Apr 21 2024
How to build a thermal battery

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

The votes have been tallied, and the results are in. The winner of the 11th Breakthrough Technology, 2024 edition, is … drumroll please … thermal batteries! 

While the editors of MIT Technology Review choose the annual list of 10 Breakthrough Technologies, in 2022 we started having readers weigh in on an 11th technology. And I don’t mean to flatter you, but I think you picked a fascinating one this year. 

Thermal energy storage is a convenient way to stockpile energy for later. This could be crucial in connecting cheap but inconsistent renewable energy with industrial facilities, which often require a constant supply of heat. 

I wrote about why this technology is having a moment, and where it might wind up being used, in a story published Monday. For the newsletter this week, let’s take a deeper look at the different kinds of thermal batteries out there, because there’s a wide world of possibilities. 

Step 1: Choose your energy source

In the journey to build a thermal battery, the crucial first step is to choose where your heat comes from. Most of the companies I’ve come across are building some sort of power-to-heat system, meaning electricity goes in and heat comes out. Heat often gets generated by running a current through a resistive material in a process similar to what happens when you turn on a toaster.

Some projects may take electricity directly from sources like wind turbines or solar panels that aren’t hooked up to the grid. That could reduce energy costs, since you don’t have to pay surcharges built into grid electricity rates, explains Jeffrey Rissman, senior director of industry at Energy Innovation, a policy and research firm specializing in energy and climate. 

Otherwise, thermal batteries can be hooked up to the grid directly. These systems could allow a facility to charge up when electricity prices are low or when there’s a lot of renewable energy on the grid. 

Some thermal storage systems are soaking up waste heat rather than relying on electricity. Brenmiller Energy, for example, is building thermal batteries that can be charged up with heat or electricity, depending on the customer’s needs. 

Depending on the heat source, systems using waste heat may not be able to reach temperatures as high as their electricity-powered counterparts, but they could help increase the efficiency of facilities that would otherwise waste that energy. There’s especially high potential for high-temperature processes, like cement and steel production. 

Step 2: Choose your storage material

Next up: pick out a heat storage medium. These materials should probably be inexpensive and able to reach and withstand high temperatures. 

Bricks and carbon blocks are popular choices, as they can be packed together and, depending on the material, reach temperatures well over 1,000 °C (1,800 °F). Rondo Energy, Antora Energy, and Electrified Thermal Solutions are among the companies using blocks and bricks to store heat at these high temperatures. 

Crushed-up rocks are another option, and the storage medium of choice for Brenmiller Energy. Caldera is using a mixture of aluminum and crushed rock. 

Molten materials can offer even more options for delivering thermal energy later, since they can be pumped around (though this can also add more complexity to the system). Malta is building thermal storage systems that use molten salt, and companies like Fourth Power are using systems that rely in part on molten metals. 

Step 3: Choose your delivery method

Last, and perhaps most important, is deciding how to get energy back out of your storage system. Generally, thermal storage systems can deliver heat, use it to generate electricity, or go with some combination of the two. 

Delivering heat is the most straightforward option. Typically, air or another gas gets blown over the hot thermal storage material, and that heated gas can be used to warm up equipment or to generate steam. 

Some companies are working to use heat storage to deliver electricity instead. This could allow thermal storage systems to play a role not only in industry but potentially on the electrical grid as an electricity storage solution. One downside? These systems generally take a hit on efficiency, the amount of energy that can be returned from storage. But they may be right for some situations, such as facilities that need both heat and electricity on demand. Antora Energy is aiming to use thermophotovoltaic materials to turn heat stored in its carbon blocks back into electricity. 

Some companies plan to offer a middle path, delivering a combination of heat and electricity, depending on what a facility needs. Rondo Energy’s heat batteries can deliver high-pressure steam that can be used either for heating alone or to generate some electricity using cogeneration units. 

The possibilities are seemingly endless for thermal batteries, and I’m seeing new players with new ideas all the time. Stay tuned for much more coverage of this hot technology (sorry, I had to). 

Now read the rest of The Spark

Related reading

Read more about why thermal batteries won the title of 11th breakthrough technology in my story from Monday.

I first wrote about heat as energy storage in this piece last year. As I put it then: the hottest new climate technology is bricks. 

Companies have made some progress in scaling up thermal batteries—our former fellow June Kim wrote about one new manufacturing facility in October.

VIRGINIA HANUSIK

Another thing

The state of Louisiana in the southeast US has lost over a million acres of its coast to erosion. A pilot project aims to save some homes in the state by raising them up to avoid the worst of flooding. 

It’s an ambitious attempt to build a solution to a crisis, and the effort could help keep communities together. But some experts worry that elevation projects offer too rosy an outlook and think we need to focus on relocation instead. Read more in this fascinating feature story from Xander Peters.

Keeping up with climate  

It can be easy to forget, but we’ve actually already made a lot of progress on addressing climate change. A decade ago, the world was on track for about 3.7 °C of warming over preindustrial levels. Today, it’s 2.7 °C with current actions and policies—higher than it should be but lower than it might have been. (Cipher News)

We’re probably going to have more batteries than we actually need for a while. Today, China alone makes enough batteries to satisfy global demand, which could make things tough for new players in the battery game. (Bloomberg) 

2023 was a record year for wind power. The world installed 117 gigawatts of new capacity last year, 50% more than the year before. (Associated Press)

→ Here’s what’s coming next for offshore wind. (MIT Technology Review)

Coal power grew in 2023, driven by a surge of new plants coming online in China and a slowdown of retirements in Europe and the US. (New York Times)

People who live near solar farms generally have positive feelings about their electricity-producing neighbors. There’s more negative sentiment among people who live very close to the biggest projects, though. (Inside Climate News)

E-scooters have been zipping through city streets for eight years, but they haven’t exactly ushered in the zero-emissions micro-mobility future that some had hoped for. Shared scooters can cut emissions, but it all depends on rider behavior and company practices. (Grist)

The grid could use a renovation. Replacing existing power lines with new materials could double grid capacity in many parts of the US, clearing the way for more renewables. (New York Times) 

The first all-electric tugboat in the US is about to launch in San Diego. The small boats are crucial to help larger vessels in and around ports, and the fossil-fuel-powered ones are a climate nightmare. (Canary Media)

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Apr 14 2024
The inadvertent geoengineering experiment that the world is now shutting off

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

Usually when we talk about climate change, the focus is squarely on the role that greenhouse-gas emissions play in driving up global temperatures, and rightly so. But another important, less-known phenomenon is also heating up the planet: reductions in other types of pollution.

In particular, the world’s power plants, factories, and ships are pumping much less sulfur dioxide into the air, thanks to an increasingly strict set of global pollution regulations. Sulfur dioxide creates aerosol particles in the atmosphere that can directly reflect sunlight back into space or act as the “condensation nuclei” around which cloud droplets form. More or thicker clouds, in turn, also cast away more sunlight. So when we clean up pollution, we also ease this cooling effect. 

Before we go any further, let me stress: cutting air pollution is smart public policy that has unequivocally saved lives and prevented terrible suffering. 

The fine particulate matter produced by burning coal, gas, wood, and other biomatter is responsible for millions of premature deaths every year through cardiovascular disease, respiratory illnesses, and various forms of cancer, studies consistently show. Sulfur dioxide causes asthma and other respiratory problems, contributes to acid rain, and depletes the protective ozone layer. 

But as the world rapidly warms, it’s critical to understand the impact of pollution-fighting regulations on the global thermostat as well. Scientists have baked the drop-off of this cooling effect into net warming projections for the coming decades, but they’re also striving to obtain a clearer picture of just how big a role declining pollution will play.

