitches to investors, Fervo Energy includes talking points about how geothermal energy drilling uses technology from the oil and gas industry. Fervo Energy

Overall, Fervo’s messaging has remained “pretty consistent” between U.S. presidential administrations, Jewett says. In its pitch to investors, Fervo includes talking points about how next-generation geothermal uses drilling technology from the oil and gas industry. But clean energy isn’t completely missing from Fervo’s communications. “Some sides of the aisle like parts of it, and other parts of the aisle like other parts of it,” Jewett says.

Like geothermal, nuclear power has enjoyed support from both political parties in the United States. It too is now focusing on touting its ability to meet rising electricity demand, albeit through the restarting of decommissioned reactors, the building of massive new plants, and experimentation with advanced solutions such as small modular reactors and microreactors.

Countries Adopt ‘Energy Addition’ Tack

It’s not just U.S. companies that are shifting the message. In November at ADIPEC, the world’s largest annual energy conference, held in Abu Dhabi, widely adopted buzzwords such as “energy transition”—a term referring to the shift away from fossil fuels—were being swapped with “energy addition.”

That’s not solely a result in shifting political tides. The surge in energy demand may indeed necessitate more of an addition, rather than a complete transition. It’s a reasonable shift, given the “hockey stick” demand increase the industry is facing, says Taff at Sage. “Energy transition was, in my opinion, when [demand] uptick was very steady. But now that you’ve got the hockey stick, the use of ‘addition’…is much more applicable,” she says.

Abroad, Trump’s impact reverberates, Furfari says. “We were shy to mention fossil fuel. Mr. Trump does not care, and says, ‘No, we need fossil fuel.’ This is changing the world.”

More than 97 percent of the new cars Norwegians registered in November 2025 were electric, almost reaching the country’s goal of 100 percent. As a result, the government has begun removing some of the many carrots it used to encourage its successful EV transition. Cecilie Knibe Kroglund, state secretary in the country’s Ministry of Transport, reveals some of the challenges that come with success.

Cecilie Knibe Kroglund

Cecilie Knibe Kroglund is the state secretary in Norway’s Ministry of Transport.

What were the important early steps to promote the EV switch?

Kroglund: Battery-electric vehicles have had exemptions from the 25 percent value-added tax and from the CO₂- and weight-based registration tax that apply to combustion-engine vehicles. We used other tax incentives to encourage building charging stations on highways and in rural areas. Cities had the opportunity to exempt zero-emissions cars from toll roads. EV drivers also got reduced ferry fares, free parking, and access to bus lanes in many cities. The technology for the vehicles wasn’t that good at the start of the incentives program, but we had the taxes and incentives to make traditional passenger cars more expensive.

What were the biggest barriers, and how did policymakers overcome them?

Kroglund: Early on the technology was challenging. In summertime it was easy to fuel the EV, but in wintertime it’s double the use of energy. But the technology has improved a lot in the last five years.

The Norwegian tax exemptions on EVs were introduced before EVs came to market and were decisive in offsetting the early disadvantages of EVs compared to conventional cars, especially regarding comfort, vehicle size, and range. The rapid expansion of charging infrastructure along major corridors has also been important to overcome range anxiety.

How have private companies responded to government incentives?

Kroglund: I’m personally surprised that it went so well. This was a long-term commitment from the government, and the market has responded to that. Many Norwegian companies use EVs. The market for charging infrastructure is considered commercially viable and no longer needs financial support. However, we don’t see commercial-vehicle adoption going as fast as passenger vehicles, and we had the same goal. So we will have to review the goals, and we’ll have to review the incentives.

What unexpected new problems is Norway’s success creating?

Kroglund: The success of the passenger-vehicle policies mean EVs are in competition with public transport in the larger cities. Driving an EV remains much cheaper than driving a conventional car even without tax exemptions, and overall car use continues to rise. National, regional, and local governments must find different tools to promote walking, bicycling, and public transport because each city and region is different.

How applicable are these lessons to poorer or less well-administered countries and why?

Kroglund: We are different as countries. The geographies are different, and some countries have even bigger cities than our national population. This is not a policy for L.A., but what we see in Norway is that incentives work. However, tax incentives are only applicable in systems where effective taxation is established, which may not be the case in poorer countries. Other benefits, such as lower local emissions, only apply in places with lots of traffic.

The Norwegian experience shows that the economic incentives work, but it also shows that EVs work even in a country with cold weather.

This article appears in the February 2026 print issue as “Cecilie Knibe Kroglund.”

In 2018, Justin Kropp was working on a transmission circuit in Southern California when disaster struck. Grid operators had earlier shut down the 115-kilovolt circuit, but six high-voltage lines that shared the corridor were still operating, and some of their power snuck onto the deenergized wires he was working on. That rogue current shot to the ground through Kropp’s body and his elevated work platform, killing the 32-year-old father of two.

“It went in both of his hands and came out his stomach, where he was leaning against the platform rail,” says Justin’s father, Barry Kropp, who is himself a retired line worker. “Justin got hung up on the wire. When they finally got him on the ground, it was too late.”

Budapest-based Electrostatics makes conductive suits that protect line workers from unexpected current. Electrostatics

Justin’s accident was caused by induction: a hazard that occurs when an electric or magnetic field causes current to flow through equipment whose intended power supply has been cut off. Safety practices seek to prevent such induction shocks by grounding all conductive objects in a work zone, giving electricity alternative paths. But accidents happen. In Justin’s case, his platform unexpectedly swung into the line before it could be grounded.

Conductive Suits Protect Line Workers

Adding a layer of defense against induction injuries is the motivation behind Budapest-based Electrostatics’ specialized conductive jumpsuits, which are designed to protect against burns, cardiac fibrillation, and other ills. “If my boy had been wearing one, I know he’d be alive today,” says the elder Kropp, who purchased a line-worker safety training business after Justin’s death. The Mesa, Ariz.–based company, Electrical Safety Consulting International (ESCI), now distributes those suits.

Conductive socks that are connected to the trousers complete the protective suit. BME HVL

Eduardo Ramirez Bettoni, one of the developers of the suits, dug into induction risk after a series of major accidents in the United States in 2017 and 2018, including Justin Kropp’s. At the time, he was principal engineer for transmission and substation standards at Minneapolis-based Xcel Energy. In talking to Xcel line workers and fellow safety engineers, he sensed that the accident cluster might be the tip of an iceberg. And when he and two industry colleagues scoured data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, they found 81 induction accidents between 1985 and 2021 and 60 deaths, which they documented in a 2022 report.

“Unfortunately, it is really common. I would say there are hundreds of induction contacts every year in the United States alone,” says Ramirez Bettoni, who is now technical director of R&D for the Houston-based power-distribution equipment firm Powell Industries. He bets that such “contacts”—exposures to dangerous levels of induction—are increasing as grid operators boost grid capacity by squeezing additional circuits into transmission corridors.

Electrostatics’ suits are an enhancement of the standard protective gear that line workers wear when their tasks involve working close to or even touching energized live lines, or “bare-hands” work. Both are interwoven with conductive materials such as stainless steel threads, which form a Faraday cage that shields the wearer against the lines’ electric fields. But the standard suits have limited capacity to shunt current because usually they don’t need to. Like a bird on a wire, bare-hands workers are electrically floating, rather than grounded, so current largely bypasses them via the line itself.

