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    Rooftop panels, EV chargers, and smart thermostats could chip in to boost power grid resilience

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    There’s a lot of untapped potential in our homes and vehicles that could be harnessed to reinforce local power grids and make them more resilient to unforeseen outages, a new study shows.In response to a cyber attack or natural disaster, a backup network of decentralized devices — such as residential solar panels, batteries, electric vehicles, heat pumps, and water heaters — could restore electricity or relieve stress on the grid, MIT engineers say.Such devices are “grid-edge” resources found close to the consumer rather than near central power plants, substations, or transmission lines. Grid-edge devices can independently generate, store, or tune their consumption of power. In their study, the research team shows how such devices could one day be called upon to either pump power into the grid, or rebalance it by dialing down or delaying their power use.In a paper appearing this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the engineers present a blueprint for how grid-edge devices could reinforce the power grid through a “local electricity market.” Owners of grid-edge devices could subscribe to a regional market and essentially loan out their device to be part of a microgrid or a local network of on-call energy resources.In the event that the main power grid is compromised, an algorithm developed by the researchers would kick in for each local electricity market, to quickly determine which devices in the network are trustworthy. The algorithm would then identify the combination of trustworthy devices that would most effectively mitigate the power failure, by either pumping power into the grid or reducing the power they draw from it, by an amount that the algorithm would calculate and communicate to the relevant subscribers. The subscribers could then be compensated through the market, depending on their participation.The team illustrated this new framework through a number of grid attack scenarios, in which they considered failures at different levels of a power grid, from various sources such as a cyber attack or a natural disaster. Applying their algorithm, they showed that various networks of grid-edge devices were able to dissolve the various attacks.The results demonstrate that grid-edge devices such as rooftop solar panels, EV chargers, batteries, and smart thermostats (for HVAC devices or heat pumps) could be tapped to stabilize the power grid in the event of an attack.“All these small devices can do their little bit in terms of adjusting their consumption,” says study co-author Anu Annaswamy, a research scientist in MIT’s Department of Mechanical Engineering. “If we can harness our smart dishwashers, rooftop panels, and EVs, and put our combined shoulders to the wheel, we can really have a resilient grid.”The study’s MIT co-authors include lead author Vineet Nair and John Williams, along with collaborators from multiple institutions including the Indian Institute of Technology, the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, and elsewhere.Power boostThe team’s study is an extension of their broader work in adaptive control theory and designing systems to automatically adapt to changing conditions. Annaswamy, who leads the Active-Adaptive Control Laboratory at MIT, explores ways to boost the reliability of renewable energy sources such as solar power.“These renewables come with a strong temporal signature, in that we know for sure the sun will set every day, so the solar power will go away,” Annaswamy says. “How do you make up for the shortfall?”The researchers found the answer could lie in the many grid-edge devices that consumers are increasingly installing in their own homes.“There are lots of distributed energy resources that are coming up now, closer to the customer rather than near large power plants, and it’s mainly because of individual efforts to decarbonize,” Nair says. “So you have all this capability at the grid edge. Surely we should be able to put them to good use.”While considering ways to deal with drops in energy from the normal operation of renewable sources, the team also began to look into other causes of power dips, such as from cyber attacks. They wondered, in these malicious instances, whether and how the same grid-edge devices could step in to stabilize the grid following an unforeseen, targeted attack.Attack modeIn their new work, Annaswamy, Nair, and their colleagues developed a framework for incorporating grid-edge devices, and in particular, internet-of-things (IoT) devices, in a way that would support the larger grid in the event of an attack or disruption. IoT devices are physical objects that contain sensors and software that connect to the internet.For their new framework, named EUREICA (Efficient, Ultra-REsilient, IoT-Coordinated Assets), the researchers start with the assumption that one day, most grid-edge devices will also be IoT devices, enabling rooftop panels, EV chargers, and smart thermostats to wirelessly connect to a larger network of similarly independent and distributed devices. The team envisions that for a given region, such as a community of 1,000 homes, there exists a certain number of IoT devices that could potentially be enlisted in the region’s local network, or microgrid. Such a network would be managed by an operator, who would be able to communicate with operators of other nearby microgrids.If the main power grid is compromised or attacked, operators would run the researchers’ decision-making algorithm to determine trustworthy devices within the network that can pitch in to help mitigate the attack.The team tested the algorithm on a number of scenarios, such as a cyber attack in which all smart thermostats made by a certain manufacturer are hacked to raise their setpoints simultaneously to a degree that dramatically alters a region’s energy load and destabilizes the grid. The researchers also considered attacks and weather events that would shut off the transmission of energy at various levels and nodes throughout a power grid.“In our attacks we consider between 5 and 40 percent of the power being lost. We assume some nodes are attacked, and some are still available and have some IoT resources, whether a battery with energy available or an EV or HVAC device that’s controllable,” Nair explains. “So, our algorithm decides which of those houses can step in to either provide extra power generation to inject into the grid or reduce their demand to meet the shortfall.”In every scenario that they tested, the team found that the algorithm was able to successfully restabilize the grid and mitigate the attack or power failure. They acknowledge that to put in place such a network of grid-edge devices will require buy-in from customers, policymakers, and local officials, as well as innovations such as advanced power inverters that enable EVs to inject power back into the grid.“This is just the first of many steps that have to happen in quick succession for this idea of local electricity markets to be implemented and expanded upon,” Annaswamy says. “But we believe it’s a good start.”This work was supported, in part, by the U.S. Department of Energy and the MIT Energy Initiative. More

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      Unlocking the secrets of fusion’s core with AI-enhanced simulations