A new study found that reductions in emissions of sulfur dioxide and other pollutants are responsible for about 38%, as a middle estimate, of the increased “radiative forcing” observed on the planet between 2001 and 2019. 

An increase in radiative forcing means that more energy is entering the atmosphere than leaving it, as Kerry Emanuel, a professor of atmospheric science at MIT, lays out in a handy explainer here. As that balance has shifted in recent decades, the difference has been absorbed by the oceans and atmosphere, which is what is warming up the planet. 

The remainder of the increase is “mainly” attributable to continued rising emissions of heat-trapping greenhouse gases, says Øivind Hodnebrog, a researcher at the Center for International Climate and Environment Research in Norway and lead author of the paper, which relied on climate models, sea-surface temperature readings, and satellite observations.

The study underscores the fact that as carbon dioxide, methane, and other gases continue to drive up temperature​​s, parallel reductions in air pollution are revealing more of that additional warming, says Zeke Hausfather, a scientist at the independent research organization Berkeley Earth. And it’s happening at a point when, by most accounts, global warming is about to begin accelerating or has already started to do so. (There’s ongoing debate over whether researchers can yet detect that acceleration and whether the world is now warming faster than researchers had expected.)

Because of the cutoff date, the study did not capture a more recent contributor to these trends. Starting in 2020, under new regulations from the International Maritime Organization, commercial shipping vessels have also had to steeply reduce the sulfur content in fuels. Studies have already detected a decrease in the formation of “ship tracks,” or the lines of clouds that often form above busy shipping routes. 

Again, this is a good thing in the most important way: maritime pollution alone is responsible for tens of thousands of early deaths every year. But even so, I have seen and heard of suggestions that perhaps we should slow down or alter the implementation of some of these pollution policies, given the declining cooling effect.

A 2013 study explored one way to potentially balance the harms and benefits. The researchers simulated a scenario in which the maritime industry would be required to use very low-sulfur fuels around coastlines, where the pollution has the biggest effect on mortality and health. But then the vessels would double the fuel’s sulfur content when crossing the open ocean. 

In that hypothetical world, the cooling effect was a bit stronger and premature deaths declined by 69% with respect to figures at the time, delivering a considerable public health improvement. But notably, under a scenario in which low-sulfur fuels were required across the board, mortality declined by 96%, a difference of more than 13,000 preventable deaths every year.

Now that the rules are in place and the industry is running on low-sulfur fuels, intentionally reintroducing pollution over the oceans would be a far more controversial matter.

While society basically accepted for well over a century that ships were inadvertently emitting sulfur dioxide into the air, flipping those emissions back on for the purpose of easing global warming would amount to a form of solar geoengineering, a deliberate effort to tweak the climate system.

Many think such planetary interventions are far too powerful and unpredictable for us to muck around with. And to be sure, this particular approach would be one of the more ineffective, dangerous, and expensive ways to carry out solar geoengineering, if the world ever decided it should be done at all. The far more commonly studied concept is emitting sulfur dioxide high in the stratosphere, where it would persist for longer and, as a bonus, not be inhaled by humans. 

On an episode of the Energy vs. Climate podcast last fall, David Keith, a professor at the University of Chicago who has closely studied the topic, said that it may be possible to slowly implement solar geoengineering in the stratosphere as a means of balancing out the reduced cooling occurring from sulfur dioxide emissions in the troposphere.

“The kind of solar geoengineering ideas that people are talking about seriously would be a thin wedge that would, for example, start replacing what was happening with the added warming we have from unmasking the aerosol cooling from shipping,” he said. 

Positioning the use of solar geoengineering as a means of merely replacing a cruder form that the world was shutting down offers a somewhat different mental framing for the concept—though certainly not one that would address all the deep concerns and fierce criticisms.

Now read the rest of The Spark 

Read more from MIT Technology Review’s archive: 

Back in 2018, I wrote a piece about the maritime rules that were then in the works and the likelihood that they would fuel additional global warming, noting that we were “about to kill a massive, unintentional” experiment in solar geoengineering.

Another thing

Speaking of the concerns about solar geoengineering, late last week I published a deep dive into Harvard’s unsuccessful, decade-long effort to launch a high-altitude balloon to conduct a tiny experiment in the stratosphere. I asked a handful of people who were involved in the project or followed it closely for their insights into what unfolded, the lessons that can be drawn from the episode—and their thoughts on what it means for geoengineering research moving forward.

Keeping up with Climate 

Yup, as the industry predicted (and common sense would suggest), this week’s solar eclipse dramatically cut solar power production across North America. But for the most part, grid operators were able to manage their systems smoothly, minus a few price spikes, thanks in part to a steady buildout of battery banks and the availability of other sources like natural gas and hydropower. (Heatmap)

There’s been a pile-up of bad news for Tesla in recent days. First, the company badly missed analyst expectations for vehicle deliveries during the first quarter. Then, Reuters reported that the EV giant has canceled plans for a low-cost, mass-market car. That may have something to do with the move to “prioritize the development of a robotaxi,” which the Wall Street Journal then wrote about. Over on X, Elon Musk denied the Reuters story, sort of—posting that “Reuters is lying (again).” But there’s a growing sense that his transformation into a “far-right activist” is exacting an increasingly high cost on his personal and business brands. (Wall Street Journal)

In a landmark ruling this week, the European Court of Human Rights determined that by not taking adequate steps to address the dangers of climate change, including increasingly severe heat waves that put the elderly at particular risk, Switzerland had violated the human rights of a group of older Swiss women who had brought a case against the country. Legal experts say the ruling creates a precedent that could unleash many similar cases across Europe. (The Guardian)

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Apr 7 2024
Why the lifetime of nuclear plants is getting longer

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

Aging can be scary. As you get older, you might not be able to do everything you used to, and it can be hard to keep up with the changing times. Just ask nuclear reactors.

The average age of reactors in nuclear power plants around the world is creeping up. In the US, which has more operating reactors than any other country, the average reactor is 42 years old, as of 2023. Nearly 90% of reactors in Europe have been around for 30 years or more. 

Older reactors, especially smaller ones, have been shut down in droves due to economic pressures, particularly in areas with other inexpensive sources of electricity, like cheap natural gas. But there could still be a lot of life left in older nuclear reactors. 

The new owner of a plant in Michigan that was shut down in 2022 is now working to reopen it, as I reported in my latest story. If the restart is successful, the plant could operate for a total of 80 years. Others are seeing 20-year extensions to their reactors’ licenses. Extending the lifetime of existing nuclear plants could help cut emissions and is generally cheaper than building new ones. So just how long can we expect nuclear power plants to last? 

In the US, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) licenses nuclear reactors for 40-year operating lifespans. But plants can certainly operate longer than that, and many do. 

The 40-year timeline wasn’t designed to put an endpoint on a plant’s life, says Patrick White, research director at the Nuclear Innovation Alliance, a nonprofit think tank. Rather, it was meant to ensure that plants would be able to operate long enough to make back the money invested in building them, he says. 

The NRC has granted 20-year license extensions to much of the existing US nuclear fleet, allowing them to operate for 60 years. Now some operators are applying for an additional extension. A handful of reactors have already been approved to operate for a total of 80 years, including two units at Turkey Point in Florida. Getting those extensions has been bumpy, though. The NRC has since partially walked back some of its approvals and is requiring several of the previously approved sites to go through additional environmental reviews using more recent data. 

And while the oldest operating reactors in the world today are only 54, there’s already early research investigating extending lifetimes to 100 years, White says. 

