Apr 3 2025
How 3D printing could make better cooling systems

A new 3D-printed design could make an integral part of cooling systems like air conditioners or refrigerators smaller and more efficient, according to new research.  

Heat exchangers are devices that whisk away heat, and they’re everywhere—used in data centers, ships, factories, and buildings. The aim is to pass as much heat as possible from one side of the device to the other. Most use one of a few standard designs that have historically been easiest and cheapest to make. 

“Heat exchangers are at the center of the industrial economy. They’re an essential part of every machine and every system that moves energy,” says William King, a professor at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and one of the authors of the new study. Existing designs tend to favor straight lines, right angles, and round tubes, he adds.  

King and his colleagues used 3D printing to design a heat exchanger that includes features to optimize heat movement, like wavy walls and pyramid-shaped bumps, which wouldn’t be possible to make using traditional manufacturing techniques.  

The team had set out to design a system based on a common refrigerant called R-134a, which is commonly used in devices like air conditioners and refrigerators. When cold water lowers the temperature of the refrigerant, it changes from a gas to a liquid on its path through the device. That liquid refrigerant can then go on to other parts of the cooling system, where it’s used to lower the temperature of anything from a room to a rack of servers. 

The best way to cool the refrigerant tends to involve building very thin walls between the two sides of the device and maximizing the amount of contact that the water and the refrigerant make with those walls. (Think about how much colder you’d get wearing a thin T-shirt and pants and lying down on ice than simply touching it with your gloved hands.)

To design the best possible heat exchanger, researchers used simulations and developed machine-learning models to help predict the performance of different designs under different conditions. After 36,000 simulations, the researchers landed on the one they decided to develop.

Among the key components: small fins that jut out on the side of the device that touches the water, increasing the surface area to maximize heat transfer. The team also designed wavy passageways for the water to pass through—once again helping to maximize surface area. Simulations helped the researchers figure out exactly how curvy the passages should be and where precisely to place the fins.

On the side of the devices where the refrigerant passes through, the design includes small pyramid-shaped bumps along the walls. These not only maximize the area for cooling but also help mix the refrigerant as it passes through and prevent liquid from coating the wall (which would slow down the heat transfer).

After settling on a design, the researchers used a 3D-printing technique called direct metal laser sintering, in which lasers melt and fuse together a metal powder (in this case, an aluminum alloy), layer by layer.

In testing, the researchers found that the heat exchanger created with this technique was able to cool down the refrigerant more efficiently than other designs. The new device was able to achieve a power density of over six megawatts per meter cubed—outperforming one common traditional design, the shell-tube configuration, by between 30% and 50% with the same pumping power. The device’s power density was similar to that of brazed plate heat exchangers, another common design in industry.  

Overall, this device doesn’t dramatically outperform the state-of-the-art technology, but the technique of using modeling and 3D printing to produce new heat exchanger designs is promising, says Dennis Nasuta, director of research and development at Optimized Thermal Systems, a consulting firm that works with companies in the HVAC industry on design and research. “It’s worth exploring, and I don’t think that we know yet where we can push it,” Nasuta says.

One challenge is that today, additive manufacturing techniques such as laser sintering are slow and expensive compared with traditional manufacturing; they wouldn’t be economical or feasible to rely on for all our consumer cooling devices, he says. For now, this type of approach could be most useful in niche applications like aerospace and high-end automotives, which could more likely bear the cost, he adds. 

This particular study was funded by the US Office of Naval Research. Next-generation ships have more electronics aboard than ever, and there’s a growing need for compact and efficient systems to deal with all that extra heat, says Nenad Miljkovic, one of the authors of the study. 

Energy demand for cooling buildings alone is set to double between now and 2050, and new designs could help efficiently meet the massive demand forecast for the coming decades. But challenges including manufacturing costs would need to be overcome to help innovations like the one designed by King and his team make a dent in real devices.

Another barrier to adopting these new techniques, Nasuta says, is that current standards don’t demand more efficiency. Other technologies already exist that could help make our devices more efficient, but they’re not used for the same reason. 

It will take time for new manufacturing techniques, including 3D printing, to trickle into our devices, Natsua adds: “This isn’t going to be in your AC next year.”

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Mar 28 2025
How to save a glacier

Glaciers generally move so slowly you can’t see their progress with the naked eye. (Their pace is … glacial.) But these massive bodies of ice do march downhill, with potentially planet-altering consequences.  

There’s a lot we don’t understand about how glaciers move and how soon some of the most significant ones could collapse into the sea. That could be a problem, since melting glaciers could lead to multiple feet of sea-level rise this century, potentially displacing millions of people who live and work along the coasts.

A new group is aiming not only to further our understanding of glaciers but also to look into options to save them if things move toward a worst-case scenario, as my colleague James Temple outlined in his latest story. One idea: refreezing glaciers in place.

The whole thing can sound like science fiction. But once you consider how huge the stakes are, I think it gets easier to understand why some scientists say we should at least be exploring these radical interventions.

It’s hard to feel very optimistic about glaciers these days. (The Thwaites Glacier in West Antarctica is often called the “doomsday glacier”—not alarming at all!)

Take two studies published just in the last month, for example. The British Antarctic Survey released the most detailed map to date of Antarctica’s bedrock—the foundation under the continent’s ice. With twice as many data points as before, the study revealed that more ice than we thought is resting on bedrock that’s already below sea level. That means seawater can flow in and help melt ice faster, so Antarctica’s ice is more vulnerable than previously estimated.

Another study examined subglacial rivers—streams that flow under the ice, often from subglacial lakes. The team found that the fastest-moving glaciers have a whole lot of water moving around underneath them, which speeds melting and lubricates the ice sheet so it slides faster, in turn melting even more ice.

And those are just two of the most recent surveys. Look at any news site and it’s probably delivered the same gnarly message at some point recently: The glaciers are melting faster than previously realized. (Our site has one, too: “Greenland’s ice sheet is less stable than we thought,” from 2016.) 

The new group is joining the race to better understand glaciers. Arête Glacier Initiative, a nonprofit research organization founded by scientists at MIT and Dartmouth, has already awarded its first grants to researchers looking into how glaciers melt and plans to study the possibility of reversing those fortunes, as James exclusively reported last week.

Brent Minchew, one of the group’s cofounders and an associate professor of geophysics at MIT, was drawn to studying glaciers because of their potential impact on sea-level rise. “But over the years, I became less content with simply telling a more dramatic story about how things were going—and more open to asking the question of what can we do about it,” he says.

Minchew is among the researchers looking into potential plans to alter the future of glaciers. Strategies being proposed by groups around the world include building physical supports to prop them up and installing massive curtains to slow the flow of warm water that speeds melting. Another approach, which will be the focus of Arête, is called basal intervention. It basically involves drilling holes in glaciers, which would allow water flowing underneath the ice to be pumped out and refrozen, hopefully slowing them down.

If you have questions about how all this would work, you’re not alone. These are almost inconceivably huge engineering projects, they’d be expensive, and they’d face legal and ethical questions. Nobody really owns Antarctica, and it’s governed by a huge treaty—how could we possibly decide whether to move forward with these projects?

Then there’s the question of the potential side effects. Just look at recent news from the Arctic Ice Project, which was researching how to slow the melting of sea ice by covering it with substances designed to reflect sunlight away. (Sea ice is different from glaciers, but some of the key issues are the same.) 