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      Creating and sustaining fusion reactions — essentially recreating star-like conditions on Earth — is extremely difficult, and Nathan Howard PhD ’12, a principal research scientist at the MIT Plasma Science and Fusion Center (PSFC), thinks it’s one of the most fascinating scientific challenges of our time. “Both the science and the overall promise of fusion as a clean energy source are really interesting. That motivated me to come to grad school [at MIT] and work at the PSFC,” he says.Howard is member of the Magnetic Fusion Experiments Integrated Modeling (MFE-IM) group at the PSFC. Along with MFE-IM group leader Pablo Rodriguez-Fernandez, Howard and the team use simulations and machine learning to predict how plasma will behave in a fusion device. MFE-IM and Howard’s research aims to forecast a given technology or configuration’s performance before it’s piloted in an actual fusion environment, allowing for smarter design choices. To ensure their accuracy, these models are continuously validated using data from previous experiments, keeping their simulations grounded in reality.In a recent open-access paper titled “Prediction of Performance and Turbulence in ITER Burning Plasmas via Nonlinear Gyrokinetic Profile Prediction,” published in the January issue of Nuclear Fusion, Howard explains how he used high-resolution simulations of the swirling structures present in plasma, called turbulence, to confirm that the world’s largest experimental fusion device, currently under construction in Southern France, will perform as expected when switched on. He also demonstrates how a different operating setup could produce nearly the same amount of energy output but with less energy input, a discovery that could positively affect the efficiency of fusion devices in general.The biggest and best of what’s never been builtForty years ago, the United States and six other member nations came together to build ITER (Latin for “the way”), a fusion device that, once operational, would yield 500 megawatts of fusion power, and a plasma able to generate 10 times more energy than it absorbs from external heating. The plasma setup designed to achieve these goals — the most ambitious of any fusion experiment — is called the ITER baseline scenario, and as fusion science and plasma physics have progressed, ways to achieve this plasma have been refined using increasingly more powerful simulations like the modeling framework Howard used.In his work to verify the baseline scenario, Howard used CGYRO, a computer code developed by Howard’s collaborators at General Atomics. CGYRO applies a complex plasma physics model to a set of defined fusion operating conditions. Although it is time-intensive, CGYRO generates very detailed simulations on how plasma behaves at different locations within a fusion device.The comprehensive CGYRO simulations were then run through the PORTALS framework, a collection of tools originally developed at MIT by Rodriguez-Fernandez. “PORTALS takes the high-fidelity [CGYRO] runs and uses machine learning to build a quick model called a ‘surrogate’ that can mimic the results of the more complex runs, but much faster,” Rodriguez-Fernandez explains. “Only high-fidelity modeling tools like PORTALS give us a glimpse into the plasma core before it even forms. This predict-first approach allows us to create more efficient plasmas in a device like ITER.”After the first pass, the surrogates’ accuracy was checked against the high-fidelity runs, and if a surrogate wasn’t producing results in line with CGYRO’s, PORTALS was run again to refine the surrogate until it better mimicked CGYRO’s results. “The nice thing is, once you have built a well-trained [surrogate] model, you can use it to predict conditions that are different, with a very much reduced need for the full complex runs.” Once they were fully trained, the surrogates were used to explore how different combinations of inputs might affect ITER’s predicted performance and how it achieved the baseline scenario. Notably, the surrogate runs took a fraction of the time, and they could be used in conjunction with CGYRO to give it a boost and produce detailed results more quickly.“Just dropped in to see what condition my condition was in”Howard’s work with CGYRO, PORTALS, and surrogates examined a specific combination of operating conditions that had been predicted to achieve the baseline scenario. Those conditions included the magnetic field used, the methods used to control plasma shape, the external heating applied, and many other variables. Using 14 iterations of CGYRO, Howard was able to confirm that the current baseline scenario configuration could achieve 10 times more power output than input into the plasma. Howard says of the results, “The modeling we performed is maybe the highest fidelity possible at this time, and almost certainly the highest fidelity published.”The 14 iterations of CGYRO used to confirm the plasma performance included running PORTALS to build surrogate models for the input parameters and then tying the surrogates to CGYRO to work more efficiently. It only took three additional iterations of CGYRO to explore an alternate scenario that predicted ITER could produce almost the same amount of energy with about half the input power. The surrogate-enhanced CGYRO model revealed that the temperature of the plasma core — and thus the fusion reactions — wasn’t overly affected by less power input; less power input equals more efficient operation. Howard’s results are also a reminder that there may be other ways to improve ITER’s performance; they just haven’t been discovered yet.Howard reflects, “The fact that we can use the results of this modeling to influence the planning of experiments like ITER is exciting. For years, I’ve been saying that this was the goal of our research, and now that we actually do it — it’s an amazing arc, and really fulfilling.”  More

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      How to make small modular reactors more cost-effective

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      When Youyeon Choi was in high school, she discovered she really liked “thinking in geometry.” The shapes, the dimensions … she was into all of it. Today, geometry plays a prominent role in her doctoral work under the guidance of Professor Koroush Shirvan, as she explores ways to increase the competitiveness of small modular reactors (SMRs).Central to the thesis is metallic nuclear fuel in a helical cruciform shape, which improves surface area and lowers heat flux as compared to the traditional cylindrical equivalent.A childhood in a prominent nuclear energy countryHer passion for geometry notwithstanding, Choi admits she was not “really into studying” in middle school. But that changed when she started excelling in technical subjects in her high school years. And because it was the natural sciences that first caught Choi’s eye, she assumed she would major in the subject when she went to university.This focus, too, would change. Growing up in Seoul, Choi was becoming increasingly aware of the critical role nuclear energy played in meeting her native country’s energy needs. Twenty-six reactors provide nearly a third of South Korea’s electricity, according to the World Nuclear Association. The country is also one of the world’s most prominent nuclear energy entities.In such an ecosystem, Choi understood the stakes at play, especially with electricity-guzzling technologies such as AI and electric vehicles on the rise. Her father also discussed energy-related topics with Choi when she was in high school. Being soaked in that atmosphere eventually led Choi to nuclear engineering.