The reality is that a nuclear power plant has very few truly life-limiting components. Equipment like pumps, valves, and heat exchangers in the water cooling system and support infrastructure can all be maintained, repaired, or replaced. They might even get upgraded as technology improves to help a plant generate electricity more efficiently. 

Two main components determine a plant’s lifetime: the reactor pressure vessel and the containment structure, says Jacopo Buongiorno, a professor of nuclear engineering at MIT. 

  • The reactor pressure vessel is the heart of a nuclear power plant, containing the reactor core as well as the associated cooling system. The structure must keep the reactor core at a high temperature and pressure without leaking. 
  • The containment structure is a shell around the nuclear reactor. It is designed to be airtight and to keep any radioactive material contained in an emergency. 

Both components are crucial to the safe operation of a nuclear power plant and are generally too expensive or too difficult to replace. So as regulators examine applications for extending plant lifetimes, they are the most concerned about the condition and lifespan of those components, Buongiorno says. 

Researchers are searching for new ways to tackle issues that have threatened to take some plants offline, like the corrosion that chewed through reactor components in one Ohio plant, causing it to be closed for two years. New ways of monitoring the materials inside nuclear power plants, as well as new materials that resist degradation, could help reactors operate more safely, for longer. 

Extending the lifetime of nuclear plants could help the world meet clean energy and climate goals. 

In some places, shutting down nuclear power plants can result in more carbon pollution as fossil fuels are brought in to fill the gap. When New York shut down its Indian Point nuclear plant in 2021, natural gas use spiked and greenhouse gas emissions rose. 

Germany shut down the last of its nuclear reactors in 2023, and the country’s emissions have fallen to a record low, though some experts say most of that drop has more to do with an economic slowdown than increasing use of renewables like wind and solar. 

Extending the global nuclear fleet’s lifetime by 10 years would add 26,000 terawatt-hours of low carbon electricity to the grid over the coming decades, according to a report from the International Atomic Energy Agency. That adds up to roughly a year’s worth of current global electricity demand. That could help cut emissions while the world expands low-carbon power capacity. 

So when it comes to cleaning up the power grid, there’s value in respecting your elders, including nuclear reactors. 

Now read the rest of The Spark

Related reading

A nuclear power plant in Michigan could be the first reactor in the US to reenter operation after shutting down, as I wrote in my latest story. 

Germany shut down the last of its nuclear reactors in 2023 after years of controversy in the country. Read more in our newsletter from last April.  

The next generation of nuclear reactors is getting more advanced. Kairos Power is working on cooling its reactors with salt instead of pressurized water, as I reported in January. 

Another thing

A total solar eclipse will sweep across the US on Monday, April 8. Yes, it will affect solar power, especially in states like Texas that have installed a lot of solar capacity since the 2017 eclipse. No, it probably won’t be a big issue for utilities, which are able to plan far in advance for the short dip in solar capacity. Read more in this story from Business Insider. 

Keeping up with climate  

Tesla’s EV sales slipped in the first quarter compared to last year. The automaker still outsold Chinese EV giant BYD, which briefly held the crown for EV sales in late 2023. (New York Times)

A startup is making cleaner steel in a commercial prototype. Electra wants to help tackle the 7% of global emissions that come from producing the material. (Bloomberg)

Burying plant waste can help remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. But there are problems with biomass burial, a growing trend in carbon removal. (Canary Media)

Shareholders are voting on whether recycling labels on Kraft Heinz products are deceptive. It’s part of a growing pushback against companies overselling the recyclability of their packaging. (Inside Climate News)

→ Think your plastic is being recycled? Think again. (MIT Technology Review)

Soil in Australia is shaping up to be a major climate problem. While soil is often pitched as a way to soak up carbon emissions, agriculture practices and changing weather conditions are turning things around. (The Guardian)

Two climate journalists attempted to ditch natural gas in their home. But electrification turned into quite the saga, illustrating some of the problems with efforts to decarbonize buildings. (Grist)

Solar panels are getting so cheap, some homes in Europe are sticking them on fences. With costs having more to do with installation than the cost of solar panels, we could see them going up in increasingly quirky places. (Financial Times)

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Mar 30 2024
What to expect if you’re expecting a plug-in hybrid

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

If you’ve ever eaten at a fusion restaurant or seen an episode of Glee, you know a mashup can be a wonderful thing. 

Plug-in hybrid vehicles should be the mashup that the auto industry needs right now. They can run a short distance on a small battery in electric mode or take on longer drives with a secondary fuel, cutting emissions without asking people to commit to a fully electric vehicle.

But all that freedom can come with a bit of a complication: plug-in hybrids are what drivers make them. That can wind up being a bad thing because people tend to use electric mode less than expected, meaning emissions from the vehicles are higher than anticipated, as I covered in my latest story.

So are you a good match for a plug-in hybrid? Here’s what you should know about the vehicles.

Electric range is limited, and conditions matter

Plug-in hybrids have a very modest battery, and that’s reflected in their range. Models for sale today can generally get somewhere between 25 and 40 miles of electric driving (that’s 40 to 65 kilometers), with a few options getting up to around the 50-mile (80 km) mark.

But winter conditions can cut into that range. Even gas-powered vehicles see fuel economy drop in cold weather, but electric vehicles tend to take a harder hit. Battery-powered vehicles can see a 25% reduction in range in freezing temperatures, or even more depending on how hard the heaters need to work and what sort of driving you’re doing.

In the case of a plug-in hybrid with a small battery, these range cuts can be noticeable even for modest commutes. I spoke with one researcher for a story in 2022 who told me that he uses his plug-in hybrid in electric mode constantly for about nine months out of the year. Charging once overnight gets him to and from his job most of the time, but in the winter, his range shrinks enough to require gas for part of the trip.

It might not be a problem for you lucky folks in California or the south of Spain, but if you’re in a colder climate, you might want to take these range limitations into account. Parking in a warmer place like a garage can help, and you can even preheat your vehicle while it’s plugged in to extend your range.

Charging is a key consideration

Realistically, if you don’t have the ability to charge consistently at home, a plug-in hybrid may not be the best choice for you.

EV drivers who don’t live in single-family homes with attached garages can get creative with charging. Some New York City drivers I’ve spoken with rely entirely on public fast chargers, stopping for half an hour or so to juice up their vehicles as needed.

But plug-in hybrids generally aren’t equipped to handle fast charging speeds, so forget about plugging in at a Supercharger. The vehicles are probably best for people who have access to a charger at home, in a parking garage, or at work. Depending on battery capacity, charging a plug-in hybrid can take about eight hours on a level 1 charger, and two to three hours on a level 2 charger. 

Most drivers with plug-in hybrids wind up charging them less than what official estimates suggest. That means on average, drivers are producing more emissions than they might expect and probably spending more on fuel, too. For more on setting expectations around plug-in hybrids, read more in my latest story here.

We could see better plug-in models soon (in some places, at least)

For US drivers, state regulations could mean that plug-in offerings could expand soon.  

California recently adopted rules that require manufacturers to sell a higher proportion of low-emissions vehicles. Beginning in 2026, automakers will need clean vehicles to represent 35% of sales, ramping up to 100% in 2035. Several other states have hopped on board with the regulations, including New York, Massachusetts, and Washington.

Plug-in hybrids can qualify under the California rules, but only if they have at least 50 miles (80 km) of electric driving range. That means that we could be seeing more long-range plug-in options very soon, says Aaron Isenstadt, a senior researcher at the International Council on Clean Transportation.

Some other governments aren’t supporting plug-in hybrids, or are actively pushing drivers away from the vehicles and toward fully electric options. The European Union will end sales of gas-powered cars in 2035, including all types of hybrids.