Induction Safety Suit Design

Backed by a US $250,000 investment from Xcel in 2019, Electrostatics adapted its standard suits by adding low-resistance conductive straps that pass current around a worker’s body. “When I’m touching a conductor with one hand and the other hand is grounded, the current will flow through the straps to get out,” says Bálint Németh, Electrostatics’ CEO and director of the High Voltage Laboratory at Budapest University of Technology and Economics.

A strapping system links all the elements of the suit—the jacket, trousers, gloves, and socks—and guides current through a controlled path outside the body. BME HVL

The company began selling the suits in 2023, and they have since been adopted by over a dozen transmission operators in the United States and Europe, as well as other countries including Canada, Indonesia, and Turkey. They cost about $5,200 in the United States.

Electrostatics’ suits had to meet a crucial design threshold: keeping body exposure below the 6-milliampere “let-go” threshold, beyond which electrocuted workers become unable to remove themselves from a circuit. “If you lose control of your muscles, you’re going to hold onto the conductor until you pass out or possibly die,” says Ramirez Bettoni.

The gear, which includes the suit, gloves, and socks, protects against 100 amperes for 10 seconds and 50 A for 30 seconds. It also has insulation to protect against heat created by high current and flame retardants to protect against electric arcs.

Kropp, Németh, and Ramirez Bettoni are hoping that developing industry standards for induction safety gear, including ones published in October, will broaden their use. Meanwhile, the recently enacted Justin Kropp Safety Act in California, for which the elder Kropp lobbied, mandates automated defibrillators at power-line work sites.

This article was updated on 14 January 2026.

This article appears in the March 2026 print issue as “The Anti-Induction Suit.”

On a blustery November day, a Cessna turboprop flew over Pennsylvania at 5,000 meters, in crosswinds of up to 70 knots—nearly as fast as the little plane was flying. But the bumpy conditions didn’t thwart its mission: to wirelessly beam power down to receivers on the ground as it flew by.

The test flight marked the first time power has been beamed from a moving aircraft. It was conducted by the Ashburn, Va.-based startup Overview Energy, which emerged from stealth mode in December by announcing the feat.

But the greater purpose of the flight was to demonstrate the feasibility of a much grander ambition: to beam power from space to Earth. Overview plans to launch satellites into geosynchronous orbit (GEO) to collect unfiltered solar energy where the sun never sets and then beam this abundance back to humanity. The solar energy would be transferred as near-infrared waves and received by existing solar panels on the ground.

The far-flung strategy, known as space-based solar power, has become the subject of both daydreaming and serious research over the past decade. Caltech’s Space Solar Power Project launched a demonstration mission in 2023 that transferred power in space using microwaves. And terrestrial power beaming is coming along too. The U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) in July 2025 set a new record for wirelessly transmitting power: 800 watts over 8.6 kilometers for 30 seconds using a laser beam.

But until November, no one had actively beamed power from a moving platform to a ground receiver.

Wireless Power Beaming Goes Airborne

Overview’s test transferred only a sprinkling of power, but it did it with the same components and techniques that the company plans to send to space. “Not only is it the first optical power beaming from a moving platform at any substantial range or power,” says Overview CEO Marc Berte, “but also it’s the first time anyone’s really done a power beaming thing where it’s all of the functional pieces all working together. It’s the same methodology and function that we will take to space and scale up in the long term.”

The approach was compelling enough that power-beaming expert Paul Jaffe left his job as a program manager at DARPA to join the company as head of systems engineering. Prior to DARPA, Jaffe spent three decades with the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory.

“This actually sounds like it could work.” –Paul Jaffe

It was hearing Berte explain Overview’s plan at a conference that helped to convince Jaffe to take a chance on the startup. “This actually sounds like it could work,” Jaffe remembers thinking at the time. “It really seems like it gets around a lot of the showstoppers for a lot of the other concepts. I remember coming home and telling my wife that I almost felt like the problem had been solved. So I thought: Should [I] do something which is almost unheard of—to leave in the middle of being a DARPA program manager—to try to do something else?”

For Jaffe, the most compelling reason was in Overview’s solution for space-based solar’s power-density problem. A beam with low power density is safer because it’s not blasting too much concentrated energy onto a single spot on the Earth’s surface, but it’s less efficient for the task of delivering usable solar energy. A higher-density beam does the job better, but then the researchers must engineer some way to maintain safety.

Startup Overview Energy demonstrates how space-based solar power could be beamed to Earth from satellites. Overview Energy

Space-Based Solar Power Makes Waves

Many researchers have settled on microwaves as their beam of choice for wireless power. But, in addition to the safety concerns about shooting such intense waves at the Earth, Jaffe says there’s another problem: Microwaves are part of what he calls the “beachfront property” of the electromagnetic spectrum—a range from 2 to 20 gigahertz that is set aside for many other applications, such as 5G cellular networks.

“The fact is,” Jaffe says, “if you somehow magically had a fully operational solar power satellite that used microwave power transmission in orbit today—and a multi-kilometer-scale microwave power satellite receiver on the ground magically in place today—you could not turn it on because the spectrum is not allocated to do this kind of transmission.”

Instead, Overview plans to use less-dense, wide-field infrared waves. Existing utility-scale solar farms would be able to receive the beamed energy just like they receive the sun’s energy during daylight hours. So “your receivers are already built,” Berte says. The next major step is a prototype demonstrator for low Earth orbit, after which he hopes to have GEO satellites beaming megawatts of power by 2030 and gigawatts by later that decade.

Plenty of doubts about the feasibility of space-based power abound. It is an exotic technology with much left to prove, including the ability to survive orbital debris and the exorbitant cost of launching the power stations. (Overview’s satellite will be built on Earth in a folded configuration, and it will unfold after it’s brought to orbit, according to the company.)

“Getting down the cost per unit mass for launch is a big deal,” Jaffe says. “Then, it just becomes a question of increasing the specific power. A lot of the technologies we’re working on at Overview are squarely focused on that.”

This article appears in the March 2026 print issue as “Airplane Beams Power to Ground Receiver During Flight.”

Ask the average driver what they want from a car, and it isn’t 0-to-60-mile-per-hour times or Nürburgring lap records. It’s something quiet, comfortable, reliable, and inexpensive to run. On all those fronts, the electric vehicle (EV) already offers a better experience than a gasoline car. EVs are more responsive, easier to maintain, and aligned with everyone’s idea of a sustainable future. After all, no one pictures a futuristic city cloaked in exhaust fumes.

Yet mass adoption isn’t driven by enthusiasts—it’s driven by the everyday buyer. And for that buyer, EVs remain too costly. Global EV sales passed roughly 20 percent of new cars in 2024, according to the International Energy Agency, but the inflection point for true mass adoption still lies ahead. Some major Western automakers are signaling caution: GM, for example, paused production of the Cadillac Lyriq and Vistiq in December and will run only a single shift at its Spring Hill, Tenn., plant through early 2026—an acknowledgment of softer near-term U.S. demand and rising costs. Meanwhile, global BEV growth is being pulled forward by China. If demand worldwide is rising while Western manufacturers slow production, the industry may be entering a major shake-out. Automakers cannot sustain a multiyear cost disadvantage against Chinese competitors, and only a handful that close that gap will emerge as long-term winners. And closing it ultimately comes down to building far cheaper batteries. To reach true mass-market penetration, EVs must match internal-combustion cars on both range and affordability—roughly 400 miles for US $20,000 to $25,000. That’s a tall order, because batteries make up about 40 percent of an EV’s cost, and the cells themselves dominate that figure. BloombergNEF’s most recent battery-price survey found that cell manufacturing is now the single biggest determinant of whether a vehicle can be profitably priced for the mass market.