      Youyeon Choi: Making small modular reactors more cost-effective

      Early work in South KoreaExcelling in high school math and science, Choi was a shoo-in for college at Seoul National University. Initially intent on studying nuclear fusion, Choi switched to fission because she saw that the path to fusion was more convoluted and was still in the early stages of exploration.Choi went on to complete her bachelor’s and master’s degrees in nuclear engineering from the university. As part of her master’s thesis, she worked on a multi-physics modeling project involving high-fidelity simulations of reactor physics and thermal hydraulics to analyze reactor cores.South Korea exports its nuclear know-how widely, so work in the field can be immensely rewarding. Indeed, after graduate school, Choi moved to Daejeon, which has the moniker “Science City.” As an intern at the Korea Atomic Energy Research Institute (KAERI), she conducted experimental studies on the passive safety systems of nuclear reactors. Choi then moved to the Korea Institute of Nuclear Nonproliferation and Control, where she worked as a researcher developing nuclear security programs for countries. Given South Korea’s dominance in the field, other countries would tap its knowledge resource to tap their own nuclear energy programs. The focus was on international training programs, an arm of which involved cybersecurity and physical protection.While the work was impactful, Choi found she missed the modeling work she did as part of her master’s thesis. Looking to return to technical research, she applied to the MIT Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering (NSE). “MIT has the best nuclear engineering program in the States, and maybe even the world,” Choi says, explaining her decision to enroll as a doctoral student.Innovative research at MITAt NSE, Choi is working to make SMRs more price competitive as compared to traditional nuclear energy power plants.Due to their smaller size, SMRs are able to serve areas where larger reactors might not work, but they’re more expensive. One way to address costs is to squeeze more electricity out of a unit of fuel — to increase the power density. Choi is doing so by replacing the traditional uranium dioxide ceramic fuel in a cylindrical shape with a metal one in a helical cruciform. Such a replacement potentially offers twin advantages: the metal fuel has high conductivity, which means the fuel will operate even more safely at lower temperatures. And the twisted shape gives more surface area and lower heat flux. The net result is more electricity for the same volume.The project receives funding from a collaboration between Lightbridge Corp., which is exploring how advanced fuel technologies can improve the performance of water-cooled SMRs, and the U.S. Department of Energy Nuclear Energy University Program.With SMR efficiencies in mind, Choi is indulging her love of multi-physics modeling, and focusing on reactor physics, thermal hydraulics, and fuel performance simulation. “The goal of this modeling and simulation is to see if we can really use this fuel in the SMR,” Choi says. “I’m really enjoying doing the simulations because the geometry is really hard to model. Because the shape is twisted, there’s no symmetry at all,” she says. Always up for a challenge, Choi learned the various aspects of physics and a variety of computational tools, including the Monte Carlo code for reactor physics.Being at MIT has a whole roster of advantages, Choi says, and she especially appreciates the respect researchers have for each other. She appreciates being able to discuss projects with Shirvan and his focus on practical applications of research. At the same time, Choi appreciates the “exotic” nature of her project. “Even assessing if this SMR fuel is at all feasible is really hard, but I think it’s all possible because it’s MIT and my PI [principal investigator] is really invested in innovation,” she says.It’s an exciting time to be in nuclear engineering, Choi says. She serves as one of the board members of the student section of the American Nuclear Society and is an NSE representative of the Graduate Student Council for the 2024-25 academic year.Choi is excited about the global momentum toward nuclear as more countries are exploring the energy source and trying to build more nuclear power plants on the path to decarbonization. “I really do believe nuclear energy is going to be a leading carbon-free energy. It’s very important for our collective futures,” Choi says. More

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      Toward sustainable decarbonization of aviation in Latin America

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      According to the International Energy Agency, aviation accounts for about 2 percent of global carbon dioxide emissions, and aviation emissions are expected to double by mid-century as demand for domestic and international air travel rises. To sharply reduce emissions in alignment with the Paris Agreement’s long-term goal to keep global warming below 1.5 degrees Celsius, the International Air Transport Association (IATA) has set a goal to achieve net-zero carbon emissions by 2050. Which raises the question: Are there technologically feasible and economically viable strategies to reach that goal within the next 25 years?To begin to address that question, a team of researchers at the MIT Center for Sustainability Science and Strategy (CS3) and the MIT Laboratory for Aviation and the Environment has spent the past year analyzing aviation decarbonization options in Latin America, where air travel is expected to more than triple by 2050 and thereby double today’s aviation-related emissions in the region.Chief among those options is the development and deployment of sustainable aviation fuel. Currently produced from low- and zero-carbon sources (feedstock) including municipal waste and non-food crops, and requiring practically no alteration of aircraft systems or refueling infrastructure, sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) has the potential to perform just as well as petroleum-based jet fuel with as low as 20 percent of its carbon footprint.Focused on Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Mexico and Peru, the researchers assessed SAF feedstock availability, the costs of corresponding SAF pathways, and how SAF deployment would likely impact fuel use, prices, emissions, and aviation demand in each country. They also explored how efficiency improvements and market-based mechanisms could help the region to reach decarbonization targets. The team’s findings appear in a CS3 Special Report.SAF emissions, costs, and sourcesUnder an ambitious emissions mitigation scenario designed to cap global warming at 1.5 C and raise the rate of SAF use in Latin America to 65 percent by 2050, the researchers projected aviation emissions to be reduced by about 60 percent in 2050 compared to a scenario in which existing climate policies are not strengthened. To achieve net-zero emissions by 2050, other measures would be required, such as improvements in operational and air traffic efficiencies, airplane fleet renewal, alternative forms of propulsion, and carbon offsets and removals.As of 2024, jet fuel prices in Latin America are around $0.70 per liter. Based on the current availability of feedstocks, the researchers projected SAF costs within the six countries studied to range from $1.11 to $2.86 per liter. They cautioned that increased fuel prices could affect operating costs of the aviation sector and overall aviation demand unless strategies to manage price increases are implemented.Under the 1.5 C scenario, the total cumulative capital investments required to build new SAF producing plants between 2025 and 2050 were estimated at $204 billion for the six countries (ranging from $5 billion in Ecuador to $84 billion in Brazil). The researchers identified sugarcane- and corn-based ethanol-to-jet fuel, palm oil- and soybean-based hydro-processed esters and fatty acids as the most promising feedstock sources in the near term for SAF production in Latin America.“Our findings show that SAF offers a significant decarbonization pathway, which must be combined with an economy-wide emissions mitigation policy that uses market-based mechanisms to offset the remaining emissions,” says Sergey Paltsev, lead author of the report, MIT CS3 deputy director, and senior research scientist at the MIT Energy Initiative.RecommendationsThe researchers concluded the report with recommendations for national policymakers and aviation industry leaders in Latin America.They stressed that government policy and regulatory mechanisms will be needed to create sufficient conditions to attract SAF investments in the region and make SAF commercially viable as the aviation industry decarbonizes operations. Without appropriate policy frameworks, SAF requirements will affect the cost of air travel. For fuel producers, stable, long-term-oriented policies and regulations will be needed to create robust supply chains, build demand for establishing economies of scale, and develop innovative pathways for producing SAF.Finally, the research team recommended a region-wide collaboration in designing SAF policies. A unified decarbonization strategy among all countries in the region will help ensure competitiveness, economies of scale, and achievement of long-term carbon emissions-reduction goals.“Regional feedstock availability and costs make Latin America a potential major player in SAF production,” says Angelo Gurgel, a principal research scientist at MIT CS3 and co-author of the study. “SAF requirements, combined with government support mechanisms, will ensure sustainable decarbonization while enhancing the region’s connectivity and the ability of disadvantaged communities to access air transport.”Financial support for this study was provided by LATAM Airlines and Airbus. More