One of the project’s largest field experiments involved spreading tiny silica beads, sort of like sand, over 45,000 square feet of ice in Alaska. But after new research revealed that the materials might be disrupting food chains, the organization announced that it’s concluding its research and winding down operations.

Cutting our emissions of greenhouse gases to stop climate change at the source would certainly be more straightforward than spreading beads on ice, or trying to stop a 74,000-square-mile glacier in its tracks. 

But we’re not doing so hot on cutting emissions—in fact, levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere rose faster than ever in 2024. And even if the world stopped polluting the atmosphere with planet-warming gases today, things may have already gone too far to save some of the most vulnerable glaciers. 

The longer I cover climate change and face the situation we’re in, the more I understand the impulse to at least consider every option out there, even if it sounds like science fiction. 

This article is from The Spark, MIT Technology Review’s weekly climate newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Wednesday, sign up here.

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Mar 22 2025
Inside a new quest to save the “doomsday glacier”

The Thwaites glacier is a fortress larger than Florida, a wall of ice that reaches nearly 4,000 feet above the bedrock of West Antarctica, guarding the low-lying ice sheet behind it.

But a strong, warm ocean current is weakening its foundations and accelerating its slide into the Amundsen Sea. Scientists fear the waters could topple the walls in the coming decades, kick-starting a runaway process that would crack up the West Antarctic Ice Sheet.

That would mark the start of a global climate disaster. The glacier itself holds enough ice to raise ocean levels by more than two feet, which could flood coastlines and force tens of millions of people living in low-lying areas to abandon their homes.

The loss of the entire ice sheet—which could still take centuries to unfold—would push up sea levels by 11 feet and redraw the contours of the continents.

This is why Thwaites is known as the doomsday glacier—and why scientists are eager to understand just how likely such a collapse is, when it could happen, and if we have the power to stop it. 

Scientists at MIT and Dartmouth College founded Arête Glacier Initiative last year in the hope of providing clearer answers to these questions. The nonprofit research organization will officially unveil itself, launch its website, and post requests for research proposals today, March 21, timed to coincide with the UN’s inaugural World Day for Glaciers, MIT Technology Review can report exclusively. 

Arête will also announce it is issuing its first grants, each for around $200,000 over two years, to a pair of glacier researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. 

One of the organization’s main goals is to study the possibility of preventing the loss of giant glaciers, Thwaites in particular, by refreezing them to the bedrock. It would represent a radical intervention into the natural world, requiring a massive, expensive engineering project in a remote, treacherous environment. 

But the hope is that such a mega-adaptation project could minimize the mass relocation of climate refugees, prevent much of the suffering and violence that would almost certainly accompany it, and help nations preserve trillions of dollars invested in high-rises, roads, homes, ports, and airports around the globe.

“About a million people are displaced per centimeter of sea-level rise,” says Brent Minchew, an associate professor of geophysics at MIT, who cofounded Arête Glacier Initiative and will serve as its chief scientist. “If we’re able to bring that down, even by a few centimeters, then we would safeguard the homes of millions.”

But some scientists believe the idea is an implausible, wildly expensive distraction, drawing money, expertise, time, and resources away from more essential polar research efforts. 

“Sometimes we can get a little over-optimistic about what engineering can do,” says Twila Moon, deputy lead scientist at the National Snow and Ice Data Center at the University of Colorado Boulder.

“Two possible futures”

Minchew, who earned his PhD in geophysics at Caltech, says he was drawn to studying glaciers because they are rapidly transforming as the world warms, increasing the dangers of sea-level rise. 

“But over the years, I became less content with simply telling a more dramatic story about how things were going and more open to asking the question of what can we do about it,” says Minchew, who will return to Caltech as a professor this summer.

Last March, he cofounded Arête Glacier Initiative with Colin Meyer, an assistant professor of engineering at Dartmouth, in the hope of funding and directing research to improve scientific understanding of two big questions: How big a risk does sea-level rise pose in the coming decades, and can we minimize that risk?

Brent Minchew, an MIT professor of geophysics, co-founded Arête Glacier Initiative and will serve as its chief scientist.
COURTESY: BRENT MINCHEW

“Philanthropic funding is needed to address both of these challenges, because there’s no private-sector funding for this kind of research and government funding is minuscule,” says Mike Schroepfer, the former Meta chief technology officer turned climate philanthropist, who provided funding to Arête through his new organization, Outlier Projects. 

The nonprofit has now raised about $5 million from Outlier and other donors, including the Navigation Fund, the Kissick Family Foundation, the Sky Foundation, the Wedner Family Foundation, and the Grantham Foundation. 

Minchew says they named the organization Arête, mainly because it’s the sharp mountain ridge between two valleys, generally left behind when a glacier carves out the cirques on either side. It directs the movement of the glacier and is shaped by it. 

It’s meant to symbolize “two possible futures,” he says. “One where we do something; one where we do nothing.”

Improving forecasts

The somewhat reassuring news is that, even with rising global temperatures, it may still take thousands of years for the West Antarctic Ice Sheet to completely melt. 

In addition, sea-level rise forecasts for this century generally range from as little as 0.28 meters (11 inches) to 1.10 meters (about three and a half feet), according to the latest UN climate panel report. The latter only occurs under a scenario with very high greenhouse gas emissions (SSP5-8.5), which significantly exceeds the pathway the world is now on.

But there’s still a “low-likelihood” that ocean levels could surge nearly two meters (about six and a half feet) by 2100 that “cannot be excluded,” given “deep uncertainty linked to ice-sheet processes,” the report adds. 

Two meters of sea-level rise could force nearly 190 million people to migrate away from the coasts, unless regions build dikes or other shoreline protections, according to some models. Many more people, mainly in the tropics, would face heightened flooding dangers.

Much of the uncertainty over what will happen this century comes down to scientists’ limited understanding of how Antarctic ice sheets will respond to growing climate pressures.

The initial goal of Arête Glacier Initiative is to help narrow the forecast ranges by improving our grasp of how Thwaites and other glaciers move, melt, and break apart.

Gravity is the driving force nudging glaciers along the bedrock and reshaping them as they flow. But many of the variables that determine how fast they slide lie at the base. That includes the type of sediment the river of ice slides along; the size of the boulders and outcroppings it contorts around; and the warmth and strength of the ocean waters that lap at its face.

In addition, heat rising from deep in the earth warms the ice closest to the ground, creating a lubricating layer of water that hastens the glacier’s slide. That acceleration, in turn, generates more frictional heat that melts still more of the ice, creating a self-reinforcing feedback effect.

Minchew and Meyer are confident that the glaciology field is at a point where it could speed up progress in sea-level rise forecasting, thanks largely to improving observational tools that are producing more and better data.

That includes a new generation of satellites orbiting the planet that can track the shifting shape of ice at the poles at far higher resolutions than in the recent past. Computer simulations of ice sheets, glaciers and sea ice are improving as well, thanks to growing computational resources and advancing machine learning techniques.

On March 21, Arête will issue a request for proposals from research teams to contribute to an effort to collect, organize, and openly publish existing observational glacier data. Much of that expensively gathered information is currently inaccessible to researchers around the world, Minchew says.

Colin Meyer, an assistant professor of engineering at Dartmouth, co-founded Arête Glacier Initiative.
ELI BURAK

By funding teams working across these areas, Arête’s founders hope to help produce more refined ice-sheet models and narrower projections of sea-level rise.

