Nuclear fusion reactors offer the hope of vast, clean energy from the same process that powers stars. But despite decades of research, a fusion reactor that can supply practical amounts of power has proven elusive. Now startup Commonwealth Fusion Systems has revealed in depth what it says is the most complex aspect of the reactor it is constructing—the way the reactor controls the plasma responsible for generating power.

The company says its findings support its vision—a reactor that can generate 1.1 gigawatts of fusion power and deliver 400 megawatts of net electricity to the grid. “That can power about 280,000 average American homes for a year, all using an amount of fuel you could deliver in a pickup truck,” says Brandon Sorbom, cofounder and chief science officer of Commonwealth Fusion Systems (CFS) in Devens, Mass.

The ARC (affordable, robust, compact) fusion reactor that CFS is developing is a tokamak. This is essentially a doughnut-shaped bottle that magnetically traps plasma at pressures and temperatures high enough to force atomic nuclei to fuse. A fraction of the mass of these atoms gets converted into energy. “We’re basically creating a miniature star,” Sorbom says.

High-Temperature Superconductor Magnets

The key innovation of the ARC reactor is the use of high-temperature superconductor (HTSC) magnets instead of typical superconducting magnets, which require frigid temperatures near absolute zero to work. Although HTSCs still require temperatures in the range of about 20 to 77 kelvins (-200 to -250 °C), the relative warmth in which they operate means they require dramatically less cooling equipment. This makes ARC significantly more compact and simple than previous fusion reactor designs, such as the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER).

RELATED: This Fusion Reactor Is Held Together With Tape

The fusion reactions generate neutrons, whose energy heats a continuously flowing loop of molten salt around the reactor’s magnetic bottle. This blanket of molten salt then heats a fluid to drive a turbine that generates electricity.

CFS researchers collaborated with scientists at MIT, Columbia, the Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics and other institutions around the world to describe the scientific underpinnings of the ARC reactor. They detailed their research in five peer-reviewed studies published today in the Journal of Plasma Physics.

“We demonstrate that the ARC power plant has a solid foundation in physics,” Sorbom says. “The papers confirm that when we build the ARC fusion power plant, it will work.”

Roughly two-thirds of the 58 authors of the studies come from outside CFS. “These papers are not just the stamp of our validation, but that of the global fusion-science community,” Sorbom says. “And then they underwent peer review from more institutions for independent checks to make sure all our calculations were correct.”

Managing Plasma Disruptions in Tokamaks

The new studies detail how ARC will deal with a major challenge all fusion reactors face. Plasma disruptions occur when instabilities within the plasma flow lead it to spiral out of control and make contact with the reactor wall. These can not only inflict a great deal of damage—the plasma is 150 million °C and carries 12 million amperes of electrical current—but also extinguishes the plasma.

“Plasma physics is really hard,” Sorbom says. “It’s the most complicated part of the machine.”

In the new studies, the researchers describe methods for limiting the impacts of such disruptions, such as rapidly injecting massive amounts of gas into ARC as a cushion to keep the plasma from damaging the reactor. But they also have designed ARC to withstand one disruption per day and to restart the plasma within a minute without interrupting power output, Sorbom says.

“We designed ARC considering that even on the wrong side of all the uncertainties we still face, ARC will still work.” —Brandon Sorbom, Commonwealth Fusion Systems

“Even if the plasma is off, the molten salt doesn’t decrease dramatically in temperature immediately,” Sorbom says. The salt can therefore continue to supply heat for electricity generation until fusion restarts.

ARC will use deuterium and tritium, two hydrogen isotopes, as its fuel. Ultimately, ARC will breed more tritium for future use, as neutrons from the plasma striking the molten salt will transmute some of the lithium within the salt to the rare hydrogen isotope. The tritium can then serve as fuel for the reactor, or help seed other power plants, “enabling the rapid scaling of this technology,” Sorbom says.

ARC Fusion Reactor Lifetime and Maintenance

The projected lifetime of ARC is 25 to 30 years. Its longevity depends on how long the superconducting magnets can survive damage from neutrons escaping the salt blanket. If the researchers want a fusion plant with a longer life, “we can make it slightly larger to put in more shielding between the blanket and the magnets,” Sorbom says.

The new studies explain that the reactor’s plasma fuel is held within a vacuum vessel that erodes over time. “It lasts somewhere between one to two years before it has to be replaced,” Sorbom says.

CFS has designed the vacuum vessel to be swapped out as quickly as possible. The reactor can be opened up and the salt blanket drained away so the company can cut up an old vacuum vessel and place in a new one.

ARC will have to shut down during such times, but Sorbom notes other kinds of power plants often experience outages every few years for routine maintenance as well. The startup hopes ARC will have short maintenance cycles, “a couple of months at most,” he says. The company is now collaborating with a grid operator to plan around such maintenance.

Sorbom adds that between replacements, research and development could design better vacuum vessels. “Every time we replace it, we can upgrade it,” he says. “The first may last one year. The next year, two years. Then after that, 2.5 years.”

All in all, these new studies suggest ARC is going to work, Sorbom says. “We designed ARC considering that even on the wrong side of all the uncertainties we still face, ARC will still work.”

Currently the startup is building a smaller prototype of ARC called Sparc. “Sparc is now more than 75 percent complete,” Sorbom says. The company aims for Sparc to generate its first plasma in 2027, and aims to build ARC at a site in Virginia by the early 2030s.

As thorough as the new studies are, the ARC reactor is still evolving, Sorbom adds. “We will be able to use what we learn from Sparc to make final design tweaks on ARC.”

This sponsored article is brought to you by Black & Veatch.

The biggest challenge facing utilities today isn’t what it seems. It’s not demand, even as load growth accelerates. It’s not extreme weather, even as “major events” become routine. It’s not cybersecurity, even as connections expand across the grid.

The real challenge is this: Distribution systems were designed for a different reality.

Long gone are the days of predictable demand, one-way power flow and isolated disruptions. At Black & Veatch, we see that leading utilities are no longer debating whether to modernize. They’re deciding how quickly they can do it, and how to do it at scale.

Across grid modernization programs globally, three truths consistently emerge. They define what it takes to prepare the distribution system for what’s next:

1. Outage response is not a resilience strategy

Resilience is being redefined in real time. A strategy centered on mobilizing crews and restoring service as quickly as possible is reactive, and increasingly insufficient.

Resilience has to shift upstream into integrated system design. That starts with hardening. Stronger poles, undergrounding and structural upgrades all have a role, particularly in high-risk corridors. We’re also seeing meaningful gains from how the network is configured and how quickly it can respond without waiting on manual intervention.

This is where distribution automation programs can change outcomes. Strategically placed reclosers, automated switches and fault indicators help contain disruptions before they spread. When combined with feeder reconfiguration and updated protection strategies, distribution automation investments allow utilities to set more aggressive recovery targets and achieve measurable reductions in outage duration and customer impact.

2. Future-readiness depends on DERs at scale

Forecasting is less and less reliable. Only 19 percent of utilities report strong confidence in their ability to predict future load growth, according to the Black & Veatch 2025 Electric Report. Distributed Energy Resources (DERs) like solar, storage, EVs and behind-the-meter generation are exciting solutions; but they fundamentally change how the system operates. Power is no longer just delivered. It’s injected, stored and redirected in ways the system was never designed to manage.

At scale, these challenges show up quickly — particularly on feeders where distributed generation is approaching or exceeding hosting capacity. Protection coordination becomes more difficult when fault current comes from multiple directions. Voltage becomes less predictable as generation fluctuates throughout the day. And planning models must now account for highly variable, location-specific behavior.

Distribution modernization is fundamentally changing how the system is designed and operated so it can absorb disruption, manage bi-directional flows and respond in real time.

Adapting to bi-directional power flow requires more than incremental updates. Leading utilities are responding by building flexibility into the system, moving beyond static assumptions toward dynamic hosting capacity and interconnection studies, planning that incorporates DER, EV adoption and localized load growth, and infrastructure aligned with the communications and control needed to manage it.

3. The edge must be intelligent, visible and secure

As system stress and complexity increase, utilities need far greater visibility and control over the network. Historically, utilities relied on customer calls, Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) at the substation level and field crews to understand what was happening on the system. That model doesn’t hold up. You can’t effectively manage a system you can’t see. Plus, the most critical events are increasingly happening beyond the substation — on feeders, laterals, and at the edge where DER and customer behavior are interacting with the grid.

Grid-edge technologies have become essential. Sensors, Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI) and automated switching provide the raw data and control needed to move from reactive to proactive operations. In more advanced deployments, utilities are creating centralized control environments that allow operators to see and manage the distribution system in near real time. That capability is enabled by:

• Advanced communications networks to form the backbone of real-time grid visibility
• Distribution Management System (DMS) and Outage Management System (OMS) to enable faster, more coordinated system response
• Analytics, AI and machine learning to improve situational awareness, anticipate system conditions, and support operational decision-making

The same connectivity enabling this real-time visibility and control also introduces new vulnerabilities, blurring the line between physical and cyber risk, yet many utilities manage them separately. Only 22 percent have unified teams in place, even as threats continue to rise, including a 50 percent increase in substation attacks and growing exposure to malware and ransomware, according to the Black & Veatch 2025 Electric Report. Cybersecurity and resilient network design must be embedded into the architecture from the outset—not layered on after the fact.

See what bolder vision looks like

Distribution modernization is fundamentally changing how the system is designed and operated so it can absorb disruption, manage bi-directional flows and respond in real time.

To learn about a successful program, check out Georgia Power’s recent grid modernization program. Black & Veatch partnered with the utility on large-scale infrastructure upgrades. The results? Outages are down 76 percent, restoration times have improved by more than 80 percent and communities across Georgia are powered by a grid built to meet the future head-on.

When the state faced the most destructive storm in the company’s history, Hurricane Helene, Georgia Power deployed a rapid response team that utilized its “smart grid” and restored power to more than 1 million customers within days.

