The discovery of fire by Prometheus was an unleashing of power, even if not literally. The cigar goes to Thomas Edison for inventing the light bulb, but it was Humphry Davy who invented the first electric light in 1802. He wired up an electric battery to piece of carbon, and hey presto! it glowed with light. Electricity has travelled far since then, and is one of the big enchiladas of the energy world, powering global technology, alongside coal, ethanol, geothermal hydropower, municipal solid waste, petroleum, solar thermal, wind and wood.
The world energy order is being reshaped. The World Nuclear Association report Net Zero by 2050, released in May 2021 envisages a global energy blueprint with zero emissions by mid-century. The output of nuclear energy is to nearly double between 2020 and 2050. The energy target is to reduce the share of fossil fuels in the total global picture from around 80 per cent to just above 60 per cent by 2050, and CO2 coughing from its annual top mark of 37 billion tonnes to 32 billion tonnes by 2050.
That’s a long way from 1938, German when physicists Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann cooked up a storm for the scientific buffet of new research with atomic fission. Niels Bohr and gang suggested that a split of the nucleus will release massive energy. From the late 1970s to about 2002, nuclear power was, however, on ventilator. It took this century’s global population explosion all the way to eight billion for the world to wake up and smell the atomic coffee.
Fossil fuel energy, which warms homes, charges devices and powers transport has got a bad name as the top human source of greenhouse gas emissions. As the end of 2023 nears, energy security has become a global concern. Affordability of energy now gets top billing with climate change chauffeuring the drive from fossil fuel-produced power to GenNxt of nuclear power reactors. India and China are ahead of the curve, leaving Europe and North America behind. China proposes boosting its nuclear power capacity exponentially by 2030 with contemporary Western designs. In April 2023, the Modi government announced plans to up India’s nuclear power capacity from 6780 MWe to 22,480 MWe by 2031; nuclear energy will provide up to 9 per cent of the country’s power by 2047.
Stepping on the gas of pro-climate policies will help cross the finish line faster. Supply chains for key technologies such as batteries, solar PV and electrolysers are in top gear. Scandinavian outliers of energy sources are outré: body heat, dance floors, jellyfish and confiscated alcohol. In Stockholm, engineers magicked their way to harnessing body heat of 2,50,000-plus commuters who throng the city’s Central Station daily.
This body heat is channelled through the station’s vent system, and used to warm up water kept in underground tanks and exhaled back through the heating system of a nearby office block. The whole operation cost just $30,000. Rotterdam has energy floors: the kinetic energy of the dance floor is converted to electricity to light up the dance floor itself. With the average person’s lifetime step count at 150 million steps, the British energy Pavegen has developed the world’s first energy-harvesting ‘smart street’.
The Einsteins of this century have created a biological fuel cell made with fluorescent protein cells of the jellyfish: imagine the ocean as the next bright future of energy. In 2007, Swedish border guards were on a high after confiscating 1,85,000 gallons of alcohol. This time they didn’t pour it down the sink; instead they mixed it with animal and human waste to make biofuel for public transport.
Hydrogen is the future, exhumed from garbage to power EVs. Converting sewer gas into clean hydrogen fuel could be the next big thing. India has already done the desi trick here for a lower intensity fuel: biogas, or gobar gas as it was once called. The future of power is here. And it looks just like a wow.
Fusion Over Fission
Nuclear fusion could power US cities within the next decade Empires inspire copycats. The US may have found in the N-word the answer to its energy needs, as in nuclear fusion to replace fission. The country is second to China in the consumption of fossil fuels. Nuclear fusion fuses two or more atomic nuclei to form a single heavier nucleus, thereby letting out a humongous amount of energy. Conventional nuclear reactors work with nuclear fission to generate energy. The challenge is to gather carbon-free energy from fusion to run residences and companies. Scientists at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, California carried out the first-ever successful nuclear fusion test which took decades of experiments and research to achieve.