This improved understanding would help cities plan where to build new bridges, buildings, and homes, and to determine whether they’ll need to erect higher seawalls or raise their roads, Meyer says. It could also provide communities with more advance notice of the coming dangers, allowing them to relocate people and infrastructure to safer places through an organized process known as managed retreat.

A radical intervention

But the improved forecasts might also tell us that Thwaites is closer to tumbling into the ocean than we think, underscoring the importance of considering more drastic measures.

One idea is to build berms or artificial islands to prop up fragile parts of glaciers, and to block the warm waters that rise from the deep ocean and melt them from below. Some researchers have also considered erecting giant, flexible curtains anchored to the seabed to achieve the latter effect.

Others have looked at scattering highly reflective beads or other materials across ice sheets, or pumping ocean water onto them in the hopes it would freeze during the winter and reinforce the headwalls of the glaciers.

But the concept of refreezing glaciers in place, know as a basal intervention, is gaining traction in scientific circles, in part because there’s a natural analogue for it.

The glacier that stalled

About 200 years ago, the Kamb Ice Stream, another glacier in West Antarctica that had been sliding about 350 meters (1,150 feet) per year, suddenly stalled.

Glaciologists believe an adjacent ice stream intersected with the catchment area under the glacier, providing a path for the water running below it to flow out along the edge instead. That loss of fluid likely slowed down the Kamb Ice Stream, reduced the heat produced through friction, and allowed water at the surface to refreeze.

The deceleration of the glacier sparked the idea that humans might be able to bring about that same phenomenon deliberately, perhaps by drilling a series of boreholes down to the bedrock and pumping up water from the bottom.

Minchew himself has focused on a variation he believes could avoid much of the power use and heavy operating machinery hassles of that approach: slipping long tubular devices, known as thermosyphons, down nearly to the bottom of the boreholes. 

These passive heat exchangers, which are powered only by the temperature differential between two areas, are commonly used to keep permafrost cold around homes, buildings and pipelines in Arctic regions. The hope is that we could deploy extremely long ones, stretching up to two kilometers and encased in steel pipe, to draw warm temperatures away from the bottom of the glacier, allowing the water below to freeze.

Minchew says he’s in the process of producing refined calculations, but estimates that halting Thwaites could require drilling as many as 10,000 boreholes over a 100-square-kilometer area.

He readily acknowledges that would be a huge undertaking, but provides two points of comparison to put such a project into context: Melting the necessary ice to create those holes would require roughly the amount of energy all US domestic flights consume from jet fuel in about two and a half hours. Or, it would produce about the same level of greenhouse gas emissions as constructing 10 kilometers of seawalls, a small fraction of the length the world would need to build if it can’t slow down the collapse of the ice sheets, he says.

“Kick the system”

One of Arête’s initial grantees is Marianne Haseloff, an assistant professor of geoscience at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She studies the physical processes that govern the behavior of glaciers and is striving to more faithfully represent them in ice sheet models. 

Haseloff says she will use those funds to develop mathematical methods that could more accurately determine what’s known as basal shear stress, or the resistance of the bed to sliding glaciers, based on satellite observations. That could help refine forecasts of how rapidly glaciers will slide into the ocean, in varying settings and climate conditions.

Arête’s other initial grant will go to Lucas Zoet, an associate professor in the same department as Haseloff and the principal investigator with the Surface Processes group.

He intends to use the funds to build the lab’s second “ring shear” device, the technical term for a simulated glacier.

The existing device, which is the only one operating in the world, stands about eight feet tall and fills the better part of a walk-in freezer on campus. The core of the machine is a transparent drum filled with a ring of ice, sitting under pressure and atop a layer of sediment. It slowly spins for weeks at a time as sensors and cameras capture how the ice and earth move and deform.

Lucas Zoet, an associate professor at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, stands in front of his lab’s “ring shear” device, a simulated glacier.
ETHAN PARRISH

The research team can select the sediment, topography, water pressure, temperature, and other conditions to match the environment of a real-world glacier of interest, be it Thwaites today—or Thwaites in 2100, under a high greenhouse gas emissions scenario. 

Zoet says these experiments promise to improve our understanding of how glaciers move over different types of beds, and to refine an equation known as the slip law, which represents these glacier dynamics mathematically in computer models.

The second machine will enable them to run more experiments and to conduct a specific kind that the current device can’t: a scaled-down, controlled version of the basal intervention.

Zoet says the team will be able to drill tiny holes through the ice, then pump out water or transfer heat away from the bed. They can then observe whether the simulated glacier freezes to the base at those points and experiment with how many interventions, across how much space, are required to slow down its movement.

It offers a way to test out different varieties of the basal intervention that is far easier and cheaper than using water drills to bore to the bottom of an actual glacier in Antarctica, Zoet says. The funding will allow the lab to explore a wide range of experiments, enabling them to “kick the system in a way we wouldn’t have before,” he adds.

“Virtually impossible”

The concept of glacier interventions is in its infancy. There are still considerable unknowns and uncertainties, including how much it would cost, how arduous the undertaking would be, and which approach would be most likely to work, or if any of them are feasible.

“This is mostly a theoretical idea at this point,” says Katharine Ricke, an associate professor at the University of California, San Diego, who researches the international relations implications of geoengineering, among other topics.

Conducting extensive field trials or moving forward with full-scale interventions may also require surmounting complex legal questions, she says. Antarctica isn’t owned by any nation, but it’s the subject of competing territorial claims among a number of countries and governed under a decades-old treaty to which dozens are a party.

The basal intervention—refreezing the glacier to its bed—faces numerous technical hurdles that would make it “virtually impossible to execute,” Moon and dozens of other researchers argued in a recent preprint paper, “Safeguarding the polar regions from dangerous geoengineering.”

Among other critiques, they stress that subglacial water systems are complex, dynamic, and interconnected, making it highly difficult to precisely identify and drill down to all the points that would be necessary to draw away enough water or heat to substantially slow down a massive glacier.

Further, they argue that the interventions could harm polar ecosystems by adding contaminants, producing greenhouse gases, or altering the structure of the ice in ways that may even increase sea-level rise.

“Overwhelmingly, glacial and polar geoengineering ideas do not make sense to pursue, in terms of the finances, the governance challenges, the impacts,” and the possibility of making matters worse, Moon says.

“No easy path forward”

But Douglas MacAyeal, professor emeritus of glaciology at the University of Chicago, says the basal intervention would have the lightest environmental impact among the competing ideas. He adds that nature has already provided an example of it working, and that much of the needed drilling and pumping technology is already in use in the oil industry.

“I would say it’s the strongest approach at the starting gate,” he says, “but we don’t really know anything about it yet. The research still has to be done. It’s very cutting-edge.”

A Sunday morning sunrise was enjoyed by personnel on board the research vessel Nathaniel B. Palmer as it moved into the Bellingshausen Sea. The cruise had been in the Amundsen Sea region participating in the International Thwaites Glacier Collaboration. 
The Nathaniel B. Palmer heads into the Bellinghausen sea.
CINDY DEAN/UNITED STATES ANTARCTIC PROGRAM

Minchew readily acknowledges that there are big challenges and significant unknowns—and that some of these ideas may not work.

But he says it’s well worth the effort to study the possibilities, in part because much of the research will also improve our understanding of glacier dynamics and the risks of sea-level rise—and in part because it’s only a question of when, not if, Thwaites will collapse.

Even if the world somehow halted all greenhouse gas emissions tomorrow, the forces melting that fortress of ice will continue to do so. 