Where the cost lies

About 70 percent of an EV battery cell’s cost comes from materials—the cathodes and anode active materials, separators, and current collectors—and 30 percent from manufacturing, according to data from Thunder Said Energy, an Austin, Texas–based consultancy focused on energy technologies. Progress on both fronts is vital. Chemistries such as lithium-iron-phosphate (LFP) and nickel-manganese-cobalt (NMC) are steadily improving in cost and performance, and researchers are exploring cheaper current-collector materials and boosting energy density with low-cost silicon-doped anodes. But even as materials evolve, the way we build cells has changed remarkably little.

Today’s “wet-coating” process still resembles how it was done decades ago: active powders mixed with toxic solvents, spread as slurries onto metal foil, and dried in industrial ovens the length of a football field. A 50-gigawatt-hour cell factory—enough for about a million EVs per year—can require 50 megawatts of continuous power just for those ovens, according to a 2022 study in the Journal of Power Sources. That’s equivalent to the electricity demand of roughly 40,000 homes, the U.S. Energy Information Administration notes. The environmental and capital costs are enormous.

Rethinking the factory floor

That’s why the industry’s attention is turning toward dry electrode manufacturing. In principle, eliminating solvents from electrode coating could cut both energy use and cost, while shrinking factory footprints. But getting dry coating to work at scale has proven extremely difficult. Without liquids, it’s hard to mix and spread the fine powders evenly, maintain strong adhesion, and avoid damaging the materials through heat and friction.

At Anaphite, my company (which is located in Bristol, England), we’ve spent nearly five years developing an alternative we call our Dry Coating Precursor (DCP) technology. We start with low-toxicity solvents to disperse materials uniformly, then remove the solvent mechanically before dry coating. The resulting film-forming powder behaves almost like kinetic sand: granular when loose, cohesive under pressure. During manufacturing, it transforms into a smooth, flexible electrode layer that bonds tightly to its current collector.

The payoff is dramatic—an 85 percent reduction in coating-process energy use, up to 40 percent lower cell-production cost, and a 15 percent smaller factory footprint, all without compromising yield or performance. These savings compound rapidly: Percentage points shaved from cell cost can determine whether a vehicle remains niche or achieves true mass-market pricing.

A member of Anaphite’s Cells and Electrodes team prepares battery cells whose electrodes are made with the company’s proprietary Dry Coating Precursor for testing.Anaphite

Parallel paths toward the same goal

Anaphite is not alone in this pursuit. On a recent episode of the Volts podcast, Karl Littau, CTO of San Jose, Calif.–based Sakuù, described his company’s solvent-free “laser-printing” method, which he likens to “frosting a cake—without the mess.” Instead of wet slurries and ovens, Sakuù’s Kavian platform fuses dry powders directly onto foil with heat and pressure. Their approach can print electrodes of nearly any chemistry—LFP, NMC, or even formulations yet to be invented—by simply swapping material cartridges. In pilot programs, Sakuù reports that its process cuts carbon-dioxide emissions by about 55 percent, shrinks factory size by 60 percent, and slashes utility costs by more than half.

Other Players in the Dry-Electrode Race

AM Batteries—AM, headquartered in Billerica, Mass., uses a powder-to-electrode roll-to-roll process that sprays dry active materials directly onto foil. Unlike Anaphite’s pre-treated film-forming powder, AMB skips liquids entirely, bonding particles with a small amount of binder and pressure. It targets continuous high-throughput manufacturing rather than Sakuù’s modular printers. The company is developing pilot [AH6] lines with cell makers in North America and Asia.

LiCAP Technologies—The Sacramento, Calif.–based company’s Activated Dry Electrode process forms electrode sheets under heat and pressure. LiCAP has commissioned a 300-MWh dry-coating line in California and is partnering with European equipment suppliers to scale up.

The machines themselves are modular and compact—“They could go in a garage,” Littau says—allowing manufacturers to scale production by adding units rather than constructing vast, energy-hungry facilities. While Anaphite and Sakuù take different engineering routes, the destination is the same: a low-cost, low-energy, high-throughput future for battery manufacturing.

Why It Matters

Dry coating unlocks other advantages as well. It enables thicker electrodes, which reduce the proportion of inactive materials and increase both gravimetric and volumetric energy density. The result: batteries that offer higher range per kilogram and per cubic centimeter. Combine that with EVs’ inherent benefits—quietness, smoothness, and low operating costs—and the case for electrification becomes irresistible.

Whether through DCP, Kavion, or the next breakthrough waiting in a lab somewhere, the dry-coating revolution promises to make clean mobility truly mainstream—bringing forward the day when buying an EV isn’t just the cleaner choice; it’s the obvious one.

If a data center is moving in next door, you probably live in the United States. More than half of all upcoming global data centers—as indicated by land purchased for data centers not yet announced, those under construction, and those whose plans are public—will be developed in the United States.

And these figures are likely underselling the near-term data-center dominance of the United States. Power usage varies widely among data centers, depending on land availability and whether the facility will provide xhttps://spectrum.ieee.org/data-center-liquid-cooling or mixed-use services, says Tom Wilson, who studies energy systems at the Electric Power Research Institute. Because of these factors, “data centers in the U.S. are much larger on average than data centers in other countries,” he says.

Wilson adds that the dataset you see here—which comes from the analysis firm Data Center Map—may undercount new Chinese data centers because they are often not announced publicly. Chinese data-center plans are “just not in the repository of information used to collect data on other parts of the world,” he says. If information about China were up-to-date, he would still expect to see “the U.S. ahead, China somewhat behind, and then the rest of the world trailing.”

One thing that worries Wilson is whether the U.S. power grid can meet the rising energy demands of these data centers. “We’ve had flat demand for basically two decades, and now we want to grow. It’s a big system to grow,” he notes.

He thinks the best solution is asking data centers to be more flexible in their power use, maybe by scheduling complex computation for off-peak times or maintaining on-site batteries, removing part of the burden from the power grid. Whether such measures will be enough to keep up with demand remains an open question.

Every September as we plan our January tech forecast issue, IEEE Spectrum’s editors survey their beats and seek out promising projects that could solve seemingly intractable problems or transform entire industries.

Often these projects fly under the radar of the popular technology press, which these days seems more interested in the personalities driving Big Tech companies than in the technology itself. We go our own way here, getting out into the field to bring you news of the hidden gems that genuinely—as the IEEE motto goes—advance technology for the benefit of humanity.

A look back at the last 20 years of January issues reveals that while we’ve certainly covered our share of huge tech projects, like the James Webb Space Telescope, many of the stories touch on subjects most people would have otherwise missed.