“Not in my backyard” is the rallying cry of citizens everywhere resisting projects proposed for their locality. Whether it’s affordable housing, a waste treatment plant, or a new data center, they may recognize the benefit of the activity. They just don’t want it near them. And the roots of that resistance differ from place to place. When it comes to the ongoing transition from fossil fuels to renewables, companies and policymakers need to know where, exactly, people are coming from.

The Italian island of Sardinia is a textbook example. As IEEE Spectrum’s power and energy editor Emily Waltz discovered when she traveled there last October, Sardinian opposition to wind and solar projects runs deep. It spurred a quarter of the voting population to queue up in public squares in 2024 to sign a petition banning all construction of renewable energy.

Waltz was surprised. She went there to see a promising new grid-scale energy storage system that uses domes inflated with carbon dioxide. While reporting on that project, she interviewed residents, engineers, activists, and professors about their attitudes toward climate change and the Italian government’s grand plans for renewable energy on the island. And Waltz soon learned of Sardinians’ profound antipathy toward renewable energy and its deep ties to a history of invasion, occupation, and exploitation stretching back 2,700 years.

It started with the Phoenicians and then extended through the Romans, the Byzantines, and the Iberians. Sardinia was absorbed into a newly unified Italy in 1861, and it became an autonomous region of Italy in 1948. The island’s population is justifiably suspicious of outsiders, including the Italian government. “When you’re in Sardinia, the weight of history—you can feel it like in the air,” Waltz told me. “And it gets passed down from one generation to the next.”

Now, Italy needs Sardinia to produce even more power to meet the country’s climate goals—something that Sardinians see as Rome’s problem, not theirs. “Sardinia already exports about 30 percent of its electricity. It’s not like they need more,” Waltz says. “So it’s hard to make the case to build, build, build.”

The result of Waltz’s old-fashioned shoe leather reporting is this month’s cover story. She notes that the Sardinians she talked to aren’t climate-change deniers, and they don’t object to renewables per se. They just don’t like the way corporations and Italian policymakers are trying to plug into Sardinia like it’s one giant battery rather than the home of an ancient and proud people.

“I think Sardinians would be more receptive to renewable projects if it was more of a ground-up, grassroots approach,” Waltz says. Indeed, this homegrown approach is already working in some places in Sardinia. She knows of more than 50 projects, called energy communities, where the residents are deploying renewables themselves. The idea also holds promise for other places struggling to get locals to buy into the renewable-energy transition.

The electric vehicle (EV) market in Europe is flourishing, to the point where, in late 2025, nearly 100 percent of new registrations in Norway were EVs. But large electric freight trucks, called electric heavy-goods vehicles (eHGVs), are still as rare as hen’s teeth. Researchers and innovators on the continent are seeking to change this picture, and fast.

Chugging around the European Union are around 4.5 million HGVs, of which only around 14,500, or 0.32 percent, are electric. Figures in the United Kingdom are even more dire. Of the ~625,000 U.K. HGVs, a little over a thousand are eHGVs, making 0.16 percent. Despite diesel prices going through the roof since the start of the Iran war, eHGV sales are not trending upward. In late April, the U.K.’s Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders (SMMT) reported a drop in eHGV registrations from 1.4 percent last year to 0.9 percent this year. Similarly, the E.U. market is stalling, climbing only from 4.2 percent of new registrations in 2025 to 4.4 percent so far this year. Why?

The long-haul problem

“On the last mile, people are very happy to switch to electric,” summarizes Alex Foote, of Heriot-Watt University, in Edinburgh, who leads the road part of the Transit project, a large-scale research program seeking to holistically decarbonize all U.K. transport—road, rail, maritime, and air—using digital twinning. “It’s long haul where there’s big range anxiety, there are big costs, and then we also have the ‘payload penalty.’” The payload penalty refers to how increasing an eHGV’s range calls for more batteries, whose weight cuts into the payload.

One major improvement would be to speed up charging. A standard CCS2 (Combined Charging System Type 2) rapid charger delivering maximum 350-kilowatt power takes four hours to fully recharge an eHGV with a ~350-kilometer range, a completely impractical amount of time for most long-haul applications.

The new Megawatt Charging System (MCS)—international standards for which were only fully ratified in early 2026—is designed to address this problem. The MCS can deliver over 1 megawatt of power, meaning it can charge a massive HGV battery in 30–45 minutes, perfect for a driver’s mandatory 45-minute break every 4.5 hours of driving.

However, Foote sees practical flaws. “A lot of drivers say that they’re not on break if the vehicle is charging because they have to be there, monitoring it,” he says. “Also, it needs a very reliable and universal booking system, because drivers will need to know there’s a charger there with their name on it that’s not broken or in use.”

On top of this, a truck stop or depot with 10 MCS chargers needs a 10 MW+ connection, equivalent to the needs of about 10,000 homes. Such a massive draw on the power grid could exceed local power constraints, and add massive cost.

Thoughtful eHGV implementation

Instead of installing huge MCS stations in every fleet operator’s depot and at every motorway service station, many researchers and innovators see a more realistic and practical way forward in better combining existing technologies.

The U.K.-based battery innovator Zenobē says that requires thinking holistically. In 2017, a bus company complained that the cost of installing depot charging infrastructure would be more than the cost of the 10-bus fleet itself, and take three years. Zenobē came up with a more tailored solution that reduced this cost to half that of one vehicle, and completed the job in six weeks.

The rear of an iONTRON electric ready-mix concrete truck (eMixer) fitted with a 350-kilowatt-hour battery, part of a trial project with the building-materials supplier Aggregate Industries.Zenobē

“What we see going wrong in a lot of projects is you have ‘margin squirrelers’ across the supply chain, who are all looking for safety buffers because they’re not responsible for the total result,” says cofounder Steven Meersman. “In contrast, we take the attitude that this isn’t a vehicle problem, this isn’t a charging problem—it’s a problem that’s all about optimizing your whole operation.”

Zenobē’s also addresses two other pain points for fleet operators. One is providing private financing options for fleet electrification projects when government grant funding is insufficient or unavailable, reducing initial outlays. The other is removing any risk surrounding battery-life degradation.

Zenobē replaces batteries when their capacity is below a certain threshold, but then uses these old batteries for second-life applications. These batteries might find use as an alternative power source for eHGV charging during peak energy demand, a strategy called “peak shaving,” or they might be used to work alongside a diesel generator on construction sites. These second-life applications have real-world value, which Zenobē can then pass on to their customers. “This means that the [eHGV] customer only pays for what they use,” Meersman says.

Software will drive eHGV adoption

The Swedish freight-technology company Einride offers a somewhat different holistic solution for electrifying fleets.

“Instead of thinking of the transition as a gradual electrification of an existing fleet, we took a step back and asked, ‘Where would full electrification make sense now?’” says electric-mobility general manager David Hallgren. “We wanted to start there and operate more or less entirely with an electric-only fleet from day one.”

Einride’s fully autonomous, driverless, cab-less electric trucks have been operational on public roads since 2019, even completing the world’s first driverless international border crossing in 2025, between Sweden and Norway. But it’s the company’s Saga AI software that sets Einride apart.

This software simultaneously weighs up all of the usual freight-operation factors as well as those specific to eHGVs, such as state of charge, sizes of loads, grid connections, topology, driving style, even the weather. It then learns from real-world data and applies it to future scenarios in order to continuously improve.

Further improving Saga AI, Einride recently partnered with the U.S. quantum-computing company IonQ to help solve a nagging problem in freight logistics. Idle schedule gaps caused by shipment cancellations are difficult to fill optimally using classical optimization techniques. Combining classical techniques with a quantum approximate-optimization algorithm allowed the partners to achieve improvements of up to 12 percent in shipments delivered and a reduction of up to 6 percent in drive distance.

“The number of factors you need to consider and the nonlinearity of how those intersect mean that it becomes impossible to manage an eHGV fleet at scale with any level of manual planning,” says Hallgren. “This is why we’re incorporating AI…and trying to look around the corner at new technologies that will allow us to do this even better.”

This sponsored article is brought to you by Applied Materials.

At pivotal moments in history, progress has required more than individual brilliance. The most consequential breakthroughs — such as those achieved under the Human Genome Project — required a new operating paradigm: Concentrate the world’s best talent around a single mission, establish a common platform, share critical infrastructure, and collapse feedback loops. When stakes are high and timelines are compressed, sequential and siloed innovation simply cannot keep pace.

Today’s AI era is creating an engineering race with similar demands. Every company is pushing to deliver higher-performance AI systems, faster. But performance is no longer defined by compute alone. AI workloads are increasingly dominated by the movement of data: In many cases, moving bits consumes as much — or more — energy than compute itself. As a result, reducing energy per bit can extend system‑level performance alongside gains in peak compute.

The path to energy‑efficient AI therefore runs through system‑level engineering, spanning three tightly interconnected domains:

• Logic, where performance per watt depends on efficient transistor switching, low‑loss power, and signal delivery through dense wiring stacks.
• Memory, where surging bandwidth and capacity demands expose the memory wall, with processor capability advancing faster than memory access.
• Advanced packaging, where 3D integration, chiplet architectures, and high‑density interconnects bring compute and memory closer together — enabling system designs monolithic scaling can no longer sustain.

These domains can no longer be optimized independently. Gains in logic efficiency stall without sufficient memory bandwidth. Advances in memory bandwidth fall short if packaging cannot deliver proximity within thermal and mechanical constraints. Packaging, in turn, is constrained by the precision of both front‑end device fabrication and back‑end integration processes.

In the angstrom era, the hardest problems arise at the boundaries — between compute and memory in the package, front‑end and back‑end integration, and the tightly coupled process steps needed for precise 3D fabrication. And it is precisely this boundary‑driven complexity where the traditional innovation model breaks down.

The Traditional R&D Workflow Is Too Slow for Angstrom‑Era AI

For decades, the semiconductor industry’s R&D model has resembled a relay race. Capabilities are developed in one part of the ecosystem, handed off downstream through integration and manufacturing, evaluated by chip and system designers, and only then fed back for the next iteration. That model worked when progress was dominated by relatively modular steps that could be scaled independently and simply dropped into the manufacturing flow.