So one way or another, the world will eventually need to make big, expensive, difficult interventions to protect people and infrastructure. The cost and effort of doing one project in Antarctica, he says, would be dwarfed by the global effort required to erect thousands of miles of seawalls, ratchet up homes, buildings, and roads, and relocate hundreds of millions of people.

“One thing is challenging—and the other is even more challenging,” Minchew says. “There’s no easy path forward.”

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Mar 21 2025
The elephant in the room for energy tech? Uncertainty.

At a conference dedicated to energy technology that I attended this week, I noticed an outward attitude of optimism and excitement. But it’s hard to miss the current of uncertainty just underneath. 

The ARPA-E Energy Innovation Summit, held this year just outside Washington, DC, gathers some of the most cutting-edge innovators working on everything from next-generation batteries to plants that can mine for metals. Researchers whose projects have received funding from ARPA-E—part of the US Department of Energy that gives money to high-risk research in energy—gather to show their results and mingle with each other, investors, and nosy journalists like yours truly. (For more on a few of the coolest things I saw, check out this story.)

This year, though, there was an elephant in the room, and it’s the current state of the US federal government. Or maybe it’s climate change? In any case, the vibes were weird. 

The last time I was at this conference, two years ago, climate change was a constant refrain on stage and in conversations. The central question was undoubtedly: How do we decarbonize, generate energy, and run our lives without relying on polluting fossil fuels? 

This time around, I didn’t hear the phrase “climate change” once during the opening session, which included speeches from US Secretary of Energy Chris Wright and acting ARPA-E director Daniel Cunningham. The focus was on American energy dominance—on how we can get our hands on more, more, more energy to meet growing demand. 

Last week, Wright spoke at an energy conference in Houston and had a lot to say about climate, calling climate change a “side effect of building the modern world” and climate policies irrational and quasi-religious, and he said that when it came to climate action, the cure had become worse than the disease. 

I was anticipating similar talking points at the summit, but this week, climate change hardly got a mention.

What I noticed in Wright’s speech and in the choice of programming throughout the conference is that some technologies appear to be among the favored, and others are decidedly less prominent. Nuclear power and fusion were definitely on the “in” list. There was a nuclear panel in the opening session, and in his remarks Wright called out companies like Commonwealth Fusion Systems and Zap Energy. He also praised small modular reactors. 

Renewables, including wind and solar, were mentioned only in the context of their inconsistency—Wright dwelled on that, rather than on other facts I’d argue are just as important, like that they are among the cheapest methods of generating electricity today. 

In any case, Wright seemed appropriately hyped about energy, given his role in the administration. “Call me biased, but I think there’s no more impactful place to work in than energy,” he said during his opening remarks on the first morning of the summit. He sang the praises of energy innovation, calling it a tool to drive progress, and outlined his long career in the field. 

This all comes after a chaotic couple of months for the federal government that are undoubtedly affecting the industry. Mass layoffs have hit federal agencies, including the Department of Energy. President Donald Trump very quickly tried to freeze spending from the Inflation Reduction Act, which includes tax credits and other support for EVs and power plants. 

As I walked around the showcase and chatted with experts over coffee, I heard a range of reactions to the opening session and feelings about this moment for the energy sector. 

People working in industries the Trump administration seems to favor, like nuclear energy, tended to be more positive. Some in academia who rely on federal grants to fund their work were particularly nervous about what comes next. One researcher refused to talk to me when I said I was a journalist. In response to my questions about why they weren’t able to discuss the technology on display at their booth, another member on the same project said only that it’s a wild time.

Making progress on energy technology doesn’t require that we all agree on exactly why we’re doing it. But in a moment when we need all the low-carbon technologies we can get to address climate change—a problem scientists overwhelmingly agree is a threat to our planet—I find it frustrating that politics can create such a chilling effect in some sectors. 

At the conference, I listened to smart researchers talk about their work. I saw fascinating products and demonstrations, and I’m still optimistic about where energy can go. But I also worry that uncertainty about the future of research and government support for emerging technologies will leave some valuable innovations in the dust. 

This article is from The Spark, MIT Technology Review’s weekly climate newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Wednesday, sign up here.

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Mar 20 2025
4 technologies that could power the future of energy

Where can you find lasers, electric guitars, and racks full of novel batteries, all in the same giant room? This week, the answer was the 2025 ARPA-E Energy Innovation Summit just outside Washington, DC.

Energy innovation can take many forms, and the variety in energy research was on display at the summit. ARPA-E, part of the US Department of Energy, provides funding for high-risk, high-reward research projects. The summit gathers projects the agency has funded, along with investors, policymakers, and journalists.

Hundreds of projects were exhibited in a massive hall during the conference, featuring demonstrations and research results. Here are four of the most interesting innovations MIT Technology Review spotted on site. 

Steel made with lasers

Startup Limelight Steel has developed a process to make iron, the main component in steel, by using lasers to heat iron ore to super-high temperatures. 

Steel production makes up roughly 8% of global greenhouse gas emissions today, in part because most steel is still made with blast furnaces, which rely on coal to hit the high temperatures that kick off the required chemical reactions. 

Limelight instead shines lasers on iron ore, heating it to temperatures over 1,600 °C. Molten iron can then be separated from impurities, and the iron can be put through existing processes to make steel. 

The company has built a small demonstration system with a laser power of about 1.5 kilowatts, which can process between 10 and 20 grams of ore. The whole system is made up of 16 laser arrays, each just a bit larger than a postage stamp.

The components in the demonstration system are commercially available; this particular type of laser is used in projectors. The startup has benefited from years of progress in the telecommunications industry that has helped bring down the cost of lasers, says Andy Zhao, the company’s cofounder and CTO. 

The next step is to build a larger-scale system that will use 150 kilowatts of laser power and could make up to 100 tons of steel over the course of a year.

Rocks that can make fuel

The hunks of rock at a booth hosted by MIT might not seem all that high-tech, but someday they could help produce fuels and chemicals. 

A major topic of conversation at the ARPA-E summit was geologic hydrogen—there’s a ton of excitement about efforts to find underground deposits of the gas, which can be used as a fuel across a wide range of industries, including transportation and heavy industry. 

Last year, ARPA-E funded a handful of projects on the topic, including one in Iwnetim Abate’s lab at MIT. Abate is among the researchers who are aiming not just to hunt for hydrogen, but to actually use underground conditions to help produce it. Earlier this year, his team published research showing that by using catalysts and conditions common in the subsurface, scientists can produce hydrogen as well as other chemicals, like ammonia. Abate cofounded a spinout company, Addis Energy, to commercialize the research, which has since also received ARPA-E funding. 

All the rocks on the table, from the chunk of dark, hard basalt to the softer talc, could be used to produce these chemicals. 

An electric guitar powered by iron nitride magnets

The sound of music drifted from the Niron Magnetics booth across nearby walkways. People wandering by stopped to take turns testing out the company’s magnets, in the form of an electric guitar. 

Most high-powered magnets today contain neodymium—demand for them is set to skyrocket in the coming years, especially as the world builds more electric vehicles and wind turbines. Supplies could stretch thin, and the geopolitics are complicated because most of the supply comes from China. 

Niron is making new magnets that don’t contain rare earth metals. Instead, Niron’s technology is based on more abundant materials: nitrogen and iron. 