Last January, Senior Associate Editor Emily Waltz reported on startups that are piloting ocean-based carbon capture. This issue, she’s back with another CO₂-centric story, this time focused on grid-scale storage, which is poised to blow up—literally. Waltz traveled to Sardinia to check out Milan-based Energy Dome’s “bubble battery,” which can store up to 200 megawatt-hours by compressing and decompressing pure carbon dioxide inside an inflatable dome.

This kind of modular, easy-to-deploy energy storage could be especially useful for AI data centers, says Senior Editor Samuel K. Moore, who curated this issue and wrote about gravity energy storage back in January 2021.

Big bubbles could help with grid-scale storage; tiny bubbles can liquefy cancer tumors.

“When we think about energy storage, our minds usually go to grid-scale batteries,” Moore says. “Yet these bubbles, which are in many ways more capable than batteries, will be sprouting up all over the place, often in association with computing infrastructure.”

For his story in this issue, Moore dove into the competition between two startups that are developing radio-based cables to replace conventional copper cables and fiber optics in data centers. These radio systems can connect processors 10 to 20 meters apart using a third of the power of optical-fiber cables and at a third of the cost. The next step is to integrate the radio connections directly with GPUs, to ease cooling burdens and help data centers and the AI models running on them continue to scale up.

Big bubbles could help with grid-scale storage; tiny bubbles can liquify cancer tumors, as Greg Uyeno found when reporting on HistoSonics’ ultrasound treatment. Feared for its aggressive nature and extremely low survival rate, pancreatic cancer kills almost half a million people per year worldwide. HistoSonics uses noninvasive, focused ultrasound to create cavitation bubbles that destroy tumors without dangerously heating surrounding tissue. This year, the company is concluding kidney trials as well as launching pancreatic cancer trials.

Over the last two decades, Spectrum has regularly covered the rise of drones. In 2018, for instance, we reported that the startup Zipline would deploy autonomous drones to deliver blood and medical supplies in rural Rwanda. Today, Zipline has a market cap of about US $4 billion and operates in several African countries, Japan, and the United States, having completed almost 2 million drone deliveries. In this issue, journalist Robb Mandelbaum takes us inside the Wildfire XPrize competition, aimed at providing another life-saving service: dousing wildfires before they grow out of control. Zipline succeeded because it could make deliveries to remote locations much faster than land vehicles. This year’s XPrize teams plan to detect and suppress fires faster than conventional firefighting methods.

In addition to these emerging technologies, we’ve packed this issue with a dozen others, including Porsche’s wireless home charger for EVs, the world’s first electric air taxi service, neutral-atom quantum computers, interoperable mesh networks, and robotic baseball umpires. Let’s see which of this year’s picks make it to the big leagues.

Charging an EV at home doesn’t seem like an inconvenience—until you find yourself dragging a cord around a garage or down a rainy driveway, then unplugging and coiling it back up every time you drive the kids to school or run an errand. For elderly or disabled drivers, those bulky cords can be a physical challenge.

As it was for smartphones years ago, wireless EV charging has been the dream. But there’s a difference of nearly four orders of magnitude between the roughly 14 watt-hours of a typical smartphone battery and that of a large EV. That’s what makes the wireless charging on the 108-kilowatt-hour pack in the forthcoming Porsche Cayenne Electric so notable.

To offer the first inductive charger on a production car, Porsche had to overcome both technical and practical challenges—such as how to protect a beloved housecat prowling below your car. The German automaker demonstrated the system at September’s IAA Mobility show in Munich.

With its 800-volt architecture, the Cayenne Electric can charge at up to 400 kW at a public DC station, enough to fill its pack from 10 to 80 percent in about 16 minutes. The wireless system delivers about 11 kW for Level 2 charging at home, where Porsche says three out of four of its customers do nearly all their fill-ups. Pull the Cayenne into a garage and align it over a floor-mounted plate, and the SUV will charge from 10 to 80 percent in about 7.5 hours. No plugs, tangled cords, or dirty hands. Porsche will offer a single-phase, 48-ampere version for the United States after buyers see their first Cayennes in mid-2026, and a three-phase, 16-A system in Europe.

Porsche’s Wireless Charging is Based on an Old Concept

The concept of inductive charging has been around for more than a century. Two coils of copper wire are positioned near one another. A current flowing through one coil creates a magnetic field, which induces voltage in the second coil.

In the Porsche system, the floor-mounted pad, 78 centimeters wide, plugs into the home’s electrical panel. Inside the pad, which weighs 50 kilograms, grid electricity (at 60 hertz in the United States, 50 Hz in most of the rest of the world) is converted to DC and then to high-frequency AC at 2,000 V.The resulting 85-kilohertz magnetic field extends from the pad to the Cayenne, where it is converted again to DC voltage.

The waterproof pad can also be placed outdoors, and the company says it’s unaffected by leaves, snow, and the like. In fact, the air-cooled pad can get warm enough to melt any snow, reaching temperatures as high as 50 °C.

The Cayenne’s onboard charging hardware mounts between its front electric motor and battery. The 15-kg induction unit wires directly into the battery.

In most EVs, plug-in (conductive) AC charging tops out at around 95 percent efficiency. Porsche says its wireless system delivers 90 percent efficiency, despite an air gap of roughly 12 to 18 cm between the pad and vehicle.

Last year, Oak Ridge National Laboratory transferred an impressive 270 kilowatts to a Porsche Taycan with 95 percent efficiency.

“We’re super proud that we’re just below conductive AC in charging efficiency,” says Simon Schulze, Porsche’s product manager for charging hardware. Porsche also beats inductive phone chargers, which typically max out at about 70 percent efficiency, Schulze says.

When the car gets within 7.5 meters of the charging pad, the Cayenne’s screen-based parking-assist system turns on automatically. Then comes a kind of video game that requires the driver to align a pair of green circles on-screen, one representing the car, the other the pad. It’s like a digital version of the tennis ball some people hang in their garage to gauge parking distance. There’s ample wiggle room, with tolerances of 20 cm left to right, and 15 cm fore and aft. “You can’t miss it,” according to Schulze.

Induction loops detect any objects between the charging plate and the vehicle; such objects, if they’re metal, could heat up dangerously. Radar sensors detect any living things near the pad, and will halt the charging if necessary. People can walk near the car or hop aboard without affecting a charging session.

Christian Holler, Porsche’s head of charging systems, says the system conforms to International Commission on Non-Ionizing Radiation Protection standards for electromagnetic radiation. The field remains below 15 microteslas, so it’s safe for people with pacemakers, Porsche insists. And the aforementioned cat wouldn’t be harmed even if it strayed into the magnetic field, though “its metal collar might get warm,” Schulze says.

The Porsche system’s 90 percent efficiency is impressive but not record-setting. Last year, Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) transferred 270 kW to a Porsche Taycan with 95 percent efficiency, boosting its state of charge by 50 percent in 10 minutes. That world-record wireless rate relied on polyphase windings for coils, part of a U.S. Department of Energy project that was backed by Volkswagen, Porsche’s parent company.

That effort, Holler says, spawned a Ph.D. paper from VW engineer Andrew Foote. Yet the project had different goals from the one that led to the Cayenne charging system. ORNL was focused on maximum power transfer, regardless of cost, production feasibility, or reliability, he says.

By contrast, designing a system for showroom cars “requires a completely different level of quality and processes,” Holler says.