But the AI timeline has upended these rules. At angstrom‑scale dimensions, the physics enforces inescapable coupling across the entire stack: materials choices shape integration schemes; integration defines design rules; design rules dictate power delivery; wiring sets thermal budgets; and thermals ultimately constrain packaging scaling. System architects simply cannot wait 10–15 years for each major semiconductor technology inflection to mature.

Representing a roughly $5 billion investment, EPIC is the largest commitment to advanced semiconductor equipment R&D in U.S. history.

A long‑term perspective is essential to align materials innovation with emerging device architectures — and to develop the tools and processes required to integrate both with manufacturable precision. At Applied Materials, together with our customers, we are charting a course across the next 3–4 generations, extending as far as 10 years down the roadmap.

The angstrom era demands that we break down silos and bring together the industry’s best minds — from leading companies to leading academic institutions. If the problem is coupled, the solution must be coupled. If the timeline is compressed, the learning loop must be compressed. It’s not enough to just innovate — we must innovate how we innovate.

EPIC: A Center and Platform for High‑Velocity Co‑Innovation

This is the challenge that Applied Materials EPIC Center is designed to solve.

Representing a roughly US $5 billion investment, EPIC is the largest commitment to advanced semiconductor equipment R&D in U.S. history. When it opens in 2026, it will deliver state‑of‑the‑art cleanroom capabilities built from the ground up to shorten the path from early‑stage research to full‑scale manufacturing. But the facilities are only one component of the model. EPIC is also a platform, an operating system for high-velocity co‑innovation that revolutionizes how ideas move from the lab to the fab.

EPIC is a platform, an operating system for high-velocity co‑innovation that revolutionizes how ideas move from the lab to the fab.Applied Materials

The EPIC model compresses the traditional workflow. Customer engineers work side‑by‑side with Applied technologists from day one — moving beyond isolated process optimization and downstream handoffs. Within a shared, secure environment, EPIC tightly integrates atomistic modeling, test vehicles, process development, validation, and metrology feedback. Constraints that once surfaced late in development are identified and addressed early.

The result is a potentially 2x faster path that benefits the entire ecosystem under one roof:

• Chipmakers gain earlier access to Applied’s R&D portfolio, faster learning cycles, and accelerated transfer of next‑generation technologies into high‑volume manufacturing.
• Ecosystem partners gain earlier access to advanced manufacturing technology and collaboration opportunities that expand what is possible through materials innovation.
• Academic institutions gain opportunities to strengthen the lab‑to‑fab pipeline and help develop future semiconductor talent.

Building on decades of co‑development, we are reinventing the innovation pipeline with our partners across logic, memory, and advanced packaging to deliver the next leap in energy‑efficient AI.

Accelerating Advanced Logic

Logic remains the engine of AI compute. In the angstrom era, however, system‑level gains are increasingly constrained by power and energy. Extending AI performance now depends on architectures that deliver more performance per watt — accelerating the move to 3D devices such as gate‑all‑around (GAA) transistors, which boost density within a compact footprint while preserving power efficiency.

These architectural shifts are unfolding at unprecedented scale, with the logic roadmap already extending beyond first‑generation GAA toward more advanced designs. One key example is GAA with backside power delivery, which relocates thick power lines to the backside of the wafer, reducing resistive losses and freeing front‑side routing for tighter logic cell integration. Another example brings adjacent GAA PMOS and NMOS transistors closer together while inserting a dielectric isolation wall between them to minimize electrical interference. Further out, complementary FETs (CFETs) push density scaling even more by stacking PMOS and NMOS devices directly atop one another.

While these architectures deliver compelling gains in performance per watt and logic density without relying solely on tighter lithography, they significantly raise integration complexity. Manufacturing a single GAA device today can involve more than 2,000 tightly interdependent process steps. At the same time, wiring stacks continue to grow taller and denser to connect these advanced logic devices. Modern leading‑edge GPUs now in development pack more than 300 billion transistors into an area little larger than a postage stamp, interconnected by over 2,000 miles of wiring.

At this level of complexity, the process steps used to create these precise 3D devices and wiring stacks cannot be optimized independently. Design and process must evolve in lockstep, and materials innovation and fabrication methods must advance alongside device architecture. EPIC’s co‑innovation model is designed to accelerate exactly this convergence — enabling logic compute to continue advancing the frontiers of AI at the pace the roadmap demands.

Powering the Memory Roadmap

At the same time, the AI computing era is fundamentally reshaping how data is generated, moved, and processed — making memory technologies, especially DRAM, central to delivering the energy‑efficient performance AI systems require. As models grow larger and more data‑hungry, the DRAM roadmap is shifting toward architectures that deliver higher density, greater bandwidth, and faster access per watt.

At the DRAM cell level, this shift is driving a transition from 6F² buried‑channel array transistors (BCAT) to more compact 4F² architectures, which orient the transistor vertically to boost density and reduce chip area. Looking beyond 4F², sustaining gains in performance per watt will require moving past what 2D scaling alone can deliver. The industry is therefore turning to 3D DRAM, stacking memory cells vertically to add capacity within a constrained footprint. As these structures grow taller and aspect ratios intensify, high-mobility materials engineering in three dimensions becomes increasingly critical to performance and reliability.

Beyond the memory cell array, another powerful lever for DRAM scaling is shrinking the peripheral circuitry, which includes logic transistors and interconnect wiring. One emerging approach places select periphery functions beneath the DRAM array by bonding two wafers — one optimized for the DRAM cells and the other for CMOS logic — using multiple wiring layers.

In parallel, DRAM performance is being extended by leveraging logic‑proven enhancers in the memory periphery. These include mobility boosters such as embedded silicon germanium and stress films, along with wiring upgrades like improved low‑k dielectrics and advanced copper interconnects. Memory manufacturers are also transitioning periphery transistors from planar devices to FinFET architectures, following the logic roadmap to further improve I/O speed. These valuable inflections are central to EPIC’s mission — where they can be co-developed and rapidly validated for next‑generation memory systems.

Driving System Scaling With Advanced Packaging

As data movement becomes the dominant energy cost in AI systems, advanced packaging has emerged as a critical lever for improving system‑level efficiency—shortening interconnect distances, increasing bandwidth density, and reducing the power required to move data between logic and memory.

High‑bandwidth memory (HBM) marks a major inflection along this path. By stacking DRAM dies — scaling to 16 layers and beyond — and placing memory much closer to the processor, HBM enables rapid access to ever‑larger working datasets. This delivers step‑function gains in both bandwidth and energy efficiency.

More broadly, the rise of 3D packages such as HBM underscores why advanced packaging is becoming central to the AI era. Packaging now addresses system‑level constraints that logic and memory device scaling alone can no longer overcome. It also enables a move away from monolithic systems‑on‑chip toward chiplet‑based architectures, as AI workloads increasingly demand flexible designs that combine logic, memory, and specialized accelerators optimized for specific tasks.

A vital technology powering this roadmap is hybrid bonding. With interconnect pitches approaching those of on‑chip wiring, conventional bumps and microbumps run into fundamental limits in density, power, and signal integrity. Hybrid bonding removes these barriers by allowing dramatically higher interconnect and I/O density, supporting a broad range of chiplet architectures — from memory stacking to tighter compute‑memory integration.

As bonded structures like HBM stacks grow larger and more complex, warpage control, die placement, stack alignment, and thermal management become first‑order challenges. EPIC tackles these and other high‑value advanced‑packaging challenges through early, parallel co‑innovation across materials, integration, and manufacturing.

Bringing It All Together

Across logic, memory, and advanced packaging, our industry faces an ambitious roadmap that promises significant gains in energy efficiency for AI systems. But realizing that potential demands breakthrough materials innovation at a time when feature sizes are shrinking, interfaces are multiplying, and process interdependencies are escalating. These challenges cannot be solved on 10–15‑year timelines under the traditional relay‑race model. We must break down silos, align earlier across the ecosystem, and parallelize learning to keep pace with AI’s demands.

In the AI era, progress will be defined by the speed at which lightbulb moments turn into manufacturing and commercialization reality. The only viable path forward is a new innovation model — and EPIC is how we are driving it.

This sponsored article is brought to you by Ampace.

As AI workloads grow to gigascale levels, the global data center industry has hit a hidden physical wall. The real bottleneck is no longer just the thermal limit of the chip or the capacity of the cooling system — it is the dynamic resilience of the power chain.

Modern AI computing clusters, driven by massive GPU clusters, generate high-frequency, abrupt, and synchronized spikey pulse loads. As rack densities soar beyond 100 kW, these fluctuations are amplified into a “power paradox”: while the digital logic of AI is moving faster than ever, the physical infrastructure supporting it remains tethered to legacy response capabilities.

The power usage of these gigascale sites and their drastic, high frequency, abrupt load surges from the AI GPU clusters can trigger transient voltage events and frequency instability, risking the entire local grid. The grid itself is not robust enough to support these loads. This leads to the infrastructure gap: The utility is not robust enough and traditional backup sources, such as diesel generators and gas turbines, simply cannot react to millisecond-level power spikes in output. This will often force operators into a cycle of costly infrastructure over sizing just to buffer the volatility.

AI infrastructure requires energy systems capable of instantaneous response while safeguarding continuity and reliability.

The industry has explored various mitigations — from rack-level BBUs to 800V DC architectures — yet the mature, high volume, traditional UPS system remains the most viable and scalable foundation for gigawatt-level facilities. Consequently, the UPS-integrated battery system has emerged as the critical “physical buffer” to neutralize these pulses at the source.

At Data Center World 2026 in Washington, D.C., Ampace led a pivotal technical dialogue with Eaton during the session “Powering Giga-scale AI.” Their exchange unveiled a fundamental paradigm shift: To bridge the AI power gap, energy storage must evolve from a passive insurance policy into an active, high-speed stabilizer. By aligning Ampace’s semi-solid-state battery innovation with Eaton’s proven system intelligence, we are moving beyond simple backup to solve the physical paradox of the AI era.

