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ImpRovIng the gRId:
InteRconnectIon and stoRage
In 2019, Nevada and Washington
joined California and Hawaii in
committing to 100% carbon-free
electricity in the next generation.
Around the world, France, Sweden,
Norway, Portugal and the U.K.,
among others, have set similar goals.
Achieving that with solar and wind
power alone is tricky because of their
“intermittency”—the times when the
sun doesn’t shine and the wind doesn’t
blow. One solution is to improve the
ability to move energy from where
it’s produced to where it’s consumed
by building new power lines, known
as interconnectors, that can move
energy across long distances between
regional power grids. Another is to
store excess energy for later use, using
batteries. Lithium-ion cells—used in
mobile phones and electric cars—are
the best energy-storage technology
we have right now, and their use both
in homes and alongside power plants
is expected to grow storage capacity
tenfold by 2024. While the current
storage technology works best for
less than four hours, engineers are
developing novel alternatives that
can store energy for longer periods of
time. A startup in Switzerland called
Energy Vault uses surplus electricity
gathered on windy days to stack large
bricks into towers with automated
cranes, then recaptures the kinetic
energy generated when the bricks fall
back to the ground. Other companies
are storing electrical energy as heat
in molten salt or pumping water into
reservoirs for later use as hydropower.next-geneRatIon nucleaR
Nuclear reactors have been providing
zero-carbon power since the 1950s,
and today supply 20% of the U.S.’s
electricity and 11% of the globe’s. But
safety and environmental concerns
have increased the cost and complexity
of nuclear power plants, and their
construction has all but stopped in the
U.S. (Only one new reactor has come
online this century.) One strategy for
reinvigorating the industry is to focus
on smaller, simpler reactors that can
be constructed in factories, produce
less radioactive waste and require lessday-to-day management. (Some will be
designed to shut down automatically in
case of disaster.) TerraPower, a Bellevue,
Wash.–based startup with backing from
Bill Gates, is one of several companies
aiming for commercial use in the next
decade. Another, Terrestrial Energy, in
Canada, is developing a design that uses
molten salt to produce 195 megawatts
per reactor, about one-fifth of
conventional units.
But some scientists are looking
even further into the future, with novel
technologies. Commonwealth Fusion
Systems, a startup in Cambridge, Mass.,
is working to use new superconducting
materials to build a fusion power plant—
one that creates energy by combining
atoms rather than dividing them, as in
traditional nuclear. The project could
take decades to fully commercialize
but has the potential to revolutionize
electricity.managIng caRbon:
sequestRatIon
Almost all the scenarios outlined
by scientists to limit the increase
in global temperatures require not
merely reducing the amount of carbon
emitted into the atmosphere, but
eliminating it. The technology to do
that, known as carbon capture and
sequestration, involves removing
carbon from the atmosphere and
either physically storing it, often
underground, or leveraging natural
processes that capture and store it, as
trees do. Engineers have been working
on the challenge for decades, but costs
remain high—in part because there is
no economic benefit to storing carbon.
One way to change that would be to
reuse the carbon as fuel, but that only
delays its release; another would be a
price on carbon itself. For engineers,
it is a tantalizing area of research—
the ultimate moon shot—because any
breakthrough in capturing carbon,
reusing carbon or storing it at a large
scale would mitigate the potential
catastrophe of allowing it to continue
to heat the atmosphere. Life could not
only go on —it could go on more or less
as it has.Blum is the author of The Weather
Machine: A Journey Inside the ForecastILLUSTRATION BY HARRY CAMPBELL FOR TIME