High Cost Could Limit Adoption

Cayenne buyers in Europe will pay around €7,000 (roughly US $8,100) for the optional charger. Porsche has yet to price it for the United States.

Loren McDonald, chief executive of Chargeonomics, an EV-charging analysis firm, said wireless charging “is clearly the future,” with use cases such as driverless robotaxis, curbside charging, or at any site “where charging cables might be an annoyance or even a safety issue.”

But for now, inductive charging’s costly, low-volume status will limit it to niche models and high-income adopters, McDonald says. Public adoption will be critical “so that drivers can convenience-charge throughout their driving day—which then increases the benefits of spending more money on the system.”

Porsche acknowledges that issue; the system conforms to wireless standards set by the Society of Automotive Engineers so that other automakers might help popularize the technology.

“We didn’t want this to be proprietary, a Porsche-only solution,” Schulze says. “We only benefit if other brands use it.”

Powering the AI data center boom dominated the conversation in the global energy sector in 2025. Governments are racing to develop the most advanced AI models, and data center developers are building as fast as they can. But no one is going to get very far without finding ways to generate and move more electricity to these power guzzlers.

Spectrum’s most popular energy stories in 2025 centered around that theme. Readers were particularly interested in stories about next-generation nuclear power, such as small modular reactors and salt-cooled reactors, and how those technologies might support data centers. Readers also turned to Spectrum to learn about the strain all of this is putting on electricity grids, and new technologies to solve those problems.

Despite the weightiness of the energy sector’s challenges, we found some fun, off-beat stories to tell too. One American company is building the world’s largest airplane—it’s bigger than a football field—and it will have one job: to transport wind turbine blades.

I don’t know what 2026 will bring, but as Spectrum’s energy editor, I’ll do my best to provide you stories that are true, useful, and engaging. Cheers to a new year in energy!

1. U.S. Pushes for Small Modular Reactors

GE Vernova

The world suddenly needs more power, but one solution being tested is to downsize energy generation and distribute it more widely. One example of that is small modular reactors (SMRs). These nuclear fission reactors are less than a third of the size and power output of conventional reactors. And as the April deadline approached for applying for the US $900 million the United States was offering for SMR development, readers came to Spectrum in droves to learn about the program in a news article authored by contributor Shannon Cuthrell.

But the SMR money paled in comparison to the $80 billion that the United States is spending on a fleet of large-scale nuclear reactors designed by Westinghouse. Will this next group of reactors suffer from the same delays and cost overruns as the ones that put Westinghouse into bankruptcy just a few years ago? Spectrum brought readers an expert analysis on the subject by Wood MacKenzie’s Ed Crooks.

2. Why China Is Building a Thorium Molten-Salt Reactor

Edmon de Haro

The United States may have the most SMRs in development, but China has the one that’s furthest along. The Linglong One, on the island of Hainan, is expected to begin operations in the first half of 2026. And that’s just one component in a smorgasbord of nuclear reactor experimentation in China. One of the country’s most interesting projects is a thorium-powered, molten-salt reactor, which it began building in 2025 in the Gobi desert. Prior to this project, the last operating molten-salt reactor was at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, which shut down in 1969.

The attraction of thorium as a fuel is that it reduces dependence on uranium. Very little information is available on the progress of China’s thorium reactor, but with help from our Taiwan-based freelancer Yu-Tzu Chiu, we know it’s small—only 10 megawatts—and is scheduled to be operational by 2030. Check back with Spectrum for updates on this reactor and the Linglong One.

3. If We Want Bigger Wind Turbines, We’re Gonna Need Bigger Airplanes

Radia

While nuclear reactors need to get smaller, wind turbines need to get bigger, say some renewable-energy advocates. And the biggest obstacle to bigger wind—besides the present political backlash—is transportation. Roads, bridges, and train tracks dictate the size of onshore wind turbine blades, and usually can’t accommodate anything over 70 meters long. That’s why Radia, an aviation startup in Boulder, Colo., is building the world’s largest airplane. It will stretch 108 meters in length, be shaped to hold a 105-meter blade, and can land on a makeshift dirt runway. Spectrum contributor Andrew Moseman traveled to Radia’s headquarters to check out the aircraft’s design and fly the behemoth on the company’s simulator. (Spoiler: He landed it.)

4. This Low-Cost Stopgap Tech Can Fix the Grid

National Grid Electricity Transmission/Smart Wires

None of this new energy generation will matter if we can’t move it across the grid to customers who need it. But many key transmission corridors are maxed. Blackouts are growing longer and more common. Building new transmission lines takes years and often gets thwarted by NIMBY pushback. Queues for connecting to the grid, whether you’re providing power or requesting it, can be comically long.

To bridge the gap, grid operators globally are turning to innovative grid tech. Collectively called grid-enhancing technologies (GETs), some of the boldest examples can be found in the United Kingdom. For example, the U.K.’s National Grid has been implementing electronic power-flow controllers, called SmartValves, that shift electricity from jammed circuits to those with spare capacity.

The U.K. and other countries have also been reconductoring old lines and installing dynamic line rating, which calculates how much current high-voltage lines can safely carry based on real-time weather conditions. And Scotland has been beefing up its grid-scale battery stations with advanced converters. These leap into action within milliseconds to release the extra power needed when energy supply elsewhere on the grid falters. Spectrum contributor Peter Fairley, who authored several of these stories, traveled to the U.K. to investigate grid congestion woes and tech solutions.

5. Cuba’s Power Grid Nears Total Failure

Yamil Lage/AFP/Getty Images

At the opposite end of the spectrum, one of the world’s most neglected grids can be found in Cuba. There, decades of poor fuel and maintenance have left the country’s energy infrastructure in crisis. Lately, Cuba’s entire grid has been collapsing every couple of months. Blackouts are so common that citizens are cooking multiple meals at once and working by flashlight, says Ricardo Torres, a Cuban economist who explained the situation for Spectrum readers in this popular expert-authored guest post.

The nearby Caribbean island of Puerto Rico has also been enduring more frequent blackouts, leading some to speculate that the grid in this American territory may go the same way as Cuba’s. The turmoil has prompted widespread development of solar-plus-storage systems across the island that are privately financed, reports Spectrum contributor Julia Tilton.

6. The Unlikely Revival of Nuclear Batteries

Edmon de Haro

On the lighter side, we also explored the world of nuclear batteries. These devices store energy in the form of radioactive isotopes. They can last for decades, making them ideal for medical implants, remote infrastructure, robots, and sensors. But the allure of a small battery with a 50-year lifespan has given this sector several false starts. There was a stint in the 1970s where surgeons implanted nuclear-powered pacemakers in over 1,400 people only to lose track of them over time. Regulators balked when devices containing plutonium-238 started turning up in crematoriums and coffins.

Now the field is experiencing a resurgence in interest. Companies on multiple continents are claiming to be on the verge of commercialization of nuclear batteries. Whether they’ll find willing markets is unclear. In a feature for Spectrum, nuclear battery expert James Blanchard details the history of these devices and why there’s suddenly more activity in this field than he’s ever seen in his 40-year career.