To move beyond simple backup and solve the physical paradox of the AI era, Ampace is aligning its semi-solid-state battery innovation with Eaton’s proven system intelligence.Ampace

The “Shock Absorber” physics: semi-solid chemistry for AI pulses

Conventional power systems were designed for steady-state loads, not the rapid heartbeat of a massive AI GPU cluster. When thousands of GPUs synchronize their computing cycles, they generate high-frequency, abrupt pulse loads that can lead to voltage sags, frequency oscillations, and potential interruptions of critical AI training.

Ampace’s PU Series semi-solid and low-electrolyte cells address this challenge by acting as high-speed “shock absorbers.” Leveraging ultra-low internal resistance (DCR) and high cycle capability, these batteries neutralize millisecond-level power spikes at the source, stabilizing the local power loop before disturbances propagate upstream to the grid or on-site generators. These high-rate cells enable 100 kW+ racks to maintain peak performance without transmitting instability across the power chain.

This capability aligns closely with Eaton’s matured UPS architectures, such as double-conversion topologies and advanced power electronics upgrades, which have long prioritized rapid load responsiveness and high system stability.

Together, these approaches embody a shared industry philosophy: AI infrastructure requires energy systems capable of instantaneous response while safeguarding continuity and reliability.

Ampace’s semi-solid state chemistry minimizes liquid electrolyte, greatly reducing the risk of leakage and thermal runaway under continuous AI high-load conditions.Ampace

Algorithmic intelligence: synchronizing energy and control

Hardware alone cannot solve the AI power paradox; the system also requires intelligent coordination between energy storage and power management. Sophisticated battery management systems (BMS) like Ampace’s high-precision design track state-of-charge (SOC) with high-speed sampling, even during rapid, shallow cycling typical in AI workloads.

Complementary algorithmic approaches in modern UPS platforms — such as ramp-rate control and average power management — effectively suppress sub-synchronous oscillations and optimize load smoothing. In large-scale AI training environments, where thousands of GPUs can trigger millisecond-level power pulses, these intelligent layers ensure that batteries buffer high-frequency fluctuations without compromising the mandatory emergency backup reserves.

By transforming energy storage from passive “standby insurance” into active, schedulable assets, the system simultaneously safeguards continuous AI training and maintains the long-term health of the data center infrastructure. In practical terms, this means that even during peak compute bursts, the infrastructure remains stable, training cycles continue uninterrupted, and operators avoid costly oversizing or grid stress.

Eaton’s dual-layer algorithms serve as a valuable benchmark in this space, demonstrating how advanced control logic can achieve similar objectives, reinforcing Ampace’s approach and philosophy within the broader data center power ecosystem.

Economic scalability: optimizing AI infrastructure efficiently

One of the largest costs in deploying AI infrastructure is “oversizing”: procuring transformers, generators, and UPS systems to handle brief peak spikes. This traditional approach inflates the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) and leads to wasted capital on underutilized hardware.

Ampace’s turn-key cabinet design developed by its independent R&D is engineered for seamless compatibility with mature, high volume UPS systems. By leveraging Eaton’s double-conversion UPS topologies alongside intelligent ramp-rate and average power management algorithms, AI data centers can scale dynamically without requiring costly infrastructure redesigns. This approach allows the UPS and batteries to act as active load-shapers, smoothing AI-driven pulses while strictly maintaining mandatory emergency backup capacity.

By utilizing energy storage as an active, schedulable asset, operators can right-size their infrastructure, avoid unnecessary grid upgrades, and deploy gigascale AI clusters with unprecedented efficiency.

Safety First: Protecting AI Infrastructure While Enabling Innovation

In high-density AI facilities, safety is non-negotiable. Ampace’s semi-solid state chemistry minimizes liquid electrolyte, greatly reducing the risk of leakage and thermal runaway under continuous AI high-load conditions.

Ampace’s turn-key cabinet design developed by its independent R&D is engineered for seamless compatibility with mature, high volume UPS systems. Ampace

At the same time, Eaton’s UPS design emphasizes system-level energy scheduling that never sacrifices mandatory emergency backup reserves, ensuring thermal safety and uninterrupted operation.

This “safety-first” approach ensures that infrastructure can sustain aggressive performance targets without compromising the physical integrity of the facility. Coupled with over a decade of proven high-cycle life operation and design under shallow pulse conditions, these systems can extend operational lifespan, reduce replacement requirements, and provide operators with confidence that safety and reliability remain uncompromised as compute density continues to grow.

To remain the scalable backbone of AI data centers

As AI computing scales over the next two to three years, the industry will face stricter grid requirements and even more demanding pulse load characteristics. This evolution demands a forward-looking design philosophy that harmonizes UPS, battery, and grid compatibility.

Ampace views current low-electrolyte semi-solid technologies as the optimal transitional step toward a fully solid-state future — one that promises ultimate safety and performance.

Ampace remains committed to this long-term technological roadmap. We view current low-electrolyte semi-solid technologies as the optimal transitional step toward a fully solid-state future — one that promises ultimate safety and performance. Whether through rack-level BBU, integrated UPS systems, or containerized storage, the universal core of the AI era remains constant: high-speed response, long shallow-cycle life, and refined energy management.

By engaging in deep technical exchanges with Eaton and leading energy innovators, Ampace ensures that its solutions not only meet today’s AI pulse challenges but also harmonize with broader infrastructure strategies and shared industry best practices.

Ultimately, as traditional diesel generators gradually give way to diversified alternatives, the integrated UPS-plus-energy-storage system will become the fundamental infrastructure standard.

The dialogue has just begun. Ampace will continue to engage in strategic exchanges with global industrial automation leaders and digital energy pioneers, co-authoring the playbook for a safer, more efficient, and more resilient AI-ready world.

The rise of electricity-guzzling data centers has forced the artificial intelligence industry to get creative about finding power. One of the latest ideas: Build micro data centers next to utility substations and operate them in concert, shifting the computation around based on power availability.

That’s the approach Nvidia and its collaborators are taking in a new pilot project they plan to build later this year. They’ll construct about 25 of these small data centers, each ranging from 5 to 20 megawatts, across five utilities in the United States. If one substation is overloaded with power demand, or if there’s an outage, the compute will be shifted to a different data center near a substation that has spare capacity.

To develop the fleet, Nvidia is partnering with data center builder InfraPartners, real estate service provider Prologis, and the nonprofit EPRI (formerly known as the Electric Power Research Institute).

The project aims to demonstrate a new way for data centers to be more flexible and accommodating of electricity availability. It’s also a way for data center developers to quickly secure power from the grid—an increasingly precious commodity, even in small chunks.

“We started looking at how much [unused] power is available at individual substations, and what we found was that on average, like 5 MW is nominally available…max 20 MW,” says Ben Sooter, director of Agentic AI Initiatives and Distributed AI Architecture at EPRI.

That’s too small to interest most data center operators, but building several at that size and operating them as if they’re one larger one is useful, Sooter says. Plus, shifting compute away from overburdened substations to those with more headroom can double the overall available power, he says.

“There are 55,000 substations in the U.S., and if they each have 5, 10, or 20 MW of spare capacity, that number adds up pretty fast,” adds Marc Spieler, senior director of energy at Nvidia.

Building energy flexibility into data centers

Squeezing every spare megawatt out of the grid will become increasingly important as data center construction continues to ramp up. In the United States, where half of all new data centers are being built, data centers could consume 9 to 17 percent of electricity generation by 2030. That’s more than double the current use, according to EPRI’s estimates. Facilities that train AI models are being built at the gigawatt scale, drawing about the same amount of power as a midsize U.S. city.

As grid operators figure out how to accommodate such massive new loads, data center developers sometimes end up waiting up to a decade to get approved for a grid connection. In response, the developers are making incredibly bold decisions around power—moves that would have been unthinkable just two years ago.

Many are building their own gas power plants on site. Some are offering to pay for the cost of new transmission lines and other grid infrastructure. And a few are even investing in startup companies that are developing fusion and next-generation nuclear fission reactors, in the hope of meeting power needs a decade from now.

But there’s a lot more power available on the grid than is used day to day. U.S. grid operators use only about 53 percent of their generation capacity on average, according to a landmark 2025 report from Duke University’s Nicholas Institute for Energy, Environment and Sustainability.

That’s because the U.S. electricity supply was built to meet peak demand—periods of the highest energy use of the year, such as the hottest days of the summer. Those peak loads can be almost double the load on a mild-temperature day and typically occur for less than 200 hours a year. The rest of the time, whole power plants sit idle.

If AI data centers can find a way to reduce or shift power consumption during these periods of peak demand, the extraordinary measure of building on-site power generation may not always be necessary. U.S. grids could provide an additional 76 GW—about 10 percent of peak demand—if large loads like data centers curtailed their power use just 0.25 percent of the time, according to the Nicholas Institute report.

Energy flexibility could also allow data centers to connect to the grid faster because they wouldn’t have to wait for new power plants to be built. And placing small data centers right next to substations reduces the need for new grid infrastructure, such as power lines and poles, and upgraded transformers and switch gear. As a bonus, these substations already have fiber-optic lines for high-speed internet, Nvidia’s Spieler points out. So the small data center can connect to those existing lines.

The inference advantage

The type of flexibility data centers can offer depends, in part, on the workload. The two main types of workload are AI training (the process of developing, say, a large language model or image generation model) and inference (using that model to, say, generate responses to users’ chatbot questions and requests for images).

Training requires huge data centers with tightly interconnected GPUs. For example, Meta’s Llama 3.1 405B model took about two and a half months to train on 16,000 GPUs. During training, adjusting all the model weights at once at each step requires the GPUs to be connected via high-speed links, such as Nvidia’s NVLink and InfiniBand interconnects. It wouldn’t be practical to spread out AI training workloads among a fleet of mini data centers. On the bright side, because training takes months, it’s possible to pause for short periods of time to curtail energy use during peak demand.