Ultimately, plug-in hybrid vehicles can help reduce emissions from road transportation in the near term, especially for drivers who aren’t ready or willing to make the jump to fully electric cars just yet. But eventually, we’ll need to move on from compromises to fully zero-emissions options.  

Now read the rest of The Spark

Related reading

Real-world driving habits can get in the way of the theoretical benefits of plug-in hybrids. For more on why drivers might be the problem, give my latest story a read. 

Plug-in hybrids probably aren’t going away anytime soon, as I wrote in December 2022. 

Still have questions about hybrids and electric vehicles? I answered a few of them for a recent newsletter. Check it out here.

Another thing

China has emerged as a dominant force in climate technology, especially in the world of electric vehicles. If you want to dig into how that happened, and what it means for the future of addressing climate change, check out the latest in our Roundtables series here. 

For a sampling of what my colleagues got into in this conversation, check out this story from Zeyi Yang about how China came to lead the world in EVs, and this one about how EV giant BYD is getting into shipping. 

Keeping up with climate  

The US Department of Energy just awarded $6 billion to 33 projects aimed at decarbonizing industry, from cement and steel to paper and food. (Canary Media)

→ Among the winners: Sublime Systems and Brimstone, two startups working on alternative cement. Read more about climate’s hardest problem in my January feature story. (MIT Technology Review)

In the latest in concerning insurance news, State Farm announced it won’t be renewing policies for 72,000 property owners in California. As fire seasons get worse, insuring properties gets riskier. (Los Angeles Times)

Surprise! Big fossil-fuel companies aren’t aligned with goals to limit global warming. A think tank assessed the companies’ plans and found that despite splashy promises, none of the 25 largest oil and gas companies meet targets set by the Paris Agreement. (The Guardian)

An AI model can predict flooding five days in advance. This and other AI tools could help better forecast dangerous scenarios in remote places with fewer flood gauges. (Bloomberg)

Boeing’s 737 Max planes have been all over the news with incidents including a door flying off on a recent Alaska Airlines flight. Some experts say the problems can be traced back in part to the company’s corner-cutting on sustainability efforts. (Heated)

In Denver, e-bike vouchers get snapped up like Taylor Swift tickets. The city is aiming to lower the cost of the vehicles for residents in an effort to reduce the total number of car trips. It’s obviously a popular program, though some experts question whether the funding could be more effective elsewhere. (Grist)

A nuclear plant in New York was shut down in 2021—and predictably, emissions went up. It’s been a step back for clean energy in the state, as natural gas has stepped in to fill the gap. (The Guardian)

Germany used to be a solar superpower, but China has come to dominate the industry. Some domestic manufacturers aren’t giving up just yet, arguing that local production will be key to meeting ambitious clean-energy goals. (New York Times)

A company will pour 9,000 tons of sand into the sea in the name of carbon removal. Vesta’s pilot project just got a regulatory green light, and it’ll be a big step for efforts to boost the ocean’s ability to soak up carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. (Heatmap)

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Mar 24 2024
Why New York City is testing battery swapping for e-bikes

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

Spend enough time in a city and you’ll get to know its unique soundscape. In New York City, it features the echoes of car stereos, the deep grumbles of garbage truck engines, and, increasingly, the high-pitched whirring of electric bikes.

E-bikes and scooters are becoming a staple across the city’s boroughs, and e-bikes in particular are especially popular among the tens of thousands of delivery workers who zip through the streets.

On a recent cloudy afternoon in Manhattan, I joined a few dozen of them at a sign-up event for a new city program that aims to connect delivery drivers with new charging technologies. Drivers who enroll in the pilot will have access to either fast chargers or battery swapping stations for six months.

It’s part of the city’s efforts to cut down on the risk of battery fires, some of which have been sparked by e-bike batteries charging inside apartment buildings, according to the fire department. For more on the program and how it might help address fires, check out my latest story. In the meantime, here’s what I heard from delivery drivers and the startups at the kickoff event.

On a windy late-February day, I wove my way through the lines of delivery workers who showed up to the event in Manhattan’s Cooper Square. Some of them straddled their bikes in line, while others propped up their bikes in clusters. Colorful bags sporting the logos of various delivery services sprouted from their cargo racks.

City officials worked at tables under tents, assigning riders to one of the three startups that are partnering with the city for the new program. One company, Swiftmile, is building fast-charging bike racks for drivers. The other two, Popwheels and Swobbee, are aiming to bring battery swapping to the city.

Battery swapping is a growing technology in some parts of the world, but it’s not common in the US, so I was especially intrigued by the two companies who had set up battery swap cabinets.

Swobbee runs a small network of swapping stations around the world, including at its base in Germany. It is retrofitting bikes to accommodate its battery, which attaches to the rear of the bike. Popwheels is taking a slightly different approach, providing batteries that are already compatible with the majority of e-bikes delivery drivers use today, with little modification required.

I watched a Popwheels employee demonstrate the company’s battery swapping station to several newly enrolled drivers. Each one would approach the Popwheels cabinet, which is roughly the size and shape of a bookcase and has 16 numbered metal doors on the front. After they made a few taps on their smartphone, a door would swing open. Inside, there was space to slide in a used battery and a cord to plug into it. Once the battery was in the cabinet and the door had been shut, another door would open, revealing a fully charged e-bike battery the rider could unplug and slide out. Presto!

The whole process took just a minute or two—much quicker than waiting for a battery to charge. It’s similar to picking up a package from an automated locker in an upscale apartment building.

The crowd seemed to grow during the two hours I spent at the event, and the line stretched and squeezed closer to the edge of the sidewalk. I made a comment about the turnout to Baruch Herzfeld, Popwheels’ CEO and co-founder. “This is nothing,” he said. “There’s demand for 100,000 batteries in New York tomorrow.”

Indeed, New York City has roughly 60,000 delivery workers, many of whom rely on e-bikes to get around. And commuters and tourists might be interested in small, electrified vehicles. Meeting anything close to that sort of demand will take a whole lot more battery cabinets, as one can service just up to 50 riders, according to Popwheels’ estimates.

After they’d signed up and seen the battery swap demo, drivers who were ready to take batteries with them wheeled their bikes over to a few more startup employees, who helped make a slight tweak to a rail under their seats for the company’s batteries to slide into. Some adjustments required a bit of elbow grease, but I watched as one rider slid his new, freshly charged battery into place. He hopped on his bike and darted off into the bike lane, integrating into the flow of traffic.

Now read the rest of The Spark

Related reading

For more on the city’s plans for battery swapping and how they might cut fire risk, give my latest story a read.

Gogoro, one of our 15 Climate Tech Companies to Watch in 2023, operates a huge network of battery swapping stations for electric scooters, largely in Asia.

Some companies think battery swapping is an option for larger electric vehicles, too. Here’s how one startup wants to use modular, swappable batteries to get more EVs on the road.

STEPHANIE ARNETT/MITTR | SCOPEX (BALLOON)

Another thing

Harvard researchers have given up on a long-running effort to conduct a solar geoengineering experiment. 

The idea behind the technique is a simple one: scatter particles in the upper atmosphere to scatter sunlight, counteracting global warming. But related research efforts have sparked controversy. Read more in my colleague James Temple’s latest story.