7. Electric Vehicles Made These Engineers Expendable

Brittany Greeson

Sometimes a story is so good that we just have to publish it, even if we find it somewhere else. That was the case with a chapter from the book Inevitable: Inside the Messy, Unstoppable Transition to Electric Vehicles (Harvard Business Review Press, 2025). The chapter tells the tale of one power-train engineer at Ford whose internal-combustion-engine expertise slowly became expendable as car companies pivoted to EVs. With permission, we published an adapted version of the chapter, which is chock-full of excellent reporting from author Mike Colias, a veteran automotive reporter. Don’t miss it! (Spoiler: The engineer, Lem Yeung, who left Ford after 30 years, ended up returning to the company a few years later to help clean up the mess caused by the loss of old-school talent. We caught up with Yeung after his return in this Q&A.)

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This giant bubble on the island of Sardinia holds 2,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide. But the gas wasn’t captured from factory emissions, nor was it pulled from the air. It came from a gas supplier, and it lives permanently inside the dome’s system to serve an eco-friendly purpose: to store large amounts of excess renewable energy until it’s needed.

Developed by the Milan-based company Energy Dome, the bubble and its surrounding machinery demonstrate a first-of-its-kind “CO2 Battery,” as the company calls it. The facility compresses and expands CO₂ daily in its closed system, turning a turbine that generates 200 megawatt-hours of electricity, or 20 MW over 10 hours. And in 2026, replicas of this plant will start popping up across the globe.

We mean that literally. It takes just half a day to inflate the bubble. The rest of the facility takes less than two years to build and can be done just about anywhere there’s 5 hectares of flat land.

The first to build one outside of Sardinia will be one of India’s largest power companies, NTPC Limited. The company expects to complete its CO2 Battery sometime in 2026 at the Kudgi power plant in Karnataka, in India. In Wisconsin, meanwhile, the public utility Alliant Energy received the all clear from authorities to begin construction of one in 2026 to supply power to 18,000 homes.

And Google likes the concept so much that it plans to rapidly deploy the facilities in all of its key data-center locations in Europe, the United States, and the Asia-Pacific region. The idea is to provide electricity-guzzling data centers with round-the-clock clean energy, even when the sun isn’t shining or the wind isn’t blowing. The partnership with Energy Dome, announced in July, marked Google’s first investment in long-duration energy storage.

“We’ve been scanning the globe seeking different solutions,” says Ainhoa Anda, Google’s senior lead for energy strategy, in Paris. The challenge the tech giant has encountered is not only finding a long-duration storage option, but also one that works with the unique specs of every region. “So standardization is really important, and this is one of the aspects that we really like” about Energy Dome, she says. “They can really plug and play this.”

Google will prioritize placing the Energy Dome facilities where they’ll have the most impact on decarbonization and grid reliability, and where there’s a lot of renewable energy to store, Anda says. The facilities can be placed adjacent to Google’s data centers or elsewhere within the same grid. The companies did not disclose the terms of the deal.

Anda says Google expects to help the technology “reach a massive commercial stage.”

Getting creative with long-duration energy storage

All this excitement is based on Energy Dome’s one full-size, grid-connected plant in Ottana, Sardinia, which was completed in July. It was built to help solve one of the energy transition’s biggest challenges: the need for grid-scale storage that can provide power for more than 8 hours at a time. Called long-duration energy storage, or LDES in industry parlance, the concept is the key to maximizing the value of renewable energy.

When sun and wind are abundant, solar and wind farms tend to produce more electricity than a grid needs. So storing the excess for use when these resources are scarce just makes sense. LDES also makes the grid more reliable by providing backup and supplementary power.

The problem is that even the best new grid-scale storage systems on the market—mainly lithium-ion batteries—provide only about 4 to 8 hours of storage. That’s not long enough to power through a whole night, or multiple cloudy and windless days, or the hottest week of the year, when energy demand hits its peak.

After the CO2 leaves the dome, it is compressed, cooled, reduced to a liquid, and stored in pressure vessels. To release the energy, the process reverses: The liquid is evaporated, heated, expanded, and then fed through a turbine that generates electricity. Luigi Avantaggiato

Lithium-ion battery systems could be increased in size to store more and last longer, but systems of that size usually aren’t economically viable. Other grid-scale battery chemistries and approaches are in development, such as sodium-based, iron-air, and vanadium redox flow batteries. But the energy density, costs, degradation, and funding complications have challenged the developers of those alternatives.

Researchers have also experimented with storing energy by compressing air, heating up blocks or sand, using hydrogen or methanol, pressurizing water deep underground, and even dangling heavy objects in the air and dropping them. (The creativity devoted to LDES is impressive.) But geologic constraints, economic viability, efficiency, and scalability have hindered the commercialization of these strategies.

The tried-and-true grid-scale storage option—pumped hydro, in which water is pumped between reservoirs at different elevations—lasts for decades and can store thousands of megawatts for days. But these systems require specific topography, a lot of land, and can take up to a decade to build.

CO2 Batteries check a lot of boxes that other approaches don’t. They don’t need special topography like pumped-hydro reservoirs do. They don’t need critical minerals like electrochemical and other batteries do. They use components for which supply chains already exist. Their expected lifetime stretches nearly three times as long as lithium-ion batteries. And adding size and storage capacity to them significantly decreases cost per kilowatt-hour. Energy Dome expects its LDES solution to be 30 percent cheaper than lithium-ion.

China has taken note. China Huadian Corp. and Dongfang Electric Corp. are reportedly building a CO₂-based energy-storage facility in the Xinjiang region of northwest China. Media reports show renderings of domes but give widely varying storage capacities—including 100 MW and 1,000 MW. The Chinese companies did not respond to IEEE Spectrum’s requests for information.

“What I can say is that they are developing something very, very similar [to Energy Dome’s CO2 Battery] but quite large in scale,” says Claudio Spadacini, Energy Dome’s founder and CEO. The Chinese companies “are good, they are super fast, and they have a lot of money,” he says.

Why is Google investing in CO2 Batteries?

When I visited Energy Dome’s Sardinia facility in October, the CO₂ had just been pumped out of the dome, so I was able to peek inside. It was massive, monochromatic, and pretty much empty. The inner membrane, which had been holding the uncompressed CO₂, had collapsed across the entire floor. A few pockets of the gas remained, making the off-white sheet billow up in spots.

Meanwhile, the translucent outer dome allowed some daylight to pass through, creating a creamy glow that enveloped the vast space. With no structural framing, the only thing keeping the dome upright was the small difference in pressure between the inside and outside air.

“This is incredible,” I said to my guide, Mario Torchio, Energy Dome’s global marketing and communications director.

“It is. But it’s physics,” he said.

Outside the dome, a series of machines connected by undulating pipes moves the CO₂ out of the dome for compressing and condensing. First, a compressor pressurizes the gas from 1 bar (100,000 pascals) to about 55 bar (5,500,000 pa). Next, a thermal-energy-storage system cools the CO₂ to an ambient temperature. Then a condenser reduces it into a liquid that is stored in a few dozen pressure vessels, each about the size of a school bus. The whole process takes about 10 hours, and at the end of it, the battery is considered charged.

To discharge the battery, the process reverses. The liquid CO₂ is evaporated and heated. It then enters a gas-expander turbine, which is like a medium-pressure steam turbine. This drives a synchronous generator, which converts mechanical energy into electrical energy for the grid. After that, the gas is exhausted at ambient pressure back into the dome, filling it up to await the next charging phase.