Inference doesn’t require as many GPUs or as much fancy networking. Instead of a huge corpus of data, a single user’s query is fed into the model, and the model spits out the answer. No backpropagation is involved—that is, no large-scale coordination between different chunks of input data is needed. And so inference is amenable to smaller data centers. However, timing is key. When you ask an image generator for a picture of your face pasted onto a cute cat, you understandably expect to see the result right away. So rather than briefly pausing compute during peak demand, the energy flexibility can come through creatively shifting the workload to a different location.

“Inference is one of the few workloads that can be dynamically routed,” says Valerie Crafton, senior vice president of strategy and operations at modular data center company Mod42. “Which means that you can align the compute with wherever the power is actually available. That’s one unique piece that’s really driving the push for a lot of these smaller data centers where the power exists.”

Both Nvidia and EPRI have been on a tear to demonstrate different kinds of data center flexibility. They’re calling their substation-based strategy “distributed inference.” Announced in February, the project aims to begin construction of the pilot fleet of small data centers by the end of 2026. Nvidia and EPRI estimate that compute workloads will need to be moved to a different substation only about 0.1 percent of the time.

Going micro in data center size is an idea that’s picking up speed. “We’re in this compute wave currently where everybody’s building these really large data centers—5 gigawatt, mammoth things,” says Sooter. But “there’s a second compute wave coming,” involving much smaller data centers handling inference, he says. Tech companies are “really beating the drum on this because they see demand for inference compute really picking up in 2027,” he says.

This story was updated on 13 May, 2026 to correct the source of the 76-GW figure.

“Why are you here?” Fabrizio Pilo, an electrical engineer, asks me as we sit in an outdoor café near his home in Cagliari, an ancient city on the island of Sardinia. It’s a fair question. I’m a journalist from the United States. I’d just stepped off my flight 2 hours prior and come straight to this meeting, suitcase still stowed in my rental car.

I’m here to see three intriguing new energy projects under development in Sardinia. I’d heard there’s strong public resistance to renewable energy, and I want to understand why that is. I tell Pilo, who is vice rector for innovation at the University of Cagliari, that I hope he’ll share some insights before I head out on a reporting trip across the island. (My answer seems to satisfy him, and he kindly gives me an hour of his time).

This won’t be the first time that I’m asked to explain my presence on the island. I’d expected it, to some extent; I’m a foreign journalist poking around, after all.

What I didn’t expect was the depth of Sardinians’ distrust, not just of journalists, but of any outsider, particularly ones with authority. Over the last few years, developers of wind and solar projects, most of whom aren’t from here, have been absorbing the bulk of this smoldering, communal wariness.

Activists Maria Grazia Demontis [left] and Alberto Sala, photographed inside the archaeological monument Giants’ Tomb of Pascarédda, have worked to stop the construction of wind farms by organizing protests and taking legal actions through their organization Gallura Coordination. Luigi Avantaggiato

In fact, the resistance is so widespread among Sardinians that over the course of two months in 2024, a grassroots petition to ban new wind and solar projects gathered over 210,000 certified signatures. That’s more than a quarter of Sardinia’s typical voter turnout and represents a cross-party consensus. People stood in long lines in public squares to sign. And it worked: Political leaders responded swiftly with an 18-month moratorium on renewable energy construction.

“I’ve never seen so much engagement for anything” in Sardinia, says Elisa Sotgiu, a literary sociologist at the University of Oxford, who was born and raised on the island. “Sardinia has a bunch of problems like enormous unemployment. There’s lots of emigration because there are no jobs. It’s one of the poorest areas in Europe. The area is just decaying,” she says. “And yet the thing people are demonstrating against is renewable energy.”

And the opposition continues: A network of mayors has mobilized for the cause. Thousands of people show up at organized protests. Activists vandalize grid equipment. Families are passing down these stories of resistance to their children as a point of pride. Local media outlets are egging it on, frequently publishing misinformation tinged with fearmongering.

These aren’t just NIMBY complaints—not in the pejorative sense, at least. The resistance, and the distrust underlying it, is rooted in the island’s complex history, both recent and ancient. It’s based on a past that the Sardinian people carry with them—a past that has seeded a deep sense of suspicion and vulnerability. Resistance, I learn, is part of what it means to be Sardinian.

Fabrizio Giulio Luca Pilo, vice rector of innovation at the University of Cagliari, has been working to help Sardinia transition to cleaner, more reliable energy. Luigi Avantaggiato

“It is a very sad situation,” Pilo tells me. “There are a lot of economic reasons to do the [energy] transition.” It could attract new companies such as data centers, which would create new jobs, he argues. It could reduce Sardinia’s reliance on imported gas and fuel, making the island more independent. New economic activity on the island might help reverse its population decline, he adds.

And while what’s happening on Sardinia is unique, it also represents a larger trend: A growing number of communities around the world are opposing wind- and solar-farm construction, to the consternation of stakeholders. By 2025, nearly one-fourth of the counties in the United States had enacted some impediment to new utility-scale wind and solar energy—up from as few as 15 percent two years earlier, according to a USA Today analysis. In Africa, community pushback successfully canceled major projects such as the 60-megawatt Kinangop Wind Park in Kenya. In India, local pastoralists are challenging the 13-gigawatt Ladakh solar and wind project. And the European Union’s top-down push for renewable energy has created opposition in many communities.

Their reasons vary—land-use preferences, generational ethos, government resentment, property values, economic effects, aesthetics—but all of these struggles have this in common: The resisters are passionate and they are often successful in blocking development.

This is a looming problem for the energy transition. Unlike large, centralized coal and nuclear power plants, renewable energy is geographically spread out, so it touches far more communities. Sardinia offers one of the clearest cases of what can go wrong when renewable-energy developers and authorities fail to consider the complexities of the local situation on the ground.

Why is Sardinia resisting renewable energy?

Roughly the size of New Hampshire, Sardinia juts out of the Mediterranean Sea about 200 kilometers west of Italy’s mainland. Technically it’s part of Italy, but Sardinians are quick to point out their island’s autonomous status—a subtle way of saying, “We do things our way.” Its mountains seem to echo the sentiment. With the highest peaks running in a chain along the east side of the island, Sardinia resolutely turns its back to the mainland.

At first glance, the island looks like the kind of place that’s ripe for an energy transition. Its two coal plants are aging and are targeted to be shut down to meet climate commitments. It has no nuclear power, nor does it produce its own natural gas. Wind and sun, however, are abundant and could easily meet the energy needs of Sardinia’s sparse population of about 1.5 million.

But while the resources may be ready for a transition, the people emphatically are not. When I first arrive in Sardinia and take in its beauty, I assume that the impetus behind the fight against wind and solar farms boils down to how they look. Waves of silicon, metal, and concrete would spoil views of Sardinia’s stunning beaches, rugged mountains, ancient pastures, and idyllic medieval villages, after all.

Residents of the city of Orgosolo in 1969 famously stopped the construction of a military firing range on communal grazing land known as Pratobello. Its village walls are still covered in murals advocating social protest and antiauthoritarianism. Luigi Avantaggiato

But the island’s aesthetic—and the tourism industry that depends on it—are only part of the equation. The far stronger cultural forces at play are rooted in Sardinia’s past. Over millennia, the island has endured successive invasions from outsiders seeking to exploit the land. These incursions, and Sardinians’ rebellious responses to them, have become an integral part of the island’s identity passed down through generations.

The invasions started with the relatively peaceful settlement of the Phoenicians in the 9th and 8th centuries B.C.E. Then came the Romans, the Byzantines, and the Iberians, who conquered with violence, looting, and enslavement. But legend has it that despite the might of these ancient conquerors, pockets of Sardinia sometimes managed to defend themselves. “Not even the Roman empire could conquer the shepherds of the highland regions,” is the oft-repeated tale. Whether that’s true or just an idealization is beside the point; such stories serve as an enormous source of pride and identity.

Sardinia exported about 30 percent of the electricity it generated in 2025, largely to Corsica and the Italian mainland via two existing submarine cables.

The island is “fiercely proud of its identity…especially in the center of Sardinia, which was the most resistant part,” says Andrea Vargiu, a sociologist at the University of Sassari in Sardinia. “This long history of exploitation is still in our DNA, along with a proud sense of autonomy,” he says.

Sardinia’s unification, in the mid-1800s, with what would become the Kingdom of Italy is seen by many as an act of colonization. It didn’t help that Italy then proceeded to exploit Sardinia’s forests and other resources for the benefit of the mainland—a practice that continued through the 20th century, says Vargiu.

Sardinian bandits sometimes fought back with their own sense of justice, settling matters through raids, kidnappings, and violence. Their stories live on in Sardinian lore with an almost mythical quality, the brigands admired for their intractability.

Pasquale Mereu, mayor of Orgosolo, helped organize the Pratobello 24 movement against renewable energy in Sardinia. Luigi Avantaggiato

Italy’s use of the island for military purposes particularly irked locals. In a famous case in 1969, residents of the town of Orgosolo successfully thwarted the construction of a firing range on communal grazing land known as Pratobello. That name has since become synonymous with the defense of one’s territory, and a rallying cry.

“Sardinia has always been a land of conquest,” says Pasquale Mereu, mayor of Orgosolo, who spoke with IEEE Spectrum through an interpreter. “We believe that even today we are still a colony of Italy, and I’m not ashamed to say it even though I represent an institution.”

A longstanding mural on one of his village’s walls reads: “You are in the territory of Orgosolo; here the people rule supreme and the government obeys.”

Sardinia’s History Shapes its Identity

Driving around the island and talking to people, I can feel the weight of Sardinia’s history—and people’s propensity for holding onto it. Elaborate heritage festivals occur nearly every autumn weekend in the island’s interior. They’re well attended, multigenerational affairs that aim to keep old traditions alive. In the medieval town of Belvì, men roast chestnuts—marroni—over an open fire in a frying pan the size of a swimming pool and then serve them to the crowd by shoveling them into troughs. They’re delicious. In an adjacent amphitheater, the crowd sways along to costumed performers leading traditional dances.