The guitar is a demonstration product—today, magnets in electric guitars typically contain aluminum, nickel, and cobalt-based magnets that help translate the vibrations from steel strings into an electric signal that is broadcast through an amplifier. Niron made an instrument using its iron nitride magnets instead. (See photos of the guitar from an event last year here.)

Niron opened a pilot commercial facility in late 2024 that has the capacity to produce 10 tons of magnets annually. Since we last covered Niron, in early 2024, the company has announced plans for a full-scale plant, which will have an annual capacity of about 1,500 tons of magnets once it’s fully ramped up. 

Batteries for powering high-performance data centers

The increasing power demand from AI and data centers was another hot topic at the summit, with server racks dotting the showcase floor to demonstrate technologies aimed at the sector. One stuffed with batteries caught my eye, courtesy of Natron Energy. 

The company is making sodium-ion batteries to help meet power demand from data centers. 

Data centers’ energy demands can be incredibly variable—and as their total power needs get bigger, those swings can start to affect the grid. Natron’s sodium-ion batteries can be installed at these facilities to help level off the biggest peaks, allowing computing equipment to run full out without overly taxing the grid, says Natron cofounder and CTO Colin Wessells. 

Sodium-ion batteries are a cheaper alternative to lithium-based chemistries. They’re also made without lithium, cobalt, and nickel, materials that are constrained in production or processing. We’re seeing some varieties of sodium-ion batteries popping up in electric vehicles in China.

Natron opened a production line in Michigan last year, and the company plans to open a $1.4 billion factory in North Carolina. 

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Mar 13 2025
This artificial leaf makes hydrocarbons out of carbon dioxide

For many years, researchers have been working to build devices that can mimic photosynthesis—the process by which plants use sunlight and carbon dioxide to make their fuel. These artificial leaves use sunlight to separate water into oxygen and hydrogen, which could then be used to fuel cars or generate electricity. Now a research team has taken aim at creating more energy-dense fuels.

Companies have been manufacturing synthetic fuels for nearly a century by combining carbon monoxide (which can be sourced from carbon dioxide) and hydrogen under high temperatures. But the hope is that artificial leaves can eventually do a similar kind of synthesis in a more sustainable and efficient way, by tapping into the power of the sun.

The group’s device produces ethylene and ethane, proving that artificial leaves can create hydrocarbons. The development could offer a cheaper, cleaner way to make fuels, chemicals, and plastics. 

For research lead Virgil Andrei at the University of Cambridge, the ultimate goal is to use this technology to create fuels that don’t leave a harmful carbon footprint after they’re burned. If the process uses carbon dioxide captured from the air or power plants, the resulting fuels could be carbon neutral—and ease the need to keep digging up fossil fuels.

“Eventually we want to be able to source carbon dioxide to produce the fuels and chemicals that we need for industry and for everyday lives,” says Andrei, who coauthored a study published in Nature Catalysis in February. “You end up mimicking nature’s own carbon cycle, so you don’t need additional fossil resources.”

Copper nanoflowers

Like other artificial leaves, the team’s device harnesses energy from the sun to create chemical products. But producing hydrocarbons is more complicated than making hydrogen because the process requires more energy.

To accomplish this feat, the researchers introduced a few innovations. The first was to use a specialized catalyst made up of tiny flower-like copper structures, produced in the lab of coauthor Peidong Yang at the University of California, Berkeley. On one side of the device, electrons accumulated on the surfaces of these nanoflowers. These electrons were then used to convert carbon dioxide and water into a range of molecules including ethylene and ethane, hydrocarbons that each contain two carbon atoms. 

An image showing top views of the copper nanoflowers at different magnifications.
Microscope images of the device’s copper nanoflowers.
ANDREI, V., ROH, I., LIN, JA. ET AL. / NAT CATAL (2025)

These nanoflower structures are tunable and could be adjusted to produce a wide range of molecules, says Andrei: “Depending on the nanostructure of the copper catalyst you can get wildly different products.” 

On the other side of the device, the team also developed a more energy-efficient way to source electrons by using light-absorbing silicon nanowires to process glycerol rather than water, which is more commonly used. An added benefit is that the glycerol-based process can produce useful compounds like glycerate, lactate, and acetate, which could be harvested for use in the cosmetic and pharmaceutical industries. 

Scaling up

Even though the trial system worked, the advance is only a stepping stone toward creating a commercially viable source of fuel. “This research shows this concept can work,” says Yanwei Lum, a chemical and biomolecular engineering assistant professor at the National University of Singapore. But, he adds, “the performance is still not sufficient for practical applications. It’s still not there yet.”

Andrei says the device needs to be significantly more durable and efficient in order to be adopted for fuel production. But the work is moving in the right direction. 

“We have been making this progress because we looked at more unconventional concepts and state-of-the-art techniques that were not really available,” he says. “I’m quite optimistic that this technology could take off in the next five to 10 years.”

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Mar 13 2025
This startup just hit a big milestone for green steel production

This article is from The Spark, MIT Technology Review’s weekly climate newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Wednesday, sign up here.

Green-steel startup Boston Metal just showed that it has all the ingredients needed to make steel without emitting gobs of greenhouse gases. The company successfully ran its largest reactor yet to make steel, producing over a ton of metal, MIT Technology Review can exclusively report.

The latest milestone means that Boston Metal just got one step closer to commercializing its technology. The company’s process uses electricity to make steel, and depending on the source of that electricity, it could mean cleaning up production of one of the most polluting materials on the planet. The world produces about 2 billion metric tons of steel each year, emitting over 3 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide in the process.

While there are still a lot of milestones left before reaching the scale needed to make a dent in the steel industry, the latest run shows that the company can scale up its process.

Boston Metal started up its industrial reactor for steelmaking in January, and after it had run for several weeks, the company siphoned out roughly a ton of material on February 17. (You can see a video of the molten metal here. It’s really cool.)

Work on this reactor has been underway for a while. I got to visit the facility in Woburn, Massachusetts, in 2022, when construction was nearly done. In the years since, the company has been working on testing it out to make other metals before retrofitting it for steel production. 

Boston Metal’s approach is very different from that of a conventional steel plant. Steelmaking typically involves a blast furnace, which uses a coal-based fuel called coke to drive the reactions needed to turn iron ore into iron (the key ingredient in steel). The carbon in coke combines with oxygen pulled out of the iron ore, which gets released as carbon dioxide.

Instead, Boston Metal uses electricity in a process called molten oxide electrolysis (MOE). Iron ore gets loaded into a reactor, mixed with other ingredients, and then electricity is run through it, heating the mixture to around 1,600 °C (2,900 °F) and driving the reactions needed to make iron. That iron can then be turned into steel. 

Crucially for the climate, this process emits oxygen rather than carbon dioxide (that infamous greenhouse gas). If renewables like wind and solar or nuclear power are used as the source of electricity, then this approach can virtually cut out the climate impact from steel production. 

MOE was developed at MIT, and Boston Metal was founded in 2013 to commercialize the technology. Since then, the company has worked to take it from lab scale, with reactors roughly the size of a coffee cup, to much larger ones that can produce tons of metal at a time. That’s crucial for an industry that operates on the scale of billions of tons per year.

“The volumes of steel everywhere around us—it’s immense,” says Adam Rauwerdink, senior vice president of business development at Boston Metal. “The scale is massive.”

factory view of Boston Metal and MOE Green Steel

BOSTON METAL

Making the huge amounts of steel required to be commercially relevant has been quite the technical challenge. 