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      The multifaceted challenge of powering AI

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      Artificial intelligence has become vital in business and financial dealings, medical care, technology development, research, and much more. Without realizing it, consumers rely on AI when they stream a video, do online banking, or perform an online search. Behind these capabilities are more than 10,000 data centers globally, each one a huge warehouse containing thousands of computer servers and other infrastructure for storing, managing, and processing data. There are now over 5,000 data centers in the United States, and new ones are being built every day — in the U.S. and worldwide. Often dozens are clustered together right near where people live, attracted by policies that provide tax breaks and other incentives, and by what looks like abundant electricity.And data centers do consume huge amounts of electricity. U.S. data centers consumed more than 4 percent of the country’s total electricity in 2023, and by 2030 that fraction could rise to 9 percent, according to the Electric Power Research Institute. A single large data center can consume as much electricity as 50,000 homes.The sudden need for so many data centers presents a massive challenge to the technology and energy industries, government policymakers, and everyday consumers. Research scientists and faculty members at the MIT Energy Initiative (MITEI) are exploring multiple facets of this problem — from sourcing power to grid improvement to analytical tools that increase efficiency, and more. Data centers have quickly become the energy issue of our day.Unexpected demand brings unexpected solutionsSeveral companies that use data centers to provide cloud computing and data management services are announcing some surprising steps to deliver all that electricity. Proposals include building their own small nuclear plants near their data centers and even restarting one of the undamaged nuclear reactors at Three Mile Island, which has been shuttered since 2019. (A different reactor at that plant partially melted down in 1979, causing the nation’s worst nuclear power accident.) Already the need to power AI is causing delays in the planned shutdown of some coal-fired power plants and raising prices for residential consumers. Meeting the needs of data centers is not only stressing power grids, but also setting back the transition to clean energy needed to stop climate change.There are many aspects to the data center problem from a power perspective. Here are some that MIT researchers are focusing on, and why they’re important.An unprecedented surge in the demand for electricity“In the past, computing was not a significant user of electricity,” says William H. Green, director of MITEI and the Hoyt C. Hottel Professor in the MIT Department of Chemical Engineering. “Electricity was used for running industrial processes and powering household devices such as air conditioners and lights, and more recently for powering heat pumps and charging electric cars. But now all of a sudden, electricity used for computing in general, and by data centers in particular, is becoming a gigantic new demand that no one anticipated.”Why the lack of foresight? Usually, demand for electric power increases by roughly half-a-percent per year, and utilities bring in new power generators and make other investments as needed to meet the expected new demand. But the data centers now coming online are creating unprecedented leaps in demand that operators didn’t see coming. In addition, the new demand is constant. It’s critical that a data center provides its services all day, every day. There can be no interruptions in processing large datasets, accessing stored data, and running the cooling equipment needed to keep all the packed-together computers churning away without overheating.Moreover, even if enough electricity is generated, getting it to where it’s needed may be a problem, explains Deepjyoti Deka, a MITEI research scientist. “A grid is a network-wide operation, and the grid operator may have sufficient generation at another location or even elsewhere in the country, but the wires may not have sufficient capacity to carry the electricity to where it’s wanted.” So transmission capacity must be expanded — and, says Deka, that’s a slow process.Then there’s the “interconnection queue.” Sometimes, adding either a new user (a “load”) or a new generator to an existing grid can cause instabilities or other problems for everyone else already on the grid. In that situation, bringing a new data center online may be delayed. Enough delays can result in new loads or generators having to stand in line and wait for their turn. Right now, much of the interconnection queue is already filled up with new solar and wind projects. The delay is now about five years. Meeting the demand from newly installed data centers while ensuring that the quality of service elsewhere is not hampered is a problem that needs to be addressed.Finding clean electricity sourcesTo further complicate the challenge, many companies — including so-called “hyperscalers” such as Google, Microsoft, and Amazon — have made public commitments to having net-zero carbon emissions within the next 10 years. Many have been making strides toward achieving their clean-energy goals by buying “power purchase agreements.” They sign a contract to buy electricity from, say, a solar or wind facility, sometimes providing funding for the facility to be built. But that approach to accessing clean energy has its limits when faced with the extreme electricity demand of a data center.Meanwhile, soaring power consumption is delaying coal plant closures in many states. There are simply not enough sources of renewable energy to serve both the hyperscalers and the existing users, including individual consumers. As a result, conventional plants fired by fossil fuels such as coal are needed more than ever.As the hyperscalers look for sources of clean energy for their data centers, one option could be to build their own wind and solar installations. But such facilities would generate electricity only intermittently. Given the need for uninterrupted power, the data center would have to maintain energy storage units, which are expensive. They could instead rely on natural gas or diesel generators for backup power — but those devices would need to be coupled with equipment to capture the carbon emissions, plus a nearby site for permanently disposing of the captured carbon.Because of such complications, several of the hyperscalers are turning to nuclear power. As Green notes, “Nuclear energy is well matched to the demand of data centers, because nuclear plants can generate lots of power reliably, without interruption.”In a much-publicized move in September, Microsoft signed a deal to buy power for 20 years after Constellation Energy reopens one of the undamaged reactors at its now-shuttered nuclear plant at Three Mile Island, the site of the much-publicized nuclear accident in 1979. If approved by regulators, Constellation will bring that reactor online by 2028, with Microsoft buying all of the power it produces. Amazon also reached a deal to purchase power produced by another nuclear plant threatened with closure due to financial troubles. And in early December, Meta released a request for proposals to identify nuclear energy developers to help the company meet their AI needs and their sustainability goals.Other nuclear news focuses on small modular nuclear reactors (SMRs), factory-built, modular power plants that could be installed near data centers, potentially without the cost overruns and delays often experienced in building large plants. Google recently ordered a fleet of SMRs to generate the power needed by its data centers. The first one will be completed by 2030 and the remainder by 2035.Some hyperscalers are betting on new technologies. For example, Google is pursuing next-generation geothermal projects, and Microsoft has signed a contract to purchase electricity from a startup’s fusion power plant beginning in 2028 — even though the fusion technology hasn’t yet been demonstrated.Reducing electricity demandOther approaches to providing sufficient clean electricity focus on making the data center and the operations it houses more energy efficient so as to perform the same computing tasks using less power. Using faster computer chips and optimizing algorithms that use less energy are already helping to reduce the load, and also the heat generated.Another idea being tried involves shifting computing tasks to times and places where carbon-free energy is available on the grid. Deka explains: “If a task doesn’t have to be completed immediately, but rather by a certain deadline, can it be delayed or moved to a data center elsewhere in the U.S. or overseas where electricity is more abundant, cheaper, and/or cleaner? This approach is known as ‘carbon-aware computing.’” We’re not yet sure whether every task can be moved or delayed easily, says Deka. “If you think of a generative AI-based task, can it easily be separated into small tasks that can be taken to different parts of the country, solved using clean energy, and then be brought back together? What is the cost of doing this kind of division of tasks?”That approach is, of course, limited by the problem of the interconnection queue. It’s difficult to access clean energy in another region or state. But efforts are under way to ease the regulatory framework to make sure that critical interconnections can be developed more quickly and easily.What about the neighbors?A major concern running through all the options for powering data centers is the impact on residential energy consumers. When a data center comes into a neighborhood, there are not only aesthetic concerns but also more practical worries. Will the local electricity service become less reliable? Where will the new transmission lines be located? And who will pay for the new generators, upgrades to existing equipment, and so on? When new manufacturing facilities or industrial plants go into a neighborhood, the downsides are generally offset by the availability of new jobs. Not so with a data center, which may require just a couple dozen employees.There are standard rules about how maintenance and upgrade costs are shared and allocated. But the situation is totally changed by the presence of a new data center. As a result, utilities now need to rethink their traditional rate structures so as not to place an undue burden on residents to pay for the infrastructure changes needed to host data centers.MIT’s contributionsAt MIT, researchers are thinking about and exploring a range of options for tackling the problem of providing clean power to data centers. For example, they are investigating architectural designs that will use natural ventilation to facilitate cooling, equipment layouts that will permit better airflow and power distribution, and highly energy-efficient air conditioning systems based on novel materials. They are creating new analytical tools for evaluating the impact of data center deployments on the U.S. power system and for finding the most efficient ways to provide the facilities with clean energy. Other work looks at how to match the output of small nuclear reactors to the needs of a data center, and how to speed up the construction of such reactors.MIT teams also focus on determining the best sources of backup power and long-duration storage, and on developing decision support systems for locating proposed new data centers, taking into account the availability of electric power and water and also regulatory considerations, and even the potential for using what can be significant waste heat, for example, for heating nearby buildings. Technology development projects include designing faster, more efficient computer chips and more energy-efficient computing algorithms.In addition to providing leadership and funding for many research projects, MITEI is acting as a convenor, bringing together companies and stakeholders to address this issue. At MITEI’s 2024 Annual Research Conference, a panel of representatives from two hyperscalers and two companies that design and construct data centers together discussed their challenges, possible solutions, and where MIT research could be most beneficial.As data centers continue to be built, and computing continues to create an unprecedented increase in demand for electricity, Green says, scientists and engineers are in a race to provide the ideas, innovations, and technologies that can meet this need, and at the same time continue to advance the transition to a decarbonized energy system. More