Then there are the Bronze Age stone structures, called nuraghi, that are pretty much everywhere. Built before the violent conquests, these conical towers have come to symbolize a romanticized vision of the heyday of Sardinia’s independence. More than 7,000 of them remain, ranging from unremarkable piles of rocks to complex towers, each one carefully documented on an interactive online map. I visit one of the more intact ones that’s fenced off and requires an admission fee. As I take some video with my phone, an employee asks me who I am and what I’m doing and informs me I’ll need to get permission from the government before posting anything online.

This rock hollowed out by erosion and walled up with stones was likely used by shepherds as a shelter near the historic Sardinian village of Tempio Pausania. Luigi Avantaggiato

But in interviews with residents, I’m continually reminded of the darker side of Sardinia’s past. People often bring up painful things that happened 50 or 500 years ago. A middle school science teacher named Giannina Serpi, and her husband, Roberto Moro, meet me at a café in the seaside town of Sant’Antioco. When I ask why people are so opposed to renewable energy, they (like many people I interviewed) point to the 1970s.

Sheep return from pasture in Bonorva, Sardinia, near the Bonorva wind farm operated by EDF Renewables. Luigi Avantaggiato

That decade brought a new kind of exploitation: not by empires or governments, but by technology companies. Petrochemical, aluminum, and other industrial companies from overseas built factories on the island, creating jobs and adjacent businesses. But after a few decades, economic and geopolitical factors led the companies to close the factories, sinking local economies and in some cases leaving behind toxic contamination.

In the northern city of Porto Torres, several petrochemical plants, a thermoelectric power plant, and an industrial harbor employed about 8,000 workers in the early 1970s. But the oil crises of that decade took its toll on jobs, and when environmental contamination became evident in the 1990s, employment plunged further. By 2010, most of the petrochemical plants had closed. Studies show that residents of Porto Torres during that time had curiously high rates of death from cancer, although there is no consensus on the cause.

Similarly, studies have found higher rates of lead in children in the Portovesme area in the southwest, about a 20-minute drive from where I sit with Serpi and Moro in Sant’Antioco. There, the U.S. aluminum producer Alcoa operated a smelter that employed about 500 people and supported an estimated 1,500 adjacent jobs. But the company shut down the smelter in 2012. Three years earlier, Russian aluminum manufacturer Rusal had idled its Eurallumina factory nearby.

The impacts of these events still feel fresh, Serpi explains through a digital translator. She says she teaches this history to her students but doesn’t tell them how to feel about it. “I let them decide,” she says.

Energy Colonialism in Sardinia

Against this backdrop, renewable-energy developers in the early 2010s began sizing up Sardinia. They were drawn by the cheap land, low population, strong wind, and sun that shines an average of about 300 days a year. EF Solare Italia commissioned an 11-MW solar plant in 2010. Rome-based Enel Green Power began construction of a 90-MW wind farm in Portoscuso the following year.

Other developers followed, and they mostly came from elsewhere—mainland Italy, Europe, and later, China. The way many Sardinians saw it, the new plants didn’t bring many long-lasting jobs. Most of the work ended after the design and installation phases, and profits went back to the companies’ headquarters outside of Sardinia, they argued. People called it “energy colonialism” and lauded landowners who refused to sell or lease their property to developers.

Pink granite called Ghiandone Limbara was extracted from the Sinnada quarry in northern Sardinia from the late 1970s to 2011. Luigi Avantaggiato

The uncle of Oxford’s Sotgiu is one of those landowners. She says that a couple of years ago a solar company asked him if he would allow the installation of an array on his family farm in Logudoro in Sardinia’s interior. “From that, he would have gotten something around €150,000 a year, which is more money than he’s seen in his life,” says Sotgiu. The money could have covered his three kids’ college education, she says. “But he refused.”

He had many reasons. For one, switching from sheep grazing to the more passive business of leasing land would have put the fate of his income in the hands of an outsider. “If you deprive a region of any sort of economy that is self-reliant, then it’s really fragile,” says Sotgiu. Her uncle didn’t trust that the income would last, and worried he’d be left with a ruined farm, she says. Plus, his farm has been in the family for generations and one of his sons is interested in continuing the business. “So I understand his pride in saying, ‘No, this is my farm, I don’t care about the money,’” she says.

Sardinia has one of the largest carbon footprints per capita in Europe.

Despite that kind of grassroots resistance, development continued. In 2023, the Italian government authorized the construction of a 1-GW submarine power cable to connect Sardinia to Sicily and the Italian mainland. When completed, the bidirectional cable, called the Tyrrhenian Link, will increase electricity exchange between the regions, bolster grid reliability, and help grid operators efficiently use more renewable energy.

Sardinian activists, however, view the cable as a way to justify even more construction of wind and solar plants, and to export the island’s energy for the benefit of non-Sardinians. The island already exports about 30 percent of its electricity, largely to Corsica and the Italian mainland via two existing submarine cables.

The Florinas wind farm, commissioned in 2004, was one of the earliest wind farms built in Sardinia. Luigi Avantaggiato

And then came the tipping point. In June 2024, in an effort to meet the European Union’s 2030 renewable energy targets, Italy committed to building more than 80 GW of new wind and solar energy capacity over December 2020 levels. The national government divvied up the burden among its regions and told Sardinia to build its portion, 6.2 GW.

The move triggered an onslaught of requests from wind and solar developers wanting to build projects in Sardinia. The queue at one point topped 50 GW of grid-connection requests. That represented more than 700 solar and wind projects, many of which came from companies outside of Sardinia.

The southern newspaper L’Unione Sarda ran wild with the numbers. Almost daily, for months, it published stories about the “wind assault.” The call-to-arms posts urged people to protest. “The Attack on the Landscape Does Not Stop; The Threat From Agrivoltaics Is Growing,” read a July 2024 headline. Unsubstantiated articles tried to link wind and solar developers to organized crime.

“It was scaremongering,” says Sotgiu. “It was a little dishonest, as I saw it, because they kept exaggerating and scaring people into thinking that we were going to be invaded.” (Representatives of the newspaper declined to comment.)

The numbers did scare people. Lost was the fact that a grid-connection request is just the start of a multiyear process that involves permitting and legal review and often ends in withdrawn or downsized projects. Submitting a request is inexpensive, and developers often cast a wide net by entering lots of these queues globally to increase the odds of being accepted. In the end, only a fraction come to fruition. In other words, building all, or even most, of the requested 50 GW was never going to happen.

“I tried to explain this” to the public, says an industrial engineer at the University of Cagliari, in Sardinia, who asked to remain anonymous to avoid any detrimental impacts of speaking out. “I went to the regional television station. But it’s difficult with technical information. And the newspaper communication is so bad, and its impact is so strong in the community, that it’s very difficult to change people’s minds,” he says.

Pratobello 2024 and Anti-Wind Protests

And so the collective angst caused by powerful outsiders, industry, and the state united Sardinians into a singular cause. Faced with what felt like another attempted conquest, they did what their families and community had taught them to do: They resisted. Says Mereu: “This is what we are rebelling against: the idea that Sardinians are few and therefore must put up with everything.”

In a nod to the 1969 resistance in Orgosolo, they dubbed the movement “Pratobello 2024.” Activist groups, called “committees,” organized protests, and created social media campaigns and videos. Thousands of people started showing up at planned demonstrations. A lawyer went on a hunger strike. Vandals unscrewed bolts on wind turbine blades and set fire to grid and construction equipment.

Italy’s transmission system operator, Terna, had to switch to company cars without logos to avoid being targeted. Students studying the electricity system in a master’s program sponsored by Terna were verbally attacked at an airport, according to a professor at their school who spoke with me about the violence.

Celebrities got involved. Italian actress and Bond Girl Caterina Murino met with Sardinia’s president to ask her to reject wind farms. Murino posted on Instagram: “Nobody touch Sardinia!!!!” On Italian national TV, the jazz legend Paolo Fresu performed on trumpet while popular TV host Geppi Cucciari read an impassioned lament about the exploitation of the island.

Sardinian author Erre Push penned a graphic novel titled Fàula Birdi about a protagonist who resisted an imposition from outsiders. He wrote it upon the request of the activist group ReCommon, whose mission is to “challenge corporate and state power responsible for the plunder of territories.” Push hopes the book will inspire more people to follow the protagonist’s lead. “Renewables are another imposition like in the past—not to help Sardinians but to help external people like industry managers or founders of companies,” he told me through an interpreter.

Concerned about the influx of solar and wind farms being built in Sardinia by outsiders, Roberto Pusceddu, under his pen name Erre Push, published a graphic novel that aimed to inspire young people to resist such impositions. Luigi Avantaggiato

Mereu and a network of mayors drafted the petition that gathered so many signatures. The people had spoken. In response, Sardinian politicians passed a law that imposed an 18-month ban on construction of wind and solar projects within 7 km of a nuraghe or other archeological site. It wasn’t a total ban, but it might as well have been. “If you put a circle with a 7-km radius around each archeological site, you cover all of Sardinia,” says Emilio Ghiani, a power systems expert at the University of Cagliari. “In this way, it is impossible to find a place to install a new plant.”

The move was like giving the Italian government—and the EU’s clean energy targets—the middle finger. And it sent renewable-energy developers scrambling. One company building an agriphotovoltaic plant raced to bring construction to 30 percent completion, which the new law said was the threshold for being allowed to proceed. The company asked not to be named in this story to avoid trouble.

Furious, the government in Rome challenged the Sardinian regional law in Italy’s Constitutional Court, and in January this year it prevailed. In its decision, the court rejected the law, saying that renewable-energy projects should be evaluated case by case.

Project development quickly resumed. So did the backlash. A headline in L’Unione Sarda declared: “Enough With Top-Down Decisions Without Consulting Communities.”

Sardinia’s Renewable Energy Conflict

Where the island goes from here is unclear. There’s a willingness among a portion of the population to move forward with an energy transition. For example, some of Sardinia’s largest cheese makers are powering their operations with renewable energy and installing systems to utilize waste heat for efficiency. But for the most part, the public isn’t budging in its resistance. Researchers are trying to dispel inaccurate information, but regional newspapers seem bent on perpetuating fear.