Waste not, want more is the pitch. The US needs storage facilities for the spent fuel from reactors. Officials are hustling for locations for the waste: currently the US doesn’t recycle N-fuel. A pet Joe Biden project, the US government will soon unveil details about an $8-billion hydrogen hub initiative, bankrolled by it. The doubting Thomases in the environmental space are antsy about hydrogen’s potential climate impact such as raising methane and other greenhouse gas levels somehow indirectly.
Nuclear fusion holds the aces over fission: the fuel supply is neverending, and it is cheap, being extracted from seawater. The green men and women will love it because it doesn’t give off greenhouse gases. No Chernobyl or Fukushima either; a fusion reaction automatically brakes if the reactor gets damaged. The best news: nuclear fusion produces only helium which is a non-radioactive gas.
A Watery Solution
Cutting-edge generator to power your home for days using just 2 litres of water The war on fossil fuels is ratcheting up inventor enthusiasm. Environment-friendly businesses and mavericks are thinking up ways to depose diesel from its dirty throne. Enter the green hydrogen believers. Ergo, water to the rescue. The new Germany based startup Enapter uses its AEM (Anion exchange membrane) electrolysers that make hydrogen using electricity.
They extract emission-free hydrogen from sea water using renewable energy. (Electrolysis is the process of separating the hydrogen and oxygen atoms in water.) The best energy news ever: one electrolyser uses only about 2.4 litres of water to make enough hydrogen for a home for days. There is an easy way to figure power storage capacity: the amount of water used by AEM Electrolysers equals half of the water used for flushing a toilet once (5 litres as standard), and eight times less than the water consumption of a dishwasher (20 litres).
Enapter has its ion exchange membrane electrolysers slogging away in over 100 projects across 33 countries to recycle electricity into emission-free hydrogen gas. Cheaper and faster, AEM electrolysers are already used to power cars and planes, and domestic heating devices. A new coalition of energy purists led by Bill Gates, the Cleantech Scale-up Coalition, has Enapter as a member. Their Holy Grail: a climate neutral, energy autonomous and industrially competitive Europe.
Super Battery
Micro supercapacitors for better battery life
Extending battery lifespans and speeding up charging are two bulls eye wishes of the green energy industry. From smartphone makers to EV corporations, everybody with a battery to charge is pumping money into R&D of electronic components. Now, Swedish researchers have hit the jackpot with supercapacitors. Supercapacitors are two electrical conductors separated by an insulating layer which does not transmit electrical energy. Compared to a normal battery, it charges faster, apportions energy more efficiently, and has a longer life without affecting performance. Combining a supercapacitor with a battery in a commercial EV can extend its age by four times.
New frontiers of energy
Sunny Days
Hailed as a “moment of history” by physicists, a team at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) in the US achieved fusion ignition for the first ever time. It replicated the same natural processes found within the Sun and produced enough energy to boil a kettle. Scientists are now working on boosting production to make it possible to meet the needs of tomorrow.
Air Rage
Chemical engineers from Switzerland have created a prototype device that can produce hydrogen fuel from the water found in air. The device harvests energy from sunlight and uses it to produce hydrogen gas from water molecules found in the atmosphere. The gas could then, potentially, be converted for use as liquid fuels. As the world’s natural water sources dry up, pulling water from air to produce fuel could be a gamechanger.
Fuse News
Japan inaugurated the world’s largest experimental nuclear fusion reactor, known as the JT-60SA reactor. It involves the fusion of two atomic nuclei and aims to arrive at a safe, large-scale, and carbon-free source of net energy. The six-story-high machine, with the centre shaped like a doughnut, coaxes hydrogen nuclei to fuse into helium, liberating energy in the form of light and heat. Once tapped, this could have enough power to use as propulsion.
Fade to Black
A pair of astrophysicists at Tianjin University in China has proposed using black holes as an energy source. One of the ways outlined is to charge a primordial black hole by feeding it electrically charged particles. Once fully charged, it would repel these particles, working like a battery. This could further be converted into a usable energy source. Earlier research has shown that an electric field is present around a black hole. This could be tapped into to create both electrons and positrons, thereby arriving at an alternate source of energy.