Electrical Dreams

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Burning fossil fuels for electric generation, heating and transportation cannot continue if humanity, in more or less its current form, is to continue here on good ol’ Earth. 
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The future is electric—that much is clear. Burning fossil fuels for electric generation, heating and transportation cannot continue if humanity, in more or less its current form, is to continue here on good ol’ Earth.

Electrify: An Optimist’s Playbook for Our Clean Energy Future is a new book by Macarthur “genius” Saul Griffith that outlines how this can be done by 2035, at least in the U.S. How will this be accomplished? As Griffith writes, not with “big, not-yet-invented innovations, but [using] thousands of little inventions and cost reductions. We can still have our cars and our houses—but the cars will be electric and solar panels will cover our roofs.”

But as Griffith points out, there’s a small catch: “A 100% adoption rate is only achieved by mandate. The invisible hand of markets is definitely not fast enough; it typically takes decades for new technology to become dominant by market forces alone as it slowly increases its market share each year. A carbon tax isn’t fast enough, either. Market subsidies are not fast enough.”

Griffith believes that electrifying the U.S. by 2035 requires a wartime-level effort directed by the federal government, although at a cost somewhat smaller than the U.S. investment in World War II. That’s something I find hard to believe will happen in the next few years. (If you’re interested, Vox has an excellent summary of Griffith’s book, which provides more detail than I can in this column at tinyurl.com/yyee9whp.)

Alas, Griffith only addresses the U.S. contribution to greenhouse gas emissions. He has no answers on how to encourage China and India to act more quickly to reduce their emissions. At least when the climate-induced surge of refugees from India and China starts, we have an ocean separating us.

Despite the challenges in electrifying the world, the new hotness in the investment world is fusion startups. In December, Commonwealth Fusion Systems announced a $1.8 billion investment by, among others, Bill Gates. Just a month earlier, Helion raised $500 million (the previous record for a private fusion investment) for its fusion-based technology, $375 million of it from Sam Altman, a well-known Silicon Valley investor. And between those two records, Canadian company General Fusion raised a measly $130 million from Jeff Bezos and others. Fusion startups seem to be everywhere these days, and each has its own take on how to extract net energy from the fusion of hydrogen atoms (isotopes deuterium and tritium).

Commonwealth Fusion is working on creating a working tokamak, containing the high temperature and pressure of a fusion reaction inside a powerful magnetic field. This is similar to the publicly-financed ITER tokamak being built in France, both targeting 2025 for first results. Commonwealth is banking on its design of powerful magnets to be their advantage.

Helion has what it calls “pulsed-fusion technology,” which accelerates plasma from opposite ends of a 40-foot reactor to a central core surrounded again by powerful magnets to control the plasma and cause it to fuse. Pulsing overcomes one of the main issues with tokamak technology, which is maintaining the plasma temperature and pressure for extended periods of time (101 seconds is the current record for a Chinese tokamak). (Visit helion.com to see an animation of the pulsed reactor.)

In contrast to Commonwealth and Helion, General Fusion’s approach sounds positively archaic. As noted on its website, “Using practical, existing technology, steam-powered pistons compress the plasma to fusion conditions. Not requiring the exotic lasers or giant magnets found in other fusion approaches, steam pistons can be practically implemented in a commercial power plant.” In addition, the fuel itself doesn’t require complex or precise manufacturing, unlike the fuel pellets used in the National Ignition Facility (NIF), which uses 192 lasers to compress them. (See last month’s column for more information on both ITER and the NIF efforts.) Steam power and nuclear fusion seem a far cry from one another. (This cool YouTube video shows how it’s all supposed to work: youtu.be/rdOfW6h77ZU.)

Zap Energy takes an entirely different approach, called “sheared-flow stabilized Z-pinch”, which is apparently an improvement on “conventional Z-pinch”. Zeta-pinch devices use an electric current in the plasma to generate a magnetic field that compresses it, avoiding magnets, lasers, steam pistons, and other exotica. “Pinch” technology was one of the first approaches to nuclear fusion and lacks some of the luster of newer approaches. Yet, investors have pumped almost $50 million into the company since 2017.

There are dozens of others, and it’s hard to judge amongst them unless you’re a physicist with a deep understanding of fusion reactions. Nevertheless, billions of dollars are chasing a practical solution to nuclear fusion. Assuming that controlled fusion is possible (and all the signs point to yes), then it’s simply a matter of time and money until someone creates a working reactor. That gives the startups with the most money (Helion and Commonwealth) the best chance of getting there first.

While I don’t see any future free of the impact of global warming, global electrification powered by fusion, wind and solar holds out a glimmer of hope for what follows it.

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