Plus, there are technical issues to work out before a full-scale energy transition can be made. Sardinia’s transmission system was built around the centralized generation of two coal plants; it wasn’t made for the distributed generation of wind and solar plants. Renewables require a more dynamic grid, more energy storage, and a wider range of power sources to compensate for their intermittency. Engineers are working on it, but they’ve got a ways to go.

The new Tyrrhenian Link undersea power cable will help with that. By connecting Sardinia, Sicily, and the mainland, the cable creates more flexibility in the system. When wind or solar generation slows in Sardinia, for example, electricity from the mainland can fill in the gap, and vice versa. “It will increase the reliability of the system, and after it’s installed, it will be possible to switch off the old generation plants that use coal,” says Ghiani. In January, Terna finished laying the western section of the cable between Sardinia and Sicily, and in April it completed the eastern section between Sicily and Campania on the mainland. Doing so set a world record for power cable depth, at 2,150 meters below sea level, according to Terna.

Italy originally ordered Sardinia’s two coal plants to shut down by 2025 but later extended the deadline to 2038.

The link is one of the most innovative high-voltage direct current (HVDC) projects in Europe. It can move up to a gigawatt of power and reverse that power flow nearly instantaneously. By using voltage source converter (VSC) technology, it can also help prevent power-flow problems by regulating frequency and smoothing out oscillations in the grid in real time. And it has black-start capability: In the event of a shutdown, it can help restore the grid without relying on an external electric network. These features are particularly helpful for an isolated network like Sardinia’s.

Italy has created new incentives and regulations to build a market for grid-scale energy storage. Having plenty of storage is a key to scaling up renewables because it provides backup power when the wind isn’t blowing or the sun isn’t shining. To this end, Italy created MACSE, an auction that gives storage developers revenue certainty. Its name translates to mechanism for the procurement of electricity storage capacity. The first auction round, in September, successfully awarded 10 GWh.

Energy experts in Sardinia are also working with policymakers to change the rules around grid-connection requests. But these kinds of nerdy details don’t grace most household conversations.

Industrial Sites Host Energy Storage

Something more accessible that the public can get behind is building renewables on Sardinia’s abandoned industrial sites. “To be honest, not everything is so beautiful here. We have a lot of industrial areas where you can place PV panels. We have a lot of rooftops,” electrical engineer Pilo says. “We have unused coal mines.” I visit one such project that’s proceeding with local support—or at least without much opposition. It’s a coal mine near Gonnesa that shut down in 2018 and is now being turned into a data center and a pumped-hydro energy storage system.

The plan is to move water through the mine’s vertical geometry via an enclosed membrane—like a soft pipe—and use the flow to turn a turbine that generates electricity. The water then gets pumped back to the surface and stored in pear-shaped vessels above ground. The scheme will help power the data center, which will be built both above and below ground, including in the mine’s largest chambers nearly 500 meters below the Earth’s surface.

Energy Vault will remove old mining equipment from the Carbosulcis coal mine near Gonnesa to make way for an underground data center [above]. It will be powered by a pumped-hydro energy storage system that flows through the mine’s vertical geometry and stores water in above-ground tanks [top].Luigi Avantaggiato

Energy storage developer Energy Vault is building it, and despite being based in Lugano, Switzerland—that is, not Sardinia—the company seems to have avoided protest. It helps that the mine is owned by Carbosulcis, a Sardinian regional-government-owned company, which is calling the shots on the project.

Plus, doing nothing with the mine costs money. The mine closed eight years ago because it wasn’t profitable, but Carbosulcis must continue maintaining it because of its high methane emissions, which require monitoring and ventilation to prevent explosions and leaks. Carbosulcis managers figured that if they’re going to continue putting money and personnel into the mine, they might as well do something useful with it, Luca Manzella, vice president for Europe, Middle East, and Africa at Energy Vault, says as he and I tour the mine.

An innovative project in Sardinia’s interior—Energy Dome’s grid-scale carbon dioxide battery—seems to be avoiding protest as well. Built in a gated industrial complex near Ottana, this energy-storage facility looks like a giant bubble—the kind that fits over a stadium or tennis complex. It’s filled with carbon dioxide that is compressed to store 200 MWh of electricity for the grid. Although the bubble is visible from several of the surrounding hillside villages, and although the developer is headquartered on the mainland, there’s little sign of public pushback.

Energy Dome began operating its 20-megawatt, long-duration energy-storage facility in July 2025 in Ottana, Sardinia. In partnership with Google, the company this year aims to build replicas of the system on multiple continents.Luigi Avantaggiato

Another path forward is through “energy communities.” In this grassroots approach, consumers work together to build their own solar plant or other power generation. Dozens of these communities are already active on the island, according to the Sardinian Electricity Association, a group that provides guidance to consumers.

But by far the greatest need is for energy developers and authorities to understand the people and the history of the land on which they want to build. “When Europe or the national government make a law, they have to also consider the background of Sardinian people and why they are so afraid,” says Simone Micheletti, CEO at Futura Group, a renewable-energy developer based in Serramanna, Sardinia. “You cannot apply the same law to Sweden and Sicily. Sometimes you need to understand [the situation] locally,” he says.

Decision makers everywhere would be wise to listen. Otherwise, they may suffer the same fate as their counterparts in Sardinia: despised by locals, delayed by politics, and surprised at how badly it all went.

Special thanks to Luigi Avantaggiato for interpreting and additional reporting.

This story was updated on 13 May, 2026 to correct the percentage of electricity that Sardinia exports.

This article appears in the June 2026 print issue as “Sardinia’s Energy Future Hinges on Its Past.”

Laboratory or in-field measurements are often considered the gold standard for certain aspects of power system design; however, measurement approaches always have limitations. Simulation can help overcome some of these limitations, including speeding up the design process, reducing design costs, and assessing situations that are often not feasible to measure directly. In this presentation, we will discuss two examples from the power system industry.

The first case we will discuss involves corona performance testing of high-voltage transmission line hardware. Corona-free insulator hardware performance is critical for operation of transmission lines, particularly at 500 kV, 765 kV, or higher voltages. Laboratory mockups are commonly used to prove corona performance, but physical space constraints usually restrict testing to a partial single-phase setup. This requires establishing equivalence between the laboratory setup and real-world three-phase conditions. In practice, this can be difficult to do, but modern simulation capabilities can help. The second case involves submarine HVDC cables, which are commonly used for offshore wind interconnects. HVDC cables are often considered to be environmentally inert from an external electric field perspective (i.e., electric fields are contained in the cable, and the cable’s static magnetic fields induce no voltages externally). However, simulation demonstrates that ocean currents moving through the static magnetic field satisfy the relative motion requirement of Faraday’s law. Thus, externally induced electric fields can exist around the cable and are within a range detectable by various aquatic species.

Key Takeaway:

• Learn how to use modern simulation to translate single-phase laboratory corona mockups into accurate three-phase real-world performance for 500 kV and 765 kV systems.
• Explore the physics behind how ocean currents interacting with HVDC submarine cables create induced electric fields—a phenomenon often overlooked but detectable by aquatic species.
• Gain actionable insights into how to leverage simulation to reduce design costs and bypass the physical space constraints that often stall traditional testing.
• See a practical application of electromagnetic theory as we demonstrate how relative motion in static magnetic fields necessitates simulation where direct measurement is unfeasible.
  

As more AI data centers come on line, concerns are rising about their effects on the grid, and it’s not just the amount of power they consume. They tend to have huge swings in power use, surging up and down by 70 percent or more in milliseconds. Traditional electricity infrastructure isn’t designed to deal with that kind of load fluctuation.

To address the problem, researchers are developing power electronics systems that sit between the data center and the grid to act as a buffer and even as a grid helper in times of need. One such system, developed by the Miami-based company ON.energy, is being implemented across 3 gigawatts’ worth of projects, and has sailed through a battery of tests at the U.S. National Lab of the Rockies (NLR).

In the tests, ON.energy’s system sat between a simulated data center and a simulated grid. The system successfully protected the data center from grid instability and also safeguarded the grid from the major load swings generated by the data center. The company’s technology involves a bidirectional uninterruptible power supply (UPS) that it calls AI UPS.

Such grid buffers are becoming increasingly important as AI facilities expand to gigawatt scale and beyond. Utilities have major concerns about both the amount of power demanded by these data centers and their potential to create system instability due to wild variations in loads. Innovations are needed to help data centers become better grid citizens, and shorten the amount of time they must wait to connect to the grid.

AI Data Centers and Grid Stability

UPS systems have been used for decades to protect data centers from grid events. If frequency varies suddenly or power is lost, these unidirectional systems provide almost instantaneous, short-term backup power to the equipment inside the data center. Because servers can’t tolerate more than minor deviations, UPS electronics also clean up low-quality power, such as voltage spikes or sags and frequency deviation.

UPS has served data centers well. But the scale of modern facilities packed with graphics processing units (GPUs) changes the game. Instead of data centers whose size is measured in tens of megawatts, AI facilities are reaching up to 5 GW. They still require the type of protection afforded by UPS, but their massive scale and load volatility pose dangers to the grid.

During a minor grid fault in Virginia in 2025, for example, several data centers tripped offline, causing 1.5 GW to drop off the grid simultaneously. This caused panic for the system operator, who had to act fast to balance the system and avoid a major power outage.

In addition to major changes in overall load, AI data centers can generate short-lived, high-voltage, or high-current disturbances known as grid transients. They may only last microseconds, but they can break down insulation, overheat transformers, cause electrical arcing, start fires, and destabilize an entire grid.

“The scale of modern data centers could lead to load swings of 1 GW multiple times per minute, which creates frequency variations and oscillations that the grid can’t handle,” says Ricardo de Azevedo, CTO at ON.energy.

These problems have given utilities and government authorities pause. Some authorities in the United States and parts of Europe are implementing moratoriums on new data centers or instituting rules that place responsibility for grid conditions onto the data center.