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      For clean ammonia, MIT engineers propose going underground

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      Ammonia is the most widely produced chemical in the world today, used primarily as a source for nitrogen fertilizer. Its production is also a major source of greenhouse gas emissions — the highest in the whole chemical industry.Now, a team of researchers at MIT has developed an innovative way of making ammonia without the usual fossil-fuel-powered chemical plants that require high heat and pressure. Instead, they have found a way to use the Earth itself as a geochemical reactor, producing ammonia underground. The processes uses Earth’s naturally occurring heat and pressure, provided free of charge and free of emissions, as well as the reactivity of minerals already present in the ground.The trick the team devised is to inject water underground, into an area of iron-rich subsurface rock. The water carries with it a source of nitrogen and particles of a metal catalyst, allowing the water to react with the iron to generate clean hydrogen, which in turn reacts with the nitrogen to make ammonia. A second well is then used to pump that ammonia up to the surface.The process, which has been demonstrated in the lab but not yet in a natural setting, is described today in the journal Joule. The paper’s co-authors are MIT professors of materials science and engineering Iwnetim Abate and Ju Li, graduate student Yifan Gao, and five others at MIT.“When I first produced ammonia from rock in the lab, I was so excited,” Gao recalls. “I realized this represented an entirely new and never-reported approach to ammonia synthesis.’”The standard method for making ammonia is called the Haber-Bosch process, which was developed in Germany in the early 20th century to replace natural sources of nitrogen fertilizer such as mined deposits of bat guano, which were becoming depleted. But the Haber-Bosch process is very energy intensive: It requires temperatures of 400 degrees Celsius and pressures of 200 atmospheres, and this means it needs huge installations in order to be efficient. Some areas of the world, such as sub-Saharan Africa and Southeast Asia, have few or no such plants in operation.  As a result, the shortage or extremely high cost of fertilizer in these regions has limited their agricultural production.The Haber-Bosch process “is good. It works,” Abate says. “Without it, we wouldn’t have been able to feed 2 out of the total 8 billion people in the world right now, he says, referring to the portion of the world’s population whose food is grown with ammonia-based fertilizers. But because of the emissions and energy demands, a better process is needed, he says.Burning fuel to generate heat is responsible for about 20 percent of the greenhouse gases emitted from plants using the Haber-Bosch process. Making hydrogen accounts for the remaining 80 percent.  But ammonia, the molecule NH3, is made up only of nitrogen and hydrogen. There’s no carbon in the formula, so where do the carbon emissions come from? The standard way of producing the needed hydrogen is by processing methane gas with steam, breaking down the gas into pure hydrogen, which gets used, and carbon dioxide gas that gets released into the air.Other processes exist for making low- or no-emissions hydrogen, such as by using solar or wind-generated electricity to split water into oxygen and hydrogen, but that process can be expensive. That’s why Abate and his team worked on developing a system to produce what they call geological hydrogen. Some places in the world, including some in Africa, have been found to naturally generate hydrogen underground through chemical reactions between water and iron-rich rocks. These pockets of naturally occurring hydrogen can be mined, just like natural methane reservoirs, but the extent and locations of such deposits are still relatively unexplored.Abate realized this process could be created or enhanced by pumping water, laced with copper and nickel catalyst particles to speed up the process, into the ground in places where such iron-rich rocks were already present. “We can use the Earth as a factory to produce clean flows of hydrogen,” he says.He recalls thinking about the problem of the emissions from hydrogen production for ammonia: “The ‘aha!’ moment for me was thinking, how about we link this process of geological hydrogen production with the process of making Haber-Bosch ammonia?”That would solve the biggest problem of the underground hydrogen production process, which is how to capture and store the gas once it’s produced. Hydrogen is a very tiny molecule — the smallest of them all — and hard to contain. But by implementing the entire Haber-Bosch process underground, the only material that would need to be sent to the surface would be the ammonia itself, which is easy to capture, store, and transport.The only extra ingredient needed to complete the process was the addition of a source of nitrogen, such as nitrate or nitrogen gas, into the water-catalyst mixture being injected into the ground. Then, as the hydrogen gets released from water molecules after interacting with the iron-rich rocks, it can immediately bond with the nitrogen atoms also carried in the water, with the deep underground environment providing the high temperatures and pressures required by the Haber-Bosch process. A second well near the injection well then pumps the ammonia out and into tanks on the surface.“We call this geological ammonia,” Abate says, “because we are using subsurface temperature, pressure, chemistry, and geologically existing rocks to produce ammonia directly.”Whereas transporting hydrogen requires expensive equipment to cool and liquefy it, and virtually no pipelines exist for its transport (except near oil refinery sites), transporting ammonia is easier and cheaper. It’s about one-sixth the cost of transporting hydrogen, and there are already more than 5,000 miles of ammonia pipelines and 10,000 terminals in place in the U.S. alone. What’s more, Abate explains, ammonia, unlike hydrogen, already has a substantial commercial market in place, with production volume projected to grow by two to three times by 2050, as it is used not only for fertilizer but also as feedstock for a wide variety of chemical processes.For example, ammonia can be burned directly in gas turbines, engines, and industrial furnaces, providing a carbon-free alternative to fossil fuels. It is being explored for maritime shipping and aviation as an alternative fuel, and as a possible space propellant.Another upside to geological ammonia is that untreated wastewater, including agricultural runoff, which tends to be rich in nitrogen already, could serve as the water source and be treated in the process. “We can tackle the problem of treating wastewater, while also making something of value out of this waste,” Abate says.Gao adds that this process “involves no direct carbon emissions, presenting a potential pathway to reduce global CO2 emissions by up to 1 percent.” To arrive at this point, he says, the team “overcame numerous challenges and learned from many failed attempts. For example, we tested a wide range of conditions and catalysts before identifying the most effective one.”The project was seed-funded under a flagship project of MIT’s Climate Grand Challenges program, the Center for the Electrification and Decarbonization of Industry. Professor Yet-Ming Chiang, co-director of the center, says “I don’t think there’s been any previous example of deliberately using the Earth as a chemical reactor. That’s one of the key novel points of this approach.”  Chiang emphasizes that even though it is a geological process, it happens very fast, not on geological timescales. “The reaction is fundamentally over in a matter of hours,” he says. “The reaction is so fast that this answers one of the key questions: Do you have to wait for geological times? And the answer is absolutely no.”Professor Elsa Olivetti, a mission director of the newly established Climate Project at MIT, says, “The creative thinking by this team is invaluable to MIT’s ability to have impact at scale. Coupling these exciting results with, for example, advanced understanding of the geology surrounding hydrogen accumulations represent the whole-of-Institute efforts the Climate Project aims to support.”“This is a significant breakthrough for the future of sustainable development,” says Geoffrey Ellis, a geologist at the U.S. Geological Survey, who was not associated with this work. He adds, “While there is clearly more work that needs to be done to validate this at the pilot stage and to get this to the commercial scale, the concept that has been demonstrated is truly transformative.  The approach of engineering a system to optimize the natural process of nitrate reduction by Fe2+ is ingenious and will likely lead to further innovations along these lines.”The initial work on the process has been done in the laboratory, so the next step will be to prove the process using a real underground site. “We think that kind of experiment can be done within the next one to two years,” Abate says. This could open doors to using a similar approach for other chemical production processes, he adds.The team has applied for a patent and aims to work towards bringing the process to market.“Moving forward,” Gao says, “our focus will be on optimizing the process conditions and scaling up tests, with the goal of enabling practical applications for geological ammonia in the near future.”The research team also included Ming Lei, Bachu Sravan Kumar, Hugh Smith, Seok Hee Han, and Lokesh Sangabattula, all at MIT. Additional funding was provided by the National Science Foundation and was carried out, in part, through the use of MIT.nano facilities. More

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      How hard is it to prevent recurring blackouts in Puerto Rico?