One key component of Boston Metal’s design is the anode. It’s basically a rounded metallic bit that sticks into the reactor, providing a way for electricity to get in and drive the reactions required. In theory, this anode doesn’t get used up, but if the conditions aren’t quite right, it can degrade over time.

Over the past few years, the company has made a lot of progress in preventing inert anode degradation, Rauwerdink says. The latest phase of work is more complicated, because now the company is adding multiple anodes in the same reactor. 

In lab-scale reactors, there’s one anode, and it’s quite small. Larger reactors require bigger anodes, and at a certain point it’s necessary to add more of them. The latest run continues to prove how Boston Metal’s approach can scale, Rauwerdink says: making reactors larger, adding more anodes, and then adding multiple reactors together in a single plant to make the volumes of material needed.

Now that the company has completed its first run of the multi-anode reactor for steelmaking, the plan is to keep exploring how the reactions happen at this larger scale. These runs will also help the company better understand what it will cost to make its products.

The next step is to build an even bigger system, Rauwerdink says—something that won’t fit in the Boston facility. While a reactor of the current size can make a ton or two of material in about a month, the truly industrial-scale equipment will make that amount of metal in about a day. That demonstration plant should come online in late 2026 and begin operation in 2027, he says. Ultimately, the company hopes to license its technology to steelmakers. 

In steel and other heavy industries, the scale can be mind-boggling. Boston Metal has been at this for over a decade, and it’s fascinating to see the company make progress toward becoming a player in this massive industry. 

Now read the rest of The Spark

Related reading

We named green steel one of our 2025 Breakthrough Technologies. Read more about why here.

I visited Boston Metal’s facility in Massachusetts in 2022—read more about the company’s technology in this story (I’d say it pretty much holds up). 

Climate tech companies like Boston Metal have seen a second boom period for funding and support following the cleantech crash a decade ago. Read more in this 2023 feature from David Rotman. 

High voltage towers at sunset background. Power lines against the sky

GETTY

Another thing

Electricity demand is rising faster in the US than it has in decades, and meeting it will require building new power plants and expanding grid infrastructure. That could be a problem, because it’s historically been expensive and slow to get new transmission lines approved. 

New technologies could help in a major way, according to Brian Deese and Rob Gramlich. Read more in this new op-ed. 

And one more

Plants have really nailed the process of making food from sunlight in photosynthesis. For a very long time, researchers have been trying to mimic this process and make an artificial leaf that can make fuels using the sun’s energy.

Now, researchers are aiming to make energy-dense fuels using a specialized, copper-containing catalyst. Read more about the innovation in my colleague Carly Kay’s latest story. 

Keeping up with climate

Energy storage is still growing quickly in the US, with 18 gigawatts set to come online this year. That’s up from 11 GW in 2024. (Canary Media)

Oil companies including Shell, BP, and Equinor are rolling back climate commitments and ramping up fossil-fuel production. Oil and gas companies were accounting for only a small fraction of clean energy investment, so experts say that’s not a huge loss. But putting money toward new oil and gas could be bad for emissions. (Grist)

Butterfly populations are cratering around the US, dropping by 22% in just the last 20 years. Check out this visualization to see how things are changing where you live. (New York Times)

New York City’s congestion pricing plan, which charges cars to enter the busiest parts of the city, is gaining popularity: 42% of New York City residents support the toll, up from 32% in December. (Bloomberg)

Here’s a reality check for you: Ukraine doesn’t have minable deposits of rare earth metals, experts say. While tensions between US and Ukraine leaders ran high in a meeting to discuss a minerals deal, IEEE Spectrum reports that the reality doesn’t match the political theater here. (IEEE Spectrum)

Quaise Energy has a wild drilling technology that it says could unlock the potential for geothermal energy. In a demonstration, the company recently drilled several inches into a piece of rock using its millimeter-wave technology. (Wall Street Journal)

Here’s another one for the “weird climate change effects” file: greenhouse-gas emissions could mean less capacity for satellites. It’s getting crowded up there. (Grist)

The Biden administration funded agriculture projects related to climate change, and now farmers are getting caught up in the Trump administration’s efforts to claw back the money. This is a fascinating case of how the same project can be described with entirely different language depending on political priorities. (Washington Post)

You and I are helping to pay for the electricity demands of big data centers. While some grid upgrades are needed just to serve big projects like those centers, the cost of building and maintaining the grid is shared by everyone who pays for electricity. (Heatmap)

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Mar 11 2025
The cheapest way to supercharge America’s power grid

US electricity consumption is rising faster than it has in decades, thanks in part to the boom in data center development, the resurgence in manufacturing, and the increasing popularity of electric vehicles. 

Accommodating that growth will require building wind turbines, solar farms, and other power plants faster than we ever have before—and expanding the network of wires needed to connect those facilities to the grid.

Heat Exchange

MIT Technology Review’s guest opinion series, offering expert commentary on legal, political and regulatory issues related to climate change and clean energy. You can read the rest of the pieces here.

But one major problem is that it’s expensive and slow to secure permits for new transmission lines and build them across the country. This challenge has created one of the biggest obstacles to getting more electricity generation online, reducing investment in new power plants and stranding others in years-long “interconnection queues” while they wait to join the grid.

Fortunately, there are some shortcuts that could expand the capacity of the existing system without requiring completely new infrastructure: a suite of hardware and software tools known as advanced transmission technologies (ATTs), which can increase both the capacity and the efficiency of the power sector.

ATTs have the potential to radically reduce timelines for grid upgrades, avoid tricky permitting issues, and yield billions in annual savings for US consumers. They could help us quickly bring online a significant portion of the nearly 2,600 gigawatts of backlogged generation and storage projects awaiting pathways to connect to the electric grid. 

The opportunity to leverage advanced transmission technologies to update the way we deliver and consume electricity in America is as close to a $20 bill sitting on the sidewalk as policymakers may ever encounter. Promoting the development and use of these technologies should be a top priority for politicians in Washington, DC, as well as electricity market regulators around the country.

That includes the new Trump administration, which has clearly stated that building greater electricity supply and keeping costs low for consumers are high priorities. 

In the last month, Washington has been consumed by the Trump team’s efforts to test the bounds of executive power, fire civil servants, and disrupt the basic workings of the federal government. But when or if the White House and Congress get around to enacting new energy policies, they would be wise to pick up the $20 bill by enacting bipartisan measures to accelerate the rollout of these innovative grid technologies.

ATTs generally fall into four categories: dynamic line ratings, which combine local weather forecasts and measurements on or near the transmission line to safely increase their capacity when conditions allow; high-performance conductors, which are advanced wires that use carbon fiber, composite cores, or superconducting materials to carry more electricity than traditional steel-core conductors; topology optimization, which uses software to model fluctuating conditions across the grid and identify the most efficient routes to distribute electricity from moment to moment; and advanced power flow control devices, which redistribute electricity to lines with available capacity. 

“This would allow utilities to earn a profit for saving money, not just spending it, and could save consumers billions on their electricity bills every year.”

Other countries from Belgium to India to the United Kingdom are already making large-scale use of these technologies. Early projects in the United States have been remarkably successful as well. One recent deployment of dynamic line ratings increased capacity by more than 50% for only $45,000 per mile—roughly 1% of the price of building new transmission.

So why are we not seeing an explosion in ATT investment and deployment in the US? Because despite their potential to unlock 21st-century technology, the 20th-century structure of the nation’s electricity markets discourages adoption of these solutions. 