Energy Dome engineers inspect the dryer system, which keeps the gaseous CO₂ in the dome at optimal dryness levels at all times.Luigi Avantaggiato

It’s not rocket science. Still, someone had to be the first to put it together and figure out how to do it cost-effectively, which Spadacini says his company has accomplished and patented. “How we seal the turbo machinery, how we store the heat in the thermal-energy storage, how we store the heat after condensing…can really cut costs and increase the efficiency,” he says.

The company uses pure, purpose-made CO₂ instead of sourcing it from emissions or the air, because those sources come with impurities and moisture that degrade the steel in the machinery.

What happens if the dome is punctured?

On the downside, Energy Dome’s facility takes up about twice as much land as a comparable capacity lithium-ion battery would. And the domes themselves, which are about the height of a sports stadium at their apex, and longer, might stand out on a landscape and draw some NIMBY pushback.

And what if a tornado comes? Spadacini says the dome can withstand wind up to 160 kilometers per hour. If Energy Dome can get half a day’s warning of severe weather, the company can just compress and store the CO₂ in the tanks and then deflate the outer dome, he says.

If the worst happens and the dome is punctured, 2,000 tonnes of CO₂ will enter the atmosphere. That’s equivalent to the emissions of about 15 round-trip flights between New York and London on a Boeing 777. “It’s negligible compared to the emissions of a coal plant,” Spadacini says. People will also need to stay back 70 meters or more until the air clears, he says.

Worth the risk? The companies lining up to build these systems seem to think so.

This article appears in the January 2026 print issue as “Grid-Scale CO₂ Batteries Will Take Off in 2026.”

Demand for electricity is up in the United States, and so is its price. One way to increase supply and lower costs is to build new power plants, but that can take years and cost a fortune. Talgat Kopzhanov is working on a faster, more affordable solution: the generator replacement interconnection process.

The technique links renewable energy sources to the grid connections of shuttered or underutilized power facilities and coal plants. The process uses the existing interconnection rights and infrastructure when generating electricity, eliminating the years-long approval process for constructing new U.S. power facilities.

Talgat Kopzhanov

Employer

Middle River Power, in Chicago

Job title

Asset manager

Member grade

Senior member

Alma maters

Purdue University in West Lafayette, Ind., and Indiana University in Bloomington

Kopzhanov, an IEEE senior member, is an asset manager for Middle River Power, based in Chicago. The private equity–sponsored investment and asset management organization specializes in U.S. power generation assets.

“Every power plant has its own interconnection rights,” he says, “but, amazingly, most are not fully utilizing them.” Interconnection rights give a new power source—such as solar energy—permission to connect to a high-voltage transmission system.

“We build the new renewable energy resources on top of them,” Kopzhanov says. “It’s like colocating a new power plant.”

He recently oversaw the installation of two generator-replacement interconnection projects, one for a solar system in Minnesota and the other for a battery storage facility in California.

A fast-track approach that cuts costs

Artificial intelligence data centers are driving up demand and raising electricity bills globally. Although tech companies and investors are willing to spend trillions of U.S. dollars constructing new power facilities, it can take up to seven years just to secure the grid interconnection rights needed to start building a plant, Kopzhanov says. The lengthy process involves system planning, permit requests, and regulatory approvals. Only about 5 percent of new projects are approved each year, he says, in part because of grid reliability issues.

The interconnection technique takes about half the time, he says, bringing cleaner energy online faster. By overcoming interconnection bottlenecks, such as major transmission upgrades that delay renewable projects, the process speeds up project timelines and lowers expenses.

Power Engineers Are In Short Supply

If you want to work in a secure, recession-proof industry, consider a career in power engineering, Kopzhanov says—especially in an unstable job market, when even Amazon, Microsoft, and other large companies are laying off thousands of engineers.

The power industry desperately needs engineers. The global power sector will require between 450,000 and 1.5 million more engineers by 2030 to build, implement, and operate energy infrastructure, according to an IEEE Spectrum article based on a study conducted this year of the power engineering workforce by the IEEE Power & Energy Society.

One of the reasons for the shortage, Kopzhanov says, is that the power sector doesn’t seem exciting to young engineers.

“It has not been popular because the technologies we’re implementing nowadays were invented quite a long time ago,” he says. “So there were not too many recent innovations.”

But with new technologies being introduced, such as the generator replacement interconnection process, now is a great time to get into the industry, he says.

“We are facing lots of different kinds of interesting and big challenges, and we definitely need power engineers who can solve them, such as the supply and demand situation facing us,” he says. “We need right-minded people who can deal with that.

“Until this point, the marvelous engineering systems that have been designed and built with close to 100-percent reliability are not going to be the case moving forward, so we have to come up with innovative approaches.”

Just because you have a power engineering degree, however, doesn’t mean you have to work as a power engineer, he says.

“Most students might assume they will have to dedicate themselves to only being a power engineer for the rest of their life—which is not the case,” he says. “You can be on the business side or be an asset manager like me.

“The power sector is an extremely dynamic and vast area. You’ll have many paths to pursue along your career journey.”

Kopzhanov explains the technique in an on-demand educational webinar, Unlocking Surplus Interconnection Service. Colocating Renewable and Thermal Power Plants, hosted by the IEEE Power & Energy Society. The webinar is available to the public for a fee.

Kopzhanov has been involved with several recent generator replacement interconnection installations. In May a large-scale solar project in Minnesota replaced a retiring coal plant with approximately 720 megawatts of solar-powered generators, making it the largest solar-generating facility in the region. The first 460 MW of capacity is expected to be operational soon.

Another new installation, developed with Middle River, is a portfolio of battery storage projects colocated with natural gas facilities in California. It used existing and incremental interconnection capacity to add the storage system. The surplus renewable energy from the batteries will be used during peak times to reduce the plant’s greenhouse gas emissions, according to a Silicon Valley Clean Energy article about the installation.

“These projects are uniquely positioned to be colocated with existing power plants,” Kopzhanov says. “But, at the same time, they are renewable and sustainable sources of power—which is also helping to decarbonize the environment and meet the emission-reduction goals of the state.”

Influenced by Kazakhstan’s power industry

Born and raised in Taraz, Kazakhstan, Kopzhanov was surrounded by relatives who worked in the power industry. It’s not surprising that he has pursued a career in the field.

Until 1991, when the country was still a Soviet republic, most Kazakhs were required to help build the country’s power and transmission systems, he says. His mother and father are chemical engineers, and his grandfather was involved in the power industry. They told him about how they designed the transformers and overhead power lines. From a young age, he knew he wanted to be an engineer too, he says.

Today the Central Asian country is a major producer of oil, gas, and coal.

Kopzhanov left Kazakhstan in 2008 to pursue a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering at Purdue University, in West Lafayette, Ind.

After graduating in 2012, he was hired as an electrical design engineer by Fluor Corp. in Farnborough, England. He oversaw the development of a master plan for a power project there. He also engineered and designed high-voltage switchgears, substations, and transformers.

“Every power plant has its own interconnection rights but, amazingly, most are not fully utilizing them.”

In 2015 he joined ExxonMobil in Houston, working as a project manager. During his six years there, he held managerial positions. Eventually, he was promoted to asset advisor and was responsible for evaluating the feasibility of investing in decarbonization and electrification projects by identifying their risks and opportunities.