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      Researchers at MIT’s Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems (LIDS) have shown that using decision-making software and dynamic monitoring of weather and energy use can significantly improve resiliency in the face of weather-related outages, and can also help to efficiently integrate renewable energy sources into the grid.The researchers point out that the system they suggest might have prevented or at least lessened the kind of widespread power outage that Puerto Rico experienced last week by providing analysis to guide rerouting of power through different lines and thus limit the spread of the outage.The computer platform, which the researchers describe as DyMonDS, for Dynamic Monitoring and Decision Systems, can be used to enhance the existing operating and planning practices used in the electric industry. The platform supports interactive information exchange and decision-making between the grid operators and grid-edge users — all the distributed power sources, storage systems and software that contribute to the grid. It also supports optimization of available resources and controllable grid equipment as system conditions vary. It further lends itself to implementing cooperative decision-making by different utility- and non-utility-owned electric power grid users, including portfolios of mixed resources, users, and storage. Operating and planning the interactions of the end-to-end high-voltage transmission grid with local distribution grids and microgrids represents another major potential use of this platform.This general approach was illustrated using a set of publicly-available data on both meteorology and details of electricity production and distribution in Puerto Rico. An extended AC Optimal Power Flow software developed by SmartGridz Inc. is used for system-level optimization of controllable equipment. This provides real-time guidance for deciding how much power, and through which transmission lines, should be channeled by adjusting plant dispatch and voltage-related set points, and in extreme cases, where to reduce or cut power in order to maintain physically-implementable service for as many customers as possible. The team found that the use of such a system can help to ensure that the greatest number of critical services maintain power even during a hurricane, and at the same time can lead to a substantial decrease in the need for construction of new power plants thanks to more efficient use of existing resources.The findings are described in a paper in the journal Foundations and Trends in Electric Energy Systems, by MIT LIDS researchers Marija Ilic and Laurentiu Anton, along with recent alumna Ramapathi Jaddivada.“Using this software,” Ilic says, they show that “even during bad weather, if you predict equipment failures, and by using that information exchange, you can localize the effect of equipment failures and still serve a lot of customers, 50 percent of customers, when otherwise things would black out.”Anton says that “the way many grids today are operated is sub-optimal.” As a result, “we showed how much better they could do even under normal conditions, without any failures, by utilizing this software.” The savings resulting from this optimization, under everyday conditions, could be in the tens of percents, they say.The way utility systems plan currently, Ilic says, “usually the standard is that they have to build enough capacity and operate in real time so that if one large piece of equipment fails, like a large generator or transmission line, you still serve customers in an uninterrupted way. That’s what’s called N-minus-1.” Under this policy, if one major component of the system fails, they should be able to maintain service for at least 30 minutes. That system allows utilities to plan for how much reserve generating capacity they need to have on hand. That’s expensive, Ilic points out, because it means maintaining this reserve capacity all the time, even under normal operating conditions when it’s not needed.In addition, “right now there are no criteria for what I call N-minus-K,” she says. If bad weather causes five pieces of equipment to fail at once, “there is no software to help utilities decide what to schedule” in terms of keeping the most customers, and the most important services such as hospitals and emergency services, provided with power. They showed that even with 50 percent of the infrastructure out of commission, it would still be possible to keep power flowing to a large proportion of customers.Their work on analyzing the power situation in Puerto Rico started after the island had been devastated by hurricanes Irma and Maria. Most of the electric generation capacity is in the south, yet the largest loads are in San Juan, in the north, and Mayaguez in the west. When transmission lines get knocked down, a lot of rerouting of power needs to happen quickly.With the new systems, “the software finds the optimal adjustments for set points,” for example, changing voltages can allow for power to be redirected through less-congested lines, or can be increased to lessen power losses, Anton says.The software also helps in the long-term planning for the grid. As many fossil-fuel power plants are scheduled to be decommissioned soon in Puerto Rico, as they are in many other places, planning for how to replace that power without having to resort to greenhouse gas-emitting sources is a key to achieving carbon-reduction goals. And by analyzing usage patterns, the software can guide the placement of new renewable power sources where they can most efficiently provide power where and when it’s needed.As plants are retired or as components are affected by weather, “We wanted to ensure the dispatchability of power when the load changes,” Anton says, “but also when crucial components are lost, to ensure the robustness at each step of the retirement schedule.”One thing they found was that “if you look at how much generating capacity exists, it’s more than the peak load, even after you retire a few fossil plants,” Ilic says. “But it’s hard to deliver.” Strategic planning of new distribution lines could make a big difference.Jaddivada, director of innovation at SmartGridz, says that “we evaluated different possible architectures in Puerto Rico, and we showed the ability of this software to ensure uninterrupted electricity service. This is the most important challenge utilities have today. They have to go through a computationally tedious process to make sure the grid functions for any possible outage in the system. And that can be done in a much more efficient way through the software that the company  developed.”The project was a collaborative effort between the MIT LIDS researchers and others at MIT Lincoln Laboratory, the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, with overall help of SmartGridz software.  More

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      Helping students bring about decarbonization, from benchtop to global energy marketplace