For one thing, under the current regulatory system, utilities generally make money by passing the cost of big new developments along to customers (earning a fixed annual return on their investment). That comes in the form of higher electricity rates, which local public utility commissions often approve after power companies propose such projects.

That means utilities have financial incentives to make large and expensive investments, but not to save consumers money. When ATTs are installed in place of building new transmission capacity, the smaller capital costs mean that utilities make lower profits. For example, utilities might earn $600,000 per year after building a new mile of transmission, compared with about $4,500 per mile annually after installing the equipment and software necessary for line ratings. While these state regulatory agencies are tasked with ensuring that utilities act in the best interest of consumers, they often lack the necessary information to identify the best approach for doing so.

Overcoming these structural barriers will require action from both state and federal governments, and it should appeal to Democrats and Republicans alike. We’ve already seen some states, including Minnesota and Montana, move in this direction, but policy interventions to date remain insufficient. In a recent paper, we propose a new approach for unlocking the potential of these technologies.

First, we suggest requiring transmission providers to use ATTs in some “no regrets” contexts, where possible downsides are minor or nonexistent. The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, for example, is already considering requiring dynamic line ratings on certain highly congested lines. Given the low cost of dynamic line ratings, and their clear benefit in cases of congestion, we believe that FERC should quickly move forward with, and strengthen, such a rule. Likewise, the Department of Energy or Congress should adopt an efficiency standard for the wires that carry electricity around the country. Every year, approximately 5% of electricity generated is lost in the transmission and distribution process. The use of high-performance conductors can reduce those losses by 30%.

In addition, federal agencies and state lawmakers should require transmission providers to evaluate the potential for using ATTs on their grid, or provide support to help them do so. FERC has recently taken steps in this direction, and it should continue to strengthen those actions. 

Regulators should also provide financial incentives to transmission providers to encourage the installation of ATTs. The most promising approach is a “shared savings” incentive, such as that proposed in the recent Advancing GETS Act. This would allow utilities to earn a profit for saving money, not just spending it, and could save consumers billions on their electricity bills every year.

Finally, we should invest in building digital tools so transmission owners can identify opportunities for these technologies and so regulators can hold them accountable. Developing these systems will require transmission providers to share information about electricity supply and demand as well as grid infrastructure. Ideally, with such data in hand, researchers can develop a “digital twin” of the current transmission system to test different configurations of ATTs and help improve the performance and efficiency of our grids. 

We are all too aware that the world often faces difficult policy trade-offs. But laws or regulations that facilitate the use of ATTs can quickly expand the grid and save consumers money. They should be an easy yes on both sides of the aisle.

Brian Deese is an innovation fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and served as director of the White House National Economic Council from 2021 to 2023. Rob Gramlich is founder and president of Grid Strategies and was economic advisor to the chairman of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission during the George W. Bush administration.

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Mar 1 2025
The best time to stop a battery fire? Before it starts.

This article is from The Spark, MIT Technology Review’s weekly climate newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Wednesday, sign up here.

Flames erupted last Tuesday amid the burned wreckage of the battery storage facility at Moss Landing Power Plant. It happened after a major fire there burned for days and then went quiet for weeks.

The reignition is yet another reminder of how difficult fires in lithium-ion batteries can be to deal with. They burn hotter than other fires—and even when it looks as if the danger has passed, they can reignite.

As these batteries become more prevalent, first responders are learning a whole new playbook for what to do when they catch fire, as a new story from our latest print magazine points out. Let’s talk about what makes battery fires a new challenge, and what it means for the devices, vehicles, and grid storage facilities that rely on them.

“Fires in batteries are pretty nasty,” says Nadim Maluf, CEO and cofounder of Qnovo, a company that develops battery management systems and analytics.

While first responders might be able to quickly douse a fire in a gas-powered vehicle with a hose, fighting an EV fire can require much more water. Often, it’s better to just let battery fires burn out on their own, as Maya Kapoor outlines in her story for MIT Technology Review. And as one expert pointed out in that story, until a battery is dismantled and recycled, “it’s always going to be a hazard.”

One very clear example of that is last week’s reignition at Moss Landing, the world’s biggest battery storage project. In mid-January, a battery fire destroyed a significant part of a 300-megawatt grid storage array. 

The site has been quiet for weeks, but residents in the area got an alert last Tuesday night urging them to stay indoors and close windows. Vistra, the owner of Moss Landing Power Plant, didn’t respond to written questions for this story but said in a public statement that flames were spotted at the facility on Tuesday and the fire had burned itself out by Wednesday morning.

Even after a battery burns, some of the cells can still hold charge, Maluf says, and in a large storage installation on the grid, there can be a whole lot of stored energy that can spark new blazes or pose a danger to cleanup crews long after the initial fire.

Vistra is currently in the process of de-linking batteries at Moss Landing, according to a website the company set up to share information about the fire and aftermath. The process involves unhooking the electrical connections between batteries, which reduces the risk of future problems. De-linking work began on February 22 and should take a couple of weeks to complete.

Even as crews work to limit future danger from the site, we still don’t know why a fire started at Moss Landing in the first place. Vistra’s site says an investigation is underway and that it’s working with local officials to learn more.

Battery fires can start when cells get waterlogged or punctured, but they can also spark during normal use, if a small manufacturing defect goes unnoticed and develops into a problem. 

Remember when Samsung Galaxy Note phones were banned from planes because they kept bursting into flames? That was the result of a manufacturing defect that could lead to short-circuiting in some scenarios. (A short-circuit basically happens when the two separate electrodes of a battery come into contact, allowing an uncontrolled flow of electricity that can release heat and start fires.)

And then there’s the infamous Chevy Bolt—those vehicles were all recalled because of fire risk. The issues were also traced back to a manufacturing issue that caused cells to short-circuit. 

One piece of battery safety is designing EV packs and large stationary storage arrays so that fires can be slowed down and isolated when they do occur. There have been major improvements in fire suppression measures in recent years, and first responders are starting to better understand how to deal with battery fires that get out of hand. 

Ultimately, though, preventing fires before they occur is the goal. It’s a hard job. Identifying manufacturing defects can be like searching for a needle in a haystack, Maluf says. Battery chemistry and cell design are complicated, and the tiniest problem can lead to a major issue down the road. 

But fire prevention is important to gain public trust, and investing in safety improvements is worth it, because we need these devices more than ever. Batteries are going to be crucial in efforts to clean up our power grid and the transportation sector.

“I don’t believe the answer is stopping these projects,” Maluf says. “That train has left the station.”

Now read the rest of The Spark

Related reading

For more on the Moss Landing Power Plant fire, catch up with my newsletter from a couple of weeks ago. 

Batteries are a “master key” technology, meaning they can unlock other tech that helps cut emissions, according to a 2024 report from the International Energy Agency. Read more about the current state of batteries in this story from last year. 

New York City is interested in battery swapping as a solution for e-bike fires, as I covered last year. 