Keeping up with climate  

The Biden administration finalized strict new rules for vehicle tailpipe emissions. Under the regulations, EVs are expected to make up over half of new vehicle sales by 2030. (NPR)

The first utility-scale offshore wind farm in the US is officially up and running. It’s a bright spot that could signal a turning point for the industry. (Canary Media)

→ Here’s what’s next for offshore wind. (MIT Technology Review)

The UK has big plans for heat pumps, but installations aren’t moving nearly fast enough, according to a new report. Installations need to increase more than tenfold to keep pace with goals. (The Guardian)

States across the US are proposing legislation to ban lab-grown meat. It’s the latest escalation in an increasingly weird battle over a product that basically doesn’t exist yet. (Wired)

Low-cost EVs from Chinese automakers are pushing US-based companies to reconsider their electrification strategy. More affordable EV options? A girl can dream. (Bloomberg)

→ EV prices in the US are inching down, approaching parity with gas-powered vehicles. (Washington Post)

Goodbye greenwashing, hello “greenhushing”! Corporations are increasingly going radio silent on climate commitments. (Inside Climate News)

The Summer Olympics are fast approaching, and organizers in Paris are working to reduce the event’s climate impact. Think fewer new buildings, more bike lanes. (New York Times)

Early springs mean cherry blossoms are blooming earlier than ever. Warmer winters in the future could cause an even bigger problem. (Bloomberg)

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Mar 17 2024
Why methane emissions are still a mystery

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

If you follow papers in climate and energy for long enough, you’re bound to recognize some patterns. 

There are a few things I’ll basically always see when I’m sifting through the latest climate and energy research: one study finding that perovskite solar cells are getting even more efficient; another showing that climate change is damaging an ecosystem in some strange and unexpected way. And there’s always some new paper finding that we’re still underestimating methane emissions. 

That last one is what I’ve been thinking about this week, as I’ve been reporting on a new survey of methane leaks from oil and gas operations in the US. (Yes, there are more emissions than we thought there were—get the details in my story here.) But what I find even more interesting than the consistent underestimation of methane is why this gas is so tricky to track down. 

Methane is the second most abundant greenhouse gas in the atmosphere, and it’s responsible for around 30% of global warming so far. The good news is that methane breaks down quickly in the atmosphere. The bad news is that while it’s floating around, it’s a super-powerful greenhouse gas, way more potent than carbon dioxide. (Just how much more potent is a complicated question that depends on what time scale you’re talking about—read more in this Q&A.)

The problem is, it’s difficult to figure out where all this methane is coming from. We can measure the total concentration in the atmosphere, but there are methane emissions from human activities, there are natural methane sources, and there are ecosystems that soak up a portion of all those emissions (these are called methane sinks). 

Narrowing down specific sources can be a challenge, especially in the oil and gas industry, which is responsible for a huge range of methane leaks. Some are small and come from old equipment in remote areas. Other sources are larger, spewing huge amounts of the greenhouse gas into the atmosphere but only for short times. 

A lot of stories about tracking methane have been in the news recently, mostly because of a methane-hunting satellite launched earlier this month. It’s designed to track down methane using tools called spectrometers, which measure how light is reflected and absorbed. 

This is just one of a growing number of satellites that are keeping an eye on the planet for methane emissions. Some take a wide view, spotting which regions have high emissions. Other satellites are hunting for specific sources and can see within a few dozen meters where a leak is coming from. (If you want to read more about why there are so many methane satellites, I recommend this story from Emily Pontecorvo at Heatmap.)

But methane tracking isn’t just a space game. In a new study published in Nature, researchers used nearly a million measurements taken from airplanes flown over oil- and gas-producing regions to estimate total emissions. 

The results are pretty staggering: researchers found that, on average, roughly 3% of oil and gas production at the sites they examined winds up as methane emissions. That’s about three times the official government estimates used by the US Environmental Protection Agency. 

I spoke with one of the authors of the study, Evan Sherwin, who completed the research as a postdoc at Stanford. He compared the challenge of understanding methane leaks to the parable of the blind men and the elephant: there are many pieces of the puzzle (satellites, planes, ground-based detection), and getting the complete story requires fitting them all together. 

“I think we’re really starting to see an elephant,” Sherwin told me. 

That picture will continue to get clearer as MethaneSAT and other surveillance satellites come online and researchers get to sift through the data. And that understanding will be crucial as governments around the world race to keep promises about slashing methane emissions. 

Now read the rest of The Spark

Related reading

For more on how researchers are working to understand methane emissions, give my latest story a read. 

If you’ve missed the news on methane-hunting satellites, check out this story about MethaneSAT from last month. 

Pulling methane out of the atmosphere could be a major boost for climate action. Some startups hope that spraying iron particles above the ocean could help, as my colleague James Temple wrote in December. 

five planes flying out of white puffy clouds at different angles across a blue sky, leaving contrails behind

PHOTO ILLUSTRATION | GETTY IMAGES

Another thing

Making minor changes to airplane routes could put a significant dent in emissions, and a new study found that these changes could be cheap to implement. 

The key is contrails, thin clouds that planes produce when they fly. Minimizing contrails means less warming, and changing flight paths can reduce the amount of contrail formation. Read more about how in the latest from my colleague James Temple. 

Keeping up with climate  

New rules from the US Securities and Exchange Commission were watered down, cutting off the best chance we’ve had at forcing companies to reckon with the dangers of climate change, as Dara O’Rourke writes in a new opinion piece. (MIT Technology Review)

Yes, heat pumps slash emissions, even if they’re hooked up to a pretty dirty grid. Switching to a heat pump is better than heating with fossil fuels basically everywhere in the US. (Canary Media)

Rivian announced its new R2, a small SUV set to go on sale in 2026. The reveal signals a shift to focusing on mass-market vehicles for the brand. (Heatmap)

Toyota has focused on selling hybrid vehicles instead of fully electric ones, and it’s paying off financially. (New York Times)

→ Here’s why I wrote in December 2022 that EVs wouldn’t be fully replacing hybrids anytime soon. (MIT Technology Review)

Some scientists think we should all pay more attention to tiny aquatic plants called azolla. They can fix their own nitrogen and capture a lot of carbon, making them a good candidate for crops and even biofuels. (Wired)

New York is suing the world’s largest meat company. The company has said it’ll produce meat with no emissions by 2040, a claim that is false and misleading, according to the New York attorney general’s office. (Vox)

A massive fire in Texas has destroyed hundreds of homes. Climate change has fueled dry conditions, and power equipment sparked an intense fire that firefighters struggled to contain. (Grist)

→ Many of the homes destroyed in the blaze are uninsured, creating a tough path ahead for recovery. (Texas Tribune)

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Mar 10 2024
Emissions hit a record high in 2023. Blame hydropower.

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

Hydropower is a staple of clean energy—the modern version has been around for over a century, and it’s one of the world’s largest sources of renewable electricity.

But last year, weather conditions caused hydropower to fall short in a major way, with generation dropping by a record amount. In fact, the decrease was significant enough to have a measurable effect on global emissions. Total energy-related emissions rose by about 1.1% in 2023, and a shortfall of hydroelectric power accounts for 40% of that rise, according to a new report from the International Energy Agency.

Between year-to-year weather variability and climate change, there could be rocky times ahead for hydropower. Here’s what we can expect from the power source and what it might mean for climate goals. 

Drying up

Hydroelectric power plants use moving water to generate electricity. The majority of plants today use dams to hold back water, creating reservoirs. Operators can allow water to flow through the power plant as needed, creating an energy source that can be turned on and off on demand. 

This dispatchability is a godsend for the grid, especially because some renewables, like wind and solar, aren’t quite so easy to control. (If anyone figures out how to send more sunshine my way, please let me know—I could use more of it.) 

But while most hydroelectric plants do have some level of dispatchability, the power source is still reliant on the weather, since rain and snow are generally what fills up reservoirs. That’s been a problem for the past few years, when many regions around the world have faced major droughts. 

The world actually added about 20 gigawatts of hydropower capacity in 2023, but because of weather conditions, the amount of electricity generated from hydropower fell overall.