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      MIT students are adept at producing research and innovations at the cutting edge of their fields. But addressing a problem as large as climate change requires understanding the world’s energy landscape, as well as the ways energy technologies evolve over time.Since 2010, the course IDS.521/IDS.065 (Energy Systems for Climate Change Mitigation) has equipped students with the skills they need to evaluate the various energy decarbonization pathways available to the world. The work is designed to help them maximize their impact on the world’s emissions by making better decisions along their respective career paths.“The question guiding my teaching and research is how do we solve big societal challenges with technology, and how can we be more deliberate in developing and supporting technologies to get us there?” says Professor Jessika Trancik, who started the course to help fill a gap in knowledge about the ways technologies evolve and scale over time.Since its inception in 2010, the course has attracted graduate students from across MIT’s five schools. The course has also recently opened to undergraduate students and been adapted to an online course for professionals.Class sessions alternate between lectures and student discussions that lead up to semester-long projects in which groups of students explore specific strategies and technologies for reducing global emissions. This year’s projects span several topics, including how quickly transmission infrastructure is expanding, the relationship between carbon emissions and human development, and how to decarbonize the production of key chemicals.The curriculum is designed to help students identify the most promising ways to mitigate climate change whether they plan to be scientists, engineers, policymakers, investors, urban planners, or just more informed citizens.“We’re coming at this issue from both sides,” explains Trancik, who is part of MIT’s Institute for Data, Systems, and Society. “Engineers are used to designing a technology to work as well as possible here and now, but not always thinking over a longer time horizon about a technology evolving and succeeding in the global marketplace. On the flip side, for students at the macro level, often studies in policy and economics of technological change don’t fully account for the physical and engineering constraints of rates of improvement. But all of that information allows you to make better decisions.”Bridging the gapAs a young researcher working on low-carbon polymers and electrode materials for solar cells, Trancik always wondered how the materials she worked on would scale in the real world. They might achieve promising performance benchmarks in the lab, but would they actually make a difference in mitigating climate change? Later, she began focusing increasingly on developing methods for predicting how technologies might evolve.“I’ve always been interested in both the macro and the micro, or even nano, scales,” Trancik says. “I wanted to know how to bridge these new technologies we’re working on with the big picture of where we want to go.”Trancik’ described her technology-grounded approach to decarbonization in a paper that formed the basis for IDS.065. In the paper, she presented a way to evaluate energy technologies against climate-change mitigation goals while focusing on the technology’s evolution.“That was a departure from previous approaches, which said, given these technologies with fixed characteristics and assumptions about their rates of change, how do I choose the best combination?” Trancik explains. “Instead we asked: Given a goal, how do we develop the best technologies to meet that goal? That inverts the problem in a way that’s useful to engineers developing these technologies, but also to policymakers and investors that want to use the evolution of technologies as a tool for achieving their objectives.”This past semester, the class took place every Tuesday and Thursday in a classroom on the first floor of the Stata Center. Students regularly led discussions where they reflected on the week’s readings and offered their own insights.“Students always share their takeaways and get to ask open questions of the class,” says Megan Herrington, a PhD candidate in the Department of Chemical Engineering. “It helps you understand the readings on a deeper level because people with different backgrounds get to share their perspectives on the same questions and problems. Everybody comes to class with their own lens, and the class is set up to highlight those differences.”The semester begins with an overview of climate science, the origins of emissions reductions goals, and technology’s role in achieving those goals. Students then learn how to evaluate technologies against decarbonization goals.But technologies aren’t static, and neither is the world. Later lessons help students account for the change of technologies over time, identifying the mechanisms for that change and even forecasting rates of change.Students also learn about the role of government policy. This year, Trancik shared her experience traveling to the COP29 United Nations Climate Change Conference.“It’s not just about technology,” Trancik says. “It’s also about the behaviors that we engage in and the choices we make. But technology plays a major role in determining what set of choices we can make.”From the classroom to the worldStudents in the class say it has given them a new perspective on climate change mitigation.“I have really enjoyed getting to see beyond the research people are doing at the benchtop,” says Herrington. “It’s interesting to see how certain materials or technologies that aren’t scalable yet may fit into a larger transformation in energy delivery and consumption. It’s also been interesting to pull back the curtain on energy systems analysis to understand where the metrics we cite in energy-related research originate from, and to anticipate trajectories of emerging technologies.”Onur Talu, a first-year master’s student in the Technology and Policy Program, says the class has made him more hopeful.“I came into this fairly pessimistic about the climate,” says Talu, who has worked for clean technology startups in the past. “This class has taught me different ways to look at the problem of climate change mitigation and developing renewable technologies. It’s also helped put into perspective how much we’ve accomplished so far.”Several student projects from the class over the years have been developed into papers published in peer-reviewed journals. They have also been turned into tools, like carboncounter.com, which plots the emissions and costs of cars and has been featured in The New York Times.Former class students have also launched startups; Joel Jean SM ’13, PhD ’17, for example, started Swift Solar. Others have drawn on the course material to develop impactful careers in government and academia, such as Patrick Brown PhD ’16 at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory and Leah Stokes SM ’15, PhD ’15 at the University of California at Santa Barbara.Overall, students say the course helps them take a more informed approach to applying their skills toward addressing climate change.“It’s not enough to just know how bad climate change could be,” says Yu Tong, a first-year master’s student in civil and environmental engineering. “It’s also important to understand how technology can work to mitigate climate change from both a technological and market perspective. It’s about employing technology to solve these issues rather than just working in a vacuum.” More