Keeping up with climate

BP Is dropping its target of increasing renewables by 20-fold by 2030. The company is refocusing on fossil fuels after concerns about earnings. Booooo. (Reuters)

This refinery planned to be a hub for alternative jet fuels in the US. Now the project is on shaky ground after the Trump administration has begun trying to claw back funding from the Inflation Reduction Act. (Wired)
→ Alternative jet fuels are one of our 10 Breakthrough Technologies of 2025. As I covered, the fuels will be a challenge to scale, and that’s even more true if federal funding falls through. (MIT Technology Review)

Chinese EVs are growing in popularity in Nigeria. Gas-powered cars are getting more expensive to run, making electric ones attractive, even as much of the country struggles to get consistent access to electricity. (Bloomberg)

EV chargers at federal buildings are being taken out of service—the agency that runs federal buildings says they aren’t “mission critical.” This one boggles my mind—these chargers are already paid for and installed. What a waste. (The Verge)

Congestion pricing that charges drivers entering the busiest parts of Manhattan has cut traffic, and now the program is hitting revenue goals, raising over $48 million in the first month. Expect more drama to come, though, as the Trump administration recently revoked authorization for the plan, and the MTA followed up with a lawsuit. (New York Times)

New skyscrapers are designed to withstand hurricanes, but the buildings may fare poorly in less intense wind storms, according to a new study. (The Guardian)

Ten new battery factories are scheduled to come online this year in the US. The industry is entering an uncertain time, especially with the new administration—will this be a battery boom or a battery bust? (Inside Climate News)

Proposed renewable-energy projects in northern Colombia are being met with opposition from Indigenous communities in the region. The area could generate 15 gigawatts of electricity, but local leaders say that they haven’t been consulted about development. (Associated Press)

This farm in Virginia is testing out multiple methods designed to pull carbon out of the air at once. Spreading rock dust, compost, and biochar on fields can help improve yields and store carbon. (New Scientist)

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Feb 21 2025
What’s driving electricity demand? It isn’t just AI and data centers.

This article is from The Spark, MIT Technology Review’s weekly climate newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Wednesday, sign up here.

Electricity demand rose by 4.3% in 2024 and will continue to grow at close to 4% annually through 2027, according to a new report from the International Energy Agency. 

If that sounds familiar, it may be because there’s been a constant stream of headlines about energy demand recently, largely because of the influx of data centers—especially those needed to power the AI that’s spreading seemingly everywhere. These technologies are sucking up more power from the grid, but they’re just a small part of a much larger story. 

What’s actually behind this demand growth is complicated. Much of the increase comes from China, India, and Southeast Asia. Air-conditioning, electric vehicles, and factories all play a role. And of course, we can’t entirely discount the data centers. Here are a few key things to know about global electricity in 2025, and where things are going next.

China, India, and Southeast Asia are the ones to watch.

Between now and 2027, about 85% of electricity demand growth is expected to come from developing and emerging economies. China is an especially major force, having accounted for over half of global electricity demand growth last year.

The influence of even individual sectors in China is staggering. For example, in 2024, about 300 terawatt-hours’ worth of electricity was used just to produce solar modules, batteries, and electric vehicles. That’s as much electricity as Italy uses in a year. And this sector is growing quickly. 

A boom in heavy industry, an increase in the number of air conditioners, and a robust electric-vehicle market are all adding to China’s power demand. India and Southeast Asia are also going to have above-average increases in demand, driven by economic growth and increased adoption of air conditioners. 

And there’s a lot of growth yet to come, as 600 million people across Africa still don’t have access to reliable electricity.

Data centers are a somewhat minor factor globally, but they can’t be counted out.

According to another IEA projection published last year, data centers are expected to account for less than 10% of global electricity demand growth between now and 2030. That’s less than the expected growth due to other contributors like electric vehicles, air conditioners, and heavy industry.

However, data centers are a major storyline for advanced economies like the US and many countries in Europe. As a group, these nations have largely seen flat or declining electricity demand for the last 15 years, in part because of efficiency improvements. Data centers are reversing that trend.

Take the US, for example. The IEA report points to other research showing that the 10 states hosting the most data center growth saw a 10% increase in electricity demand between 2019 and 2023. Demand in the other 40 states declined by about 3% over the same period.

One caveat here is that nobody knows for sure what’s going to happen with data centers in the future, particularly those needed to run AI. Projections are all over the place, and small changes could drastically alter the amount of energy required for the technology. (See the DeepSeek drama.)

One bit I found interesting here is that China could see data centers emerge as yet another source of growing electricity demand in the future, with demand projected to double between now and 2027 (though, again, it’s all quite uncertain).

What this all means for climate change is complicated.

Growth in electricity demand can be seen as a good thing for our climate. Using a heat pump rather than a natural-gas heating system can help reduce emissions even as it increases electricity use. But as we add demand to the grid, it’s important to remember that in many places, it’s still largely reliant on fossil fuels.

The good news in all this is that there’s enough expansion in renewable and low-emissions electricity sources to cover the growth in demand. The rapid deployment of solar power alone contributes enough energy to cover half the demand growth expected through 2027. Nuclear power is also expected to see new heights soon, with recovery in France, restarts in Japan, and new reactors in China and India adding to a stronger global industry.

However, just adding renewables to meet electricity demand doesn’t automatically pull fossil fuels off the grid; existing coal and natural-gas plants are still chugging along all over the world. To make a dent in emissions, low-carbon sources need to grow fast enough not only to meet new demand, but to replace existing dirtier sources.

It isn’t inherently bad that the grid is growing. More people having air-conditioning and more factories making solar panels are all firmly in the “positive” column, I’d argue. But keeping up with this breakneck pace of demand growth is going to be a challenge—one that could have major effects on our ability to cut emissions. 

Now read the rest of The Spark

Related reading

Transmission equipment is key to getting more power to more people. Here’s why one developer won’t quit fighting to connect US grids, as reported by my colleague James Temple.

Virtual power plants could help meet growing electricity demand for EVs in China, as Zeyi Yang lays out in this story.

Power demand from data centers is rising, and so are emissions. They’re set to climb even higher, as James O’Donnell explains in this story from December.

robot made with humanoid head, car engine, chassis, wheels and industrial robot arms holds an electric drill and smaller car.

STEPHANIE ARNETT/MIT TECHNOLOGY REVIEW

Another thing

Competition is stiff in China’s EV market, so some automakers are pivoting to humanoid robots. With profit margins dropping for electrified vehicles, financial necessity is driving creativity, as my new colleague Caiwei Chen explains in her latest story. 

Keeping up with climate

The Trump administration has frozen funds and set hiring restrictions, and that could leave the US vulnerable to wildfire. (ProPublica)

US tariffs on imported steel and aluminum are set to go into effect next month, and they could be a problem for key grid equipment. The metals are used in transformers, which are in short supply. (Heatmap)

A maker of alternative jet fuel will get access to a $1.44 billion loan it was promised earlier this year. The Trump administration is exploring canceling promised financing, but this loan went ahead after a local representative pressured the White House. (Canary Media)

A third-generation oil and gas worker has pivoted to focus on drilling for geothermal systems. This Q&A is a fascinating look at what it might look like for more workers to move from fossil fuels to renewables. (Inside Climate News)

The Trump administration is working to fast-track hundreds of fossil-fuel projects. The US Army Corps of Engineers is speeding up permits using an emergency designation. (New York Times)

Japan’s government is adopting new climate targets. The country aims to cut greenhouse-gas emissions by more than 70% from 2013 levels over the next 15 years and reach net zero by 2050. Expansion of renewables and nuclear power will be key in the plan. (Associated Press)

A funding freeze has caused a whole lot of confusion about the state of federal financing for EV chargers in the US. But there’s still progress on building chargers, both from government funds already committed and from the private sector. (Wired)

The US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) is the latest target of the Trump administration’s cuts. NOAA provides weather forecasts, and private industry is reliant on the agency’s data. (Bloomberg)

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