The shortfall was especially bad in China, with generation falling by 4.9% there. North America also faced droughts that contributed to hydro’s troubles, partly because El Niño brought warmer and drier conditions. Europe was one of the few places where conditions improved in 2023—mostly because 2022 was an even worse year for drought on the continent.

As hydroelectric plants fell short, fossil fuels like coal and natural gas stepped in to fill the gap, contributing to a rise in global emissions. In total, changes in hydropower output had more of an effect on global emissions than the post-pandemic aviation industry’s growth from 2022 to 2023. 

A trickle

Some of the changes in the weather that caused falling hydropower output last year can be chalked up to expected yearly variation. But in a changing climate, a question looms: Is hydropower in trouble?

The effects of climate change on rainfall patterns can be complicated and not entirely clear. But there are a few key mechanisms by which hydropower is likely to be affected, as one 2022 review paper outlined: 

  • Rising temperatures will mean more droughts, since warmer air sucks up more moisture, causing rivers, soil, and plants to dry out more quickly. 
  • Winters will generally be warmer, meaning less snowpack and ice, which often fills up reservoirs in the early spring in places like the western US. 
  • There’s going to be more variability in precipitation, with periods of more extreme rainfall that can cause flooding (meaning water isn’t stored neatly in reservoirs for later use in a power plant).

What all this will mean for electricity generation depends on the region of the world in question. One global study from 2021 found that around half of countries with hydropower capacity could expect to see a 20% reduction in generation once per decade. Another report focused on China found that in more extreme emissions scenarios, nearly a quarter of power plants in the country could see that level of reduced generation consistently. 

It’s not likely that hydropower will slow to a mere trickle, even during dry years. But the grid of the future will need to be prepared for variations in the weather. Having a wide range of electricity sources and tying them together with transmission infrastructure over wide geographic areas will help keep the grid robust and ready for our changing climate. 

Related reading

Droughts across the western US have been cutting into hydropower for years. Here’s how changing weather could affect climate goals in California.

While adaptation can help people avoid the worst impacts of climate change, there’s a limit to how much adapting can really help, as I found when I traveled to El Paso, Texas, famously called the “drought-proof city.”

Drought is creating new challenges for herders, who have to handle a litany of threats to their animals and way of life. Access to data could be key in helping them navigate a changing world.

road closed blockade

STEPHANIE ARNETT/MITTR | ENVATO

Another thing

Chinese EVs have entered center stage in the ongoing tensions between the US and China. The vehicles could help address climate change, but the Biden administration is wary of allowing them into the market. There are two major motivations: security and the economy. Read more in my colleague Zeyi Yang’s latest newsletter here. 

Keeping up with climate  

A new satellite that launched this week will be keeping an eye on methane emissions. Tracking leaks of the powerful greenhouse gas could be key in addressing climate change. (New York Times)

→ This isn’t our first attempt at tracking greenhouse gases from space—but here’s how MethaneSAT is different from other methane-detecting satellites. (Heatmap)

Smarter charging of EVs could be essential to the grid of the future, and California is working on a new program to test it out. (Canary Media)

The magnets that power wind turbines nearly always wind up in a landfill. A new program aims to change that by supporting new methods of recycling. (Grist)

→ One company wants to do without the rare earth metals that are used in today’s powerful magnets. (MIT Technology Review)

Data centers burn through water to keep machinery cool. As more of the facilities pop up, in part to support AI tools like ChatGPT, they could stretch water supplies thin in some places. (The Atlantic)

No US state has been more enthusiastic about heat pumps than Maine. While it might seem an unlikely match—the appliances can lose some of their efficiency in the cold—the state is a success story for the technology. (New York Times)

New rules from the US Securities and Exchange Commission would require companies to report their emissions and expected climate risks. The final version is watered down from an earlier proposal, which would have included a wider variety of emissions. (Associated Press)

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Mar 1 2024
Why concerns over the sustainability of carbon removal are growing

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

There’s a looming problem in the carbon removal space.

By one count, nearly 800 companies around the world are exploring a wide variety of methods for drawing planet-warming greenhouse gas out of the atmosphere and storing it away or putting it to use, a gigantic leap from the five startups I could have named in 2019. Globally, venture investors poured more than $4 billion into this sector between 2020 and the end of last year, according to data provided by PitchBook. 

The trouble is, carbon dioxide removal (CDR) is a very expensive product that, strictly speaking, no one needs right now. It’s not a widget; it’s waste management for invisible garbage, a public good that nobody is eager to pay for.

“CDR is a pure cost, and we’re trying to force it to be something that’s profitable—and the only way you can do that is with public money or through voluntary markets,” says Emily Grubert, an associate professor at Notre Dame, who previously served as deputy assistant secretary in the US Energy Department’s Office of Carbon Management.

Both of those are playing a part to certain degrees. So far, the main markets for carbon removal come from government procurement, which is limited; government subsidies, which don’t cover the cost; and voluntary purchases by corporations and individuals, which are restricted to those willing to pay the true cost of high-quality, reliable removal. You can also use the CO2 as a feedstock in other products, but then you’re generally starting with a high-cost version of a cheap commodity.

Given these market challenges, some investors are scratching their heads as they witness the huge sums flowing into the space.

In a report last summer, the venture capital firm DCVC said that all of the approaches it evaluated faced “multiple feasibility constraints.” It noted that carbon-sucking direct-air-capture factories are particularly expensive, charging customers hundreds of dollars per ton.

“That will still likely be the case in five, seven, even 10 years—which is why we at DCVC are somewhat surprised to see hundreds of millions of dollars in capital flowing into early-stage direct air capture companies,” the authors wrote.

Rachel Slaybaugh, a DCVC partner, said of direct-air capture in the report: “I’m not saying we won’t need it. And I’m not saying there won’t eventually be good businesses here. I’m saying right now the markets are very nascent, and I don’t see how you can possibly make a venture return.” 

In background conversations, several industry insiders I’ve spoken with acknowledge that the number of carbon removal companies is simply unsustainable, and that a sizable share will flame out at some point.

The sector has taken off, in part, because a growing body of studies has found that a huge amount of carbon removal will be needed to keep rising temperatures in check. By some estimates, nations may have to remove 10 billion tons of carbon dioxide a year by midcentury to keep the planet from blowing past 2 °C of warming, or to pull it back into safer terrain.

On top of that, companies are looking for ways to meet their net-zero commitments. For now, some businesses are willing to pay the really high current costs for carbon removal, in part to help the sector scale up. These include Microsoft and companies participating in the $1 billion Frontier program. 

At the moment, I’m told, corporate demand is outstripping the availability of reliable forms of carbon removal. There are only a handful of direct-air-capture plants, which take years to construct, and companies are still testing out or scaling up other approaches, like burying biochar and pumping bio-oil deep underground.

Costs are sure to come down, but it’s always going to be relatively expensive to do this well, and there are only so many corporate customers that will be willing to pay the true cost, observers say. So as carbon removal capacity catches up with that corporate demand, the fate of the industry will increasingly depend on how much more help governments are willing to provide—and on how thoughtfully they craft any accompanying rules.

Countries may support the emerging industry through carbon trading markets, direct purchases, mandates on polluters, fuel standards, or other measures. 

It seems safe to assume that nations will continue to dangle more carrots or wield bigger sticks to help the sector along. Notably, the European Commission is developing a framework for certifying carbon dioxide removal, which could allow countries to eventually use various approaches to work toward the EU goal of climate neutrality by 2050. But it’s far from clear that such government support will grow as much and as quickly as investors hope or as entrepreneurs need.