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      MIT spinout Commonwealth Fusion Systems unveils plans for the world’s first fusion power plant

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      America is one step closer to tapping into a new and potentially limitless clean energy source today, with the announcement from MIT spinout Commonwealth Fusion Systems (CFS) that it plans to build the world’s first grid-scale fusion power plant in Chesterfield County, Virginia.The announcement is the latest milestone for the company, which has made groundbreaking progress toward harnessing fusion — the reaction that powers the sun — since its founders first conceived of their approach in an MIT classroom in 2012. CFS is now commercializing a suite of advanced technologies developed in MIT research labs.“This moment exemplifies the power of MIT’s mission, which is to create knowledge that serves the nation and the world, whether via the classroom, the lab, or out in communities,” MIT Vice President for Research Ian Waitz says. “From student coursework 12 years ago to today’s announcement of the siting in Virginia of the world’s first fusion power plant, progress has been amazingly rapid. At the same time, we owe this progress to over 65 years of sustained investment by the U.S. federal government in basic science and energy research.”The new fusion power plant, named ARC, is expected to come online in the early 2030s and generate about 400 megawatts of clean, carbon-free electricity — enough energy to power large industrial sites or about 150,000 homes.The plant will be built at the James River Industrial Park outside of Richmond through a nonfinancial collaboration with Dominion Energy Virginia, which will provide development and technical expertise along with leasing rights for the site. CFS will independently finance, build, own, and operate the power plant.The plant will support Virginia’s economic and clean energy goals by generating what is expected to be billions of dollars in economic development and hundreds of jobs during its construction and long-term operation.More broadly, ARC will position the U.S. to lead the world in harnessing a new form of safe and reliable energy that could prove critical for economic prosperity and national security, including for meeting increasing electricity demands driven by needs like artificial intelligence.“This will be a watershed moment for fusion,” says CFS co-founder Dennis Whyte, the Hitachi America Professor of Engineering at MIT. “It sets the pace in the race toward commercial fusion power plants. The ambition is to build thousands of these power plants and to change the world.”Fusion can generate energy from abundant fuels like hydrogen and lithium isotopes, which can be sourced from seawater, and leave behind no emissions or toxic waste. However, harnessing fusion in a way that produces more power than it takes in has proven difficult because of the high temperatures needed to create and maintain the fusion reaction. Over the course of decades, scientists and engineers have worked to make the dream of fusion power plants a reality.In 2012, teaching the MIT class 22.63 (Principles of Fusion Engineering), Whyte challenged a group of graduate students to design a fusion device that would use a new kind of superconducting magnet to confine the plasma used in the reaction. It turned out the magnets enabled a more compact and economic reactor design. When Whyte reviewed his students’ work, he realized that could mean a new development path for fusion.Since then, a huge amount of capital and expertise has rushed into the once fledgling fusion industry. Today there are dozens of private fusion companies around the world racing to develop the first net-energy fusion power plants, many utilizing the new superconducting magnets. CFS, which Whyte founded with several students from his class, has attracted more than $2 billion in funding.“It all started with that class, where our ideas kept evolving as we challenged the standard assumptions that came with fusion,” Whyte says. “We had this new superconducting technology, so much of the common wisdom was no longer valid. It was a perfect forum for students, who can challenge the status quo.”Since the company’s founding in 2017, it has collaborated with researchers in MIT’s Plasma Science and Fusion Center (PFSC) on a range of initiatives, from validating the underlying plasma physics for the first demonstration machine to breaking records with a new kind of magnet to be used in commercial fusion power plants. Each piece of progress moves the U.S. closer to harnessing a revolutionary new energy source.CFS is currently completing development of its fusion demonstration machine, SPARC, at its headquarters in Devens, Massachusetts. SPARC is expected to produce its first plasma in 2026 and net fusion energy shortly after, demonstrating for the first time a commercially relevant design that will produce more power than it consumes. SPARC will pave the way for ARC, which is expected to deliver power to the grid in the early 2030s.“There’s more challenging engineering and science to be done in this field, and we’re very enthusiastic about the progress that CFS and the researchers on our campus are making on those problems,” Waitz says. “We’re in a ‘hockey stick’ moment in fusion energy, where things are moving incredibly quickly now. On the other hand, we can’t forget about the much longer part of that hockey stick, the sustained support for very complex, fundamental research that underlies great innovations. If we’re going to continue to lead the world in these cutting-edge technologies, continued investment in those areas will be crucial.” More