He decided he wanted to learn more about the business aspects of running a company, so he left in 2021 to pursue an MBA at Indiana University’s Kelley School of Business, in Bloomington. During his MBA program, he briefly worked as a consultant for a lithium-ion manufacturing firm, offering advice on the viability of their proposed projects and investments.

“Engineers aren’t typically connected to the business world,” he says, “but having an understanding of what the needs are and tailoring your future goals toward that is extremely important. In my view, that’s how you’ll become a great technical expert. I definitely recommend that engineers have some kind of understanding of the business side.”

He joined Middle River shortly after graduating from Indiana with his MBA in 2023.

The power of membership

Kopzhanov was introduced to IEEE by a colleague at ExxonMobil after he asked the member about an IEEE plaque displayed on his desk. The coworker explained the activities he was involved in, as well as the process for joining. Kopzhanov became a member in 2019, left, and then rejoined in 2023.

“That was one of the best decisions I have made,” he says.

A member of the IEEE Power & Energy Society, he says its publications, webinars, conferences, and networking events keep him current on new developments.

“Being able to follow what’s happening in the industry, especially in the space where you’re working, is something that has benefited me a lot,” he says.

He has helped organize conferences and reviews research papers.

“It’s those little things that have a significant impact,” he says. “Volunteering is a key piece of belonging to IEEE.”

This article was updated on 13 January 2026.

Fast, direct-current charging can charge an EV’s battery from about 20 percent to 80 percent in 20 minutes. That’s not bad, but it’s still about six times as long as it takes to fill the tank of an ordinary petrol-powered vehicle.

One of the major bottlenecks to even faster charging is cooling, specifically uneven cooling inside big EV battery packs as the pack is charged. Hydrohertz, a British startup launched by former motorsport and power-electronics engineers, says it has a solution: fire liquid coolant exactly where it’s needed during charging. Its solution, announced in November, is a rotary coolant router that fires coolant exactly where temperatures spike, and within milliseconds—far faster than any single-loop system can react. In laboratory tests, this cooling tech allowed an EV battery to safely charge in less than half the time than was possible with conventional cooling architecture.

A Smarter Way to Move Coolant

Hydrohertz calls its solution Dectravalve. It looks like a simple manifold, but it contains two concentric cylinders and a stepper motor to direct coolant to as many as four zones within the battery pack. It’s installed in between the pack’s cold plates, which are designed to efficiently remove heat from the battery cells through physical contact, and the main coolant supply loop, replacing a tangle of valves, brackets, sensors, and hoses.

To keep costs low, Hydrohertz designed Dectravalve to be produced with off-the-shelf materials, and seals, as well as dimensional tolerances that can be met with the fabrication tools used by many major parts suppliers. Keeping things simple and comparatively cheap could improve Dectravalve’s chances of catching on with automakers and suppliers notorious for frugality. “Thermal management is trending toward simplicity and ultralow cost,” says Chao-Yang Wang, a mechanical and chemical engineering professor at Pennsylvania State University whose research areas include dealing with issues related to internal fluids in batteries and fuel cells. Automakers would prefer passive cooling, he notes—but not if it slows fast charging. So, at least for now, Intelligent control is essential.

“If Dectravalve works as advertised, I’d expect to see a roughly 20 percent improvement in battery longevity, which is a lot.”–Anna Stefanopoulou, University of Michigan

Hydrohertz built Dectravalve to work with ordinary water-glycol, otherwise known as antifreeze, keeping integration simple. Using generic antifreeze avoids a step in the validation process where a supplier or EV manufacturer would otherwise have to establish whether some special formulation is compatible with the rest of the cooling system and doesn’t cause unforeseen complications. And because one Dectravalve can replace the multiple valves and plumbing assemblies of a conventional cooling system, it lowers the parts count, reduces leak points, and cuts warranty risk, Hydrohertz founder and CTO Martyn Talbot claims. The tighter thermal control also lets automakers shrink oversize pumps, hoses, and heat exchangers, improving both cost and vehicle packaging.

The valve reads battery-pack temperatures several times per second and shifts coolant flow instantly. If a high-load event—like a fast charge—is coming, it prepositions itself so more coolant is apportioned to known hot spots before the temperature rises in them.

Multizone control can also speed warm-up to prevent the battery degradation that comes from charging at frigid temperatures. “You can send warming fluid to heat half the pack fast so it can safely start taking load,” says Anna Stefanopoulou, a professor of mechanical engineering at the University of Michigan who specializes in control systems, energy, and transportation technologies. That half can begin accepting load, while the system begins warming the rest of the pack more gradually, she explains. But Dectravalve’s main function remains cooling fast-heating troublesome cells so they don’t slow charging.

Quick response to temperature changes inside the battery doesn’t increase the cooling capacity, but it leverages existing hardware far more efficiently. “Control the coolant with more precision and you get more performance for free,” says Talbot.

Charge Times Can Be Cut By 60 Percent

In early 2025, the Dectravalve underwent bench testing conducted by the Warwick Manufacturing Group (WMG), a multidisciplinary research center at the University of Warwick, in Coventry, England, that works with transport companies to improve the manufacturability of battery systems and other technologies. WMG compared Dectravalve’s cooling performance with that of a conventional single-loop cooling system using the same 100-kilowatt-hour battery pack. During fast-charge trials from 10 percent to 80 percent, Dectravalve held peak cell temperature below 44.5 °C and kept cell-to-cell temperature variation to just below 3 °C without intervention from the battery management system. Similar thermal performance for the single-loop system was made possible only by dialing back the amount of power the battery would accept—the very tapering that keeps fast charging from being on par with gasoline fill-ups.

Keeping the cell temperatures below 50 °C was key, because above that temperature lithium plating begins. The battery suffers irreversible damage when lithium starts coating the surface of the anode—the part of the battery where electrical charge is stored during charging—instead of filling its internal network of pores the way water does when it’s absorbed by a sponge. Plating greatly diminishes the battery’s charge-storage capacity. Letting the battery get too hot can also cause the electrolyte to break down. The result is inhibited flow of ions between the electrodes. And reduced flow within the battery means reduced flow in the external circuit, which powers the vehicle’s motors.

Because the Dectravalve kept temperatures low and uniform—and the battery management system didn’t need to play energy traffic cop and slow charging to a crawl to avoid overheating—charging time was cut by roughly 60 percent. With Dectravalve, the battery reached 80 percent state of charge in between 10 and 13 minutes, versus 30 minutes with the single-cooling-loop setup, according to Hydrohertz.

When Batteries Keep Cool, They Live Longer

Using Warwick’s temperature data, Hydrohertz applied standard degradation models and found that cooler, more uniform packs last longer. Stefanopoulou estimates that if Dectravalve works as claimed, it could boost battery life by roughly 20 percent. “That’s a lot,” she says.

Still, it could be years before the system shows up on new EVs, if ever. Automakers will need years of cycle testing, crash trials, and cost studies before signing off on a new coolant architecture. Hydrohertz says several EV makers and battery suppliers have begun validation programs, and CTO Talbot expects licensing deals to ramp up as results come in. But even in a best-case scenario, Dectravalve won’t be keeping production-model EV batteries cool for at least three model years.