Indeed, some observers argue it’s a “fantasy” that nations will ever fund high-quality carbon removal—on the scale of billions of tons a year—just because climate scientists said they should (see: our decades of inaction on climate change). To put it in perspective, the DCVC report notes that removing 100 billion tons at $100 a ton would add up to $10 trillion—“more than a tenth of global GDP.”

Growing financial pressures in the sector could play out in a variety of worrisome ways. 

“One possibility is there’s a bubble and it pops and a lot of investors lose their shirts,” says Danny Cullenward, a climate economist and research fellow with the Institute for Responsible Carbon Removal at American University. 

If so, that could shut down the development of otherwise promising carbon removal methods before we’ve learned how well and affordably they work (or not). 

The other danger is that when an especially frothy sector fizzles, it can turn public or political sentiment against the space and kill the appetite for further investment. This, after all, is precisely what played out after the cleantech 1.0 bubble burst. Conservatives assailed government lending to green startups, and VCs, feeling burned, backed away for the better part of a decade.

But Cullenward fears another possibility even more. As funding runs dry, startups eager to bring in revenue and expand the market may resort to selling cheaper, but less reliable, forms of carbon removal—and lobbying for looser standards to allow them.

He sees a scenario where the sector replicates the sort of widespread credibility problems that have occurred with voluntary carbon offsets, building up big marketplaces that move a lot of money around but don’t achieve all that much for the atmosphere.

Now read the rest of The Spark

Related reading

In December, I highlighted an essay by Grubert and another former DOE staffer, in which they warned that sucking down greenhouse gas to cancel out corporate emissions could come at the expense of more pressing public needs.

In an earlier piece, I explored how the energy, attention, and money flowing into carbon removal could feed unrealistic expectations about how much we can rely on it—and thus how much we can carry on emitting.

My colleague and former editor David Rotman recently dug into the hard lessons of the cleantech 1.0 boom and bust—and the high stakes of the current investment wave.

Keeping up with climate 

In a story out today, Tech Review’s Casey Crownhart explains why hydrogen vehicles may be lurching toward a dead end, as vehicle sales stagnate and fueling stations shut down. (MIT Technology Review)

A Trump victory would be bad news for climate change. In particular, I took a hard look at what it might mean for Joe Biden’s landmark law, the Inflation Reduction Act. (Short answer: nothing good.) (MIT Technology Review)

The Inflation Reduction Act includes a little-known methane fee, which kicks into effect for excess emissions in 2024. Grist reports that the US’s largest oil and gas companies could be on the hook for more than $1 billion, based on recent emissions patterns—marking another reason why, as I reported, Trump would likely try to rescind the provision. (Grist)

The US Securities and Exchange Commission could release long-awaited climate rules as soon as next week, requiring companies to disclose their corporate emissions and exposure to climate risks. Heatmap explores why the SEC is doing this and what it may mean for businesses, climate progress, and the cottage industry forming to conduct emissions accounting.  (Heatmap)

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Feb 23 2024
Three frequently asked questions about EVs, answered

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

For someone who does not own or drive a car, I sure do have a lot of thoughts about them.

I spend an inordinate amount of time thinking about transportation in general, since it’s one of the biggest areas we need to clean up to address climate change: it accounts for something like a quarter of global emissions. And the vehicles that we use to shuttle around to work, school, and the grocery store in many parts of the world are a huge piece of the problem.

Last week, MIT Technology Review hosted an event where my colleagues and I dug into a conversation about the future of batteries and the materials that go into them. We got so many great questions, and we answered quite a few of them (subscribers should check out the recording of the full event here).

But there were still a lot of questions, particularly about EVs, that we didn’t get to, so let’s take a look at a few. (I’ve edited these for length and clarity, but they came from subscribers, so thank you to everyone who submitted!)

Why is there not a bigger push for plug-in hybrids during the transition to full EVs? Could those play a role?

Hybrids are sometimes relegated to the fringes of the EV discussion, but I think they’re absolutely worth talking about. 

Before we get into this, let’s get a couple of terms straight. All hybrid vehicles use both an internal-combustion engine that burns gasoline and a battery, but there are two key types to know about. Plug-in hybrids can be charged up using an EV charger and run for short distances on electricity. Conventional hybrids have a small battery to help recapture energy that would otherwise be wasted, which boosts gas mileage, but they always run on gasoline.

Any technology that helps reduce emissions immediately can help address climate change, and even a conventional hybrid will cut emissions by something like 20%. 

Personally, I think plug-in hybrids in particular are a great option for people who can’t commit to an EV just yet. These vehicles often have a range of around 50 miles on electricity, so if you’re commuting short distances, nearly all your driving can be zero-emissions. 

Plug-ins aren’t the perfect solution, though. For one thing, the vehicles may have higher rates of problems than both EVs and gas-powered vehicles, and they need a bit more maintenance. And some studies have shown that plug-in hybrids don’t tend to get the full emissions benefits advertised, because people use the electric mode less than expected.

Ultimately, we need to stop burning fossil fuels, so we’ll need to get used to vehicles that run without gasoline at all. But in the meantime, dipping a toe into the world of electric vehicles could be a good option for many drivers. 

Will current charging technology be able to support EVs? How practical is it to bring chargers to remote areas of the country?

These questions hit on one of the biggest potential barriers to EV adoption: charging availability. 

In many parts of the world, there’s a massive need to build more chargers to support the EVs already on the road, not to mention all the new ones being built and sold each year. Some agencies have recommended that there should be one public charger for every 10 EVs on the road, though factors like density and rates of at-home charging mean different communities will have different needs. 

The US had about 24 EVs per charger as of the end of 2022, while the EU is at about 13, and China is among the leading nations with around eight. Improving that ratio is crucial to getting more drivers comfortable with EVs. 

But building out the charging network is a big project, and one that looks different for different communities. In dense cities, many people live in apartments as opposed to single-family homes with garages, so even more public chargers will be needed to make up for the lack of at-home charging. For rural communities, or those that are less wealthy, getting any chargers built at all can be a challenge. 

These so-called charging deserts often suffer from a sort of chicken-and-egg problem: there’s a lack of demand for chargers because people aren’t driving EVs, and people aren’t driving EVs because there are no chargers.

Public funding will be key to filling in gaps left by private companies installing charging networks. In the US, some money is tied to making sure that disadvantaged communities will benefit. 

The bottom line is that it’s possible to make chargers available and equitable, but it’s definitely going to take a while, and it’s going to be expensive. 

What about hydrogen—could that be an alternative to batteries?

I’ve been digging into this question, so stay tuned for a story coming very soon. But I’ll give you a sneak peek: the short answer is that I think there are many reasons to be skeptical of claims that hydrogen will swoop in to save the day for vehicles. 

A small number of vehicles on the road today do use hydrogen as a fuel. The Toyota Mirai is one of the most popular fuel-cell models on the market, though only a few thousand were sold last year.

The big draw is that fueling up such a car looks a lot like fueling up a gas-powered vehicle today, taking just a few minutes at a pump. Even the fastest chargers can take around half an hour to juice up an EV, so hydrogen refueling is generally faster and more convenient.

But for a range of reasons, hydrogen vehicles are more expensive both to buy and to drive, and they’re likely to stay that way. There are better uses for hydrogen, too, in heavy industry and fertilizer and even long-range shipping. So EVs are probably going to be our best option for a long while. 

I hope I’ve piqued your interest—look out for a longer story on this topic soon. In the meantime, check out some of our other transportation coverage. 

Related reading

We put electric vehicles on our 2023 list of breakthrough technologies—see why here.

Hybrids are going to be around for a while, and that might be a good thing, as I wrote in a 2022 story.

Huge EVs are far from perfect, but they can be part of the story on addressing climate change.

Aerial view of electric car parking in charging station with solar panels.

GETTY

Another thing

The EV revolution is happening faster in China than anywhere else in the world. So it’s no wonder that the country is also a center for the world of virtual power plants, which pull together energy resources like EV batteries. Read more about why China needs VPPs in my colleague Zeyi Yang’s latest story.

Keeping up with climate  

Plastic is really difficult to recycle. A new report shows that some companies knew just how extensive the challenges are and obscured the truth for decades. (The Guardian)

→ Think that your plastic is being recycled? Think again. (MIT Technology Review)

The EU is finalizing rules around pulling carbon out of the atmosphere. The certification will favor techniques that work over long time scales and can be measured effectively. (The Verge)

EVs can run into trouble in extreme heat and cold. New materials, especially advancements in a part of the battery called the electrolyte, could help EVs last longer and stand up to tough conditions. (Scientific American)

A growing group of companies wants to enlist the earth to help store energy. Sage Geosystems just raised $17 million for geothermal energy storage. (Canary Media)

→ Fervo Energy demonstrated that its wells can be used like a giant underground battery. (MIT Technology Review)

Restringing power lines could be key in supercharging clean energy. The process can be quicker and cheaper than building new transmission lines, as long as red tape doesn’t get in the way. (Heatmap News)

Farmers are getting better at growing more crops faster on less land. The problem is, the benefits are focused on plants going into cars and cows, not people. (Wired)

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Feb 16 2024
Three things to love about batteries

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

I wouldn’t exactly say I have favorites when it comes to climate technologies. Anything that could help us get closer to tackling climate change is worth writing about, both to share the potential upsides and to carefully examine for pitfalls. But I have a special spot in my heart and my reporting notebook for batteries.

After all, what’s not to love? They play a crucial role in climate action, there are a million different kinds that can meet basically any need, and they’re at least a little bit magical. 

In honor of everyone’s favorite Hallmark-ified holiday, I thought I’d share a love letter to batteries. In any case, this should give you some sense of why I keep coming back to this subject. (Most recently, I dove into the topic of an alternative battery chemistry, lithium-sulfur—give that a read if you haven’t!)

So, how do I love batteries? Let me count the ways. 

They’re practical 

Imagine a world that’s on its way to reaching net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. That would put us on track to limit global warming to less than 2 °C, or 3.6 °F. To get there, the two biggest sectors to clean up are electricity and transportation: how we power the world and get around. And the common denominator is—you guessed it—batteries. 

Some low-emissions power sources, like wind and solar, aren’t consistently available, so they need a little backup. That’s where grid storage comes in—we’ll need to build about 100 times more energy storage by 2050 on the grid to be on track for our net-zero scenario. 

This won’t all be batteries—storing energy with pumped hydro, compressed air, and other methods could be key. But batteries, especially if cheaper alternatives can scale, will be a major piece of the puzzle.

Electrifying transport is a similar story. We need to move from gas guzzlers to zero-emissions vehicles. And batteries are going to help us do it. 

In our net-zero scenario, the world needs about 14 terawatt hours’ worth of batteries for EVs every year by 2050, according to the International Energy Agency. That’s something like 90 times greater than production in 2020. 

They’re versatile

One of my favorite things about battery technology is its adaptability. Researchers are finding and developing new chemistries all the time, and it’s fascinating to follow. 

Lithium-ion batteries tend to be the default for the industries I typically write about (think transportation and energy storage). That’s mostly because these batteries were developed for personal devices that became widespread beginning in the 1990s, so they’ve had a head start on scaling and the cost cuts that come along with it. 

Even in existing battery technologies, there’s lots of nuance and innovation. Lithium-ion batteries follow a similar blueprint, but there’s a whole world of flavors. Your phone and laptop probably house pouch cells with higher levels of cobalt, whereas your EV likely runs off cylindrical ones that are high in nickel. And a growing fraction of lithium-ion cells don’t include either of those metals—companies are looking at these options for stationary storage or lower- cost vehicles. 

But don’t stop there. Next-generation batteries could give us a different chemistry for every occasion. Need a robust, low-cost battery? Try sodium-ion. Even cheaper, for stationary storage? Zinc flow batteries or iron-air might be the chemistry for you. Something for a long-range, high performance EV? Check out solid state, or maybe something of the lithium-sulfur variety. 

I’m often asked which battery chemistry is going to “win.” Not all batteries are going to make it to widespread adoption, and not all battery companies are going to succeed. But I think the answer is that we’ll hopefully see not a single dominant type of battery, but an ever-growing menu of options. 

They’re at least a little bit magic

Last but not least, I think that one of the main reasons that I’m obsessed with batteries is that I find them a little bit mystifying. Tiny ions shuttling around in a metal container can store energy for us to use, whenever and wherever we want. 

I’ll never get sick of it, and I hope you won’t either. Here’s to spending more time with the ones we love in the year ahead. 

Related reading

Read more about lithium-sulfur batteries, which could unlock cheaper EVs with longer range, in my latest story. 

For another alternative, check out this story from last year on the sodium-ion batteries that could be closer to hitting the roads.

Form Energy and its iron-air batteries made our 2023 list of 15 Climate Tech Companies to Watch. Read all about them here.

I’m not the first MIT Technology Review reporter to dive in on batteries. Read this 2018 story from my colleague James Temple on why lithium-ion batteries won’t be able to clean up the grid on their own. 

Another thing

If you, like me, can’t get enough batteries, I’ve got a great event coming up this week for you! Join me, senior editor James Temple, and editor-at-large David Rotman for the latest in our Roundtables series, where we’ll be diving into a rousing conversation about batteries and their materials. 

This event is open to subscribers, so subscribe if you haven’t yet and come ask all the questions you have about batteries, minerals, and mining! See you there!

a line of heat pumps stretch into the distance with a yellow arrow trending up in front of the closest one

STEPHANIE ARNETT/MITTR | ENVATO

More from us

Sales might be down, but heat pumps are still hot. The devices, which can heat and cool spaces using electricity, are gaining ground on fossil fuels in the US. Check out the data in this story for more on why it matters, and what this says about decarbonization prospects for the country and beyond. 

Also, I’d like to introduce you to a new colleague, James O’Donnell! He’s joining the AI team, and he’s coming out swinging with a story about how Google is using a new satellite to detect methane leaks. Give it a read, and stay tuned for more great stories from him to come. 

Keeping up with climate  

Charging EVs might seem like it’s all about being fast, but slow chargers could be the key to getting more renters to adopt the technology. (Grist)

Chinese automaker BYD has seen massive growth in its EV sales, beating out Tesla in the last quarter of 2023 to become the world’s largest EV maker. Here’s how that happened. (New York Times)

→ BYD is moving so fast that the company is getting into shipping to move more vehicles. (MIT Technology Review)

Consumer demand for EVs is slowing a bit. Some companies are looking to smaller vehicles to help jumpstart interest. (IEEE Spectrum)

Dirt is a major carbon store, holding three times as much as the entire atmosphere. The problem for people looking to leverage dirt for carbon removal is that nobody knows exactly how much carbon can be stored in dirt. (Grist)

Last year was an awful one for the offshore wind industry, but things might be looking up in the year ahead. (Heatmap)

→ Here’s what’s coming next for offshore wind. (MIT Technology Review)

This carbon removal startup is powered by sunlight and seawater. Banyu Carbon’s reversible photoacid could help suck up greenhouse gases from the ocean, though experts have questions about the scalability and ecological effects. (Bloomberg)

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