Texas Senate Bill 6, for example, requires new data centers to pay a share of any new grid infrastructure needed by their facilities. Additional requirements for voltage ride-through—the equipment’s ability to continue operating during power disruptions—are currently being formulated in accordance with this bill. Such rules aim to prevent large data centers from tripping offline suddenly or overwhelming the grid due to severe load variability from AI workloads.

“One of our customers in Texas that is building a 1-GW campus is now being required by the local grid authority to include voltage ride-through,” Azevedo says.

NLR engineers Przemyslaw Koralewicz [left] and Shahil Shah monitor the results of a simulation of ON.energy’s AI UPS in the control center at the NLR Flatirons Campus.Agata Bogucka/NLR

Bidirectional UPS

ON.energy’s 3.5-megawatt units consist of a power conversion system (PCS), batteries to store energy and act as an energy reservoir or buffer, another PCS, and a transformer. The batteries can provide up to eight hours of backup power, depending on the size of the data center. ON.energy sources this equipment from established manufacturers and adds its own software and controls.

The latest PCS units are bidirectional, acting as the interface between the grid, the batteries, and the data center. They convert between the alternating current (AC) from the grid, the direct current (DC) stored in the batteries, and the AC delivered to the data-center load, ensuring power quality and optimal flow when feeding an AI facility. In the other direction, the PCS absorbs and smooths transients caused by sudden load swings in the data center that would otherwise disrupt the grid.

“The batteries act like a reservoir of energy as well as a shock absorber, should there be any disturbances on the grid or from the data center,” says Azevedo.

ON.energy’s system is housed outside the data center, rather than inside as most UPS systems are, which frees up space internally for more compute resources. Being outside also allows the system to harness more advanced power electronics fed by medium voltage. Traditional UPS, on the other hand, operates on the low voltages needed by data-center computers for safety reasons.

The company has about 3 GW of these bidirectional AI UPS units either operating or under construction. It expects to commission a system in May for a 1.5-GW AI data center in Texas, according to Azevedo. For such a facility, hundreds of these 3.5-MW units would be required.

NLR’s Data Center-Grid Simulator

To test its system, ON.energy turned to NLR (formerly known as the National Renewable Energy Laboratory). The facility is likely the only one in the world that can do full-load, bidirectional testing that simulates both grid conditions and variable data-center loads. The facility can test up to 20 MW with voltage levels reaching 13.2 kilovolts. The test consisted of a 7-MW grid simulator that replicates disturbances and voltage ride-through events, and a 20-MW load simulator that reproduces real-world demand dynamics such as those created by an AI data center.

All over the world, researchers are working on an urgent and surprisingly difficult challenge: creating a cost-effective yet powerful permanent magnet that doesn’t use rare earth elements. Rare earth magnets are essential components of the motors for electric vehicles, heating and cooling systems, robots, tools, and appliances, and they’re also essential for wind turbines, audio speakers, and other systems. A strong magnet that doesn’t use rare earths would be of almost incalculable value, because it would free its users from China’s near-monopoly on rare earth elements and magnets. By circumventing that monopoly, it would almost certainly alter geostrategic calculations and global supply chains in short order.

Tantalizingly, no physics theories preclude the existence of a powerful and rare-earth-free magnet. And yet, after more than a decade of intensive efforts by many exceptionally bright people, no such magnet has been discovered.

Now, a small group of researchers in France and the United States has set out to test an intriguing hypothesis—that the problem can be solved with quantum computers. “You need the math of quantum mechanics to solve a problem that lives in the quantum realm,” declares Théau Peronnin, CEO of Alice & Bob, a Paris-based quantum computer startup. Alice & Bob is collaborating with Los Alamos National Laboratory and GE Vernova, with US $3.9 million in funding from the U.S. Department of Energy’s ARPA-E Quantum Computing for Computational Chemistry program.

Why Rare Earth Magnets Still Dominate

More than 67,000 compounds are known to have some degree of permanent magnetism. None, however, come close to the reigning permanent-magnet champ, neodymium iron boron (NdFeB), which dominates high-power applications.

For more than 15 years, researchers have used conventional high-performance computers to search for new and powerful magnets. But no commercially successful magnets have come out of that work. Even the best conventional computers aren’t powerful enough to simulate the detailed magnetic properties of a hypothetical permanent magnet.

To understand why, start with the basics. Permanent magnetism arises in certain crystalline materials when the spins of electrons of some of the atoms in the crystal are forced to point in the same direction, either “up” or “down.” The more of these aligned spins, the stronger the magnetism. The ideal atoms are ones that have unpaired electrons swarming around the nucleus in what are known as 3d orbitals. Tops are iron, with four unpaired 3d electrons, and cobalt, with three.

But 3d electrons alone are not enough to make superstrong magnets. As researchers discovered decades ago, magnetic strength can be greatly improved by adding to the crystalline lattice atoms with unpaired electrons in the 4f orbital—notably the rare earth elements neodymium, praseodymium, and dysprosium. These 4f electrons enhance a characteristic of the crystalline lattice called magnetic anisotropy—in effect, they promote adherence of the magnetic moments of the atoms to the desired directions in the crystal lattice. That, in turn, can be exploited to achieve high coercivity, the essential property that lets a permanent magnet stay magnetized.

“The combinatorial space is just ridiculously large. It’s 2 to the—I don’t know—40th or 50th power. It’s absolutely tremendous.”

The point is that being able to accurately simulate a hypothetical magnet means not only accounting for all those electron orbitals and spin states but also simulating the interaction of all those electron orbitals and spin states. And that’s really, really hard.

“Let’s say you have a chain of atoms, each with a single electron in the 1d orbital,” explains Peronnin. “And then you want to understand: If the spin of this one electron is down, how does it affect its neighbors? Would they be more likely to be up or down? And you need to do so for all the electrons in your chain. And then see if the total system has a tendency to align all its electron spins. Or, once you’ve added a bit of thermal noise and an external magnetic field, for example, how much disorder would there be in that chain? And so those are exactly the properties you want to predict.

“The emergent global properties [such as magnetism] arise from the local behavior of each electron. But each electron’s behavior is highly, highly correlated with how its neighbors behave. And this is what makes the problem extremely difficult, because you cannot treat each of those electrons individually. You need to treat the whole system with all its possible configurations all at once to predict the global properties. And this is where the computing space explodes.

“You have to consider all the possible superpositions of states of those electrons,” Peronnin continues. “And so here, the combinatorial space is just ridiculously large. It’s 2 to the, I don’t know, 40th or 50th power. It’s absolutely tremendous.”

Why Quantum Computers Might Finally Solve This Problem

The great potential advantage of quantum computers here is quantum parallelism, a capability that emerges directly from the qubits that are the heart of a quantum computer. In such a machine, these qubits are entangled with one another. The qubits are also in a state of superposition, which means that they can embody, in the macro world, certain quantum characteristics of subatomic particles. Namely, they can represent a binary 0 or 1 and also exist in a continuous range of states, each with an associated pair of probabilities—a probability that the bit is 0 and a corresponding probability that it’s 1. And the more there are of these superimposed qubits that are entangled, the more states those qubits can represent: A collection of n entangled qubits can represent 2ⁿ states simultaneously. The upshot is that with enough qubits, a quantum computer could handle the stupendous computational challenge of accurately simulating a hypothetical magnetic material.

How many qubits are enough? Peronnin figures things will start getting interesting when he and his colleagues can build a machine that has 100 logical qubits furnished with a proprietary type of error correction that they have pioneered. He figures that will happen around 2030. (IBM and others have already built quantum computers with over 1,000 physical qubits, but these machines did not have the error correction that is the defining characteristic of logical qubits, and none of them ever performed useful work.)

A strong magnet that doesn’t use rare earths would be of almost incalculable value.

Magnetics researchers not involved with the ARPA-E effort are mostly supportive of the project, while noting that progress on quantum computers is notoriously difficult to predict. “This is an interesting approach,” says Jiadong Zang, a professor of materials science and director of the materials science program at the University of New Hampshire. “You need some extraordinary approach to find some new structures,” he adds. Zang is part of a group that has been using a large language model to search the magnetics literature for the purpose of creating a database of experimental magnets, called the Northeast Materials Database for Magnetic Materials.

“This might be a task that quantum computers could do well,” agrees Matthew Kramer, Distinguished Scientist at Ames National Laboratory, in Iowa. (Kramer is working on a project with the U.S. Department of Energy and Fermilab aimed at improving a certain class of qubits.) He cautions, however, that efforts to use conventional computers to identify new magnet materials have often identified new candidates that could not possibly be built in the real world.

Microsoft’s Imaginary Magnets Will Probably Stay That Way

A recent and highly ambitious project at Microsoft, for example, resulted in a system called MatterGen, which the researchers used to design a range of magnets with “low supply-chain risk.” However, the researchers simplified the problem greatly by focusing on “high magnetic density” alone, without trying to incorporate any of the many other characteristics needed for a magnet to be useful. Taking into account such characteristics, including high coercivity, chemical stability, and cost effectiveness, is a big reason why the challenge quickly becomes computationally intractable. In the end, the researchers did not fabricate any of the magnets identified; it’s not even clear that they could.

“They had a lot of unusual structures,” Kramer notes. “The real question there is, can any of those actually be synthesized?”

This webinar covers power system modeling and simulation across multiple timescales, from quasi-static 8760 analysis through EMT studies, fault classification, and inverter-based resource grid integration.

What Attendees will Learn

1. Programmatic network construction and multi-fidelity modeling — Learn how to build power system networks programmatically from standard data formats, configure models for specific engineering objectives, and work across fidelity levels from quasi-static phasor simulation through switched-linear and nonlinear electromagnetic transient (EMT) analysis.
2. Quasi-static and EMT simulation workflows — Explore 8760-hour quasi-static simulation on an IEEE 123-node distribution feeder for annual energy studies, and EMT simulation on transmission system benchmarks including generator trip dynamics and asset relocation without remodeling the network.
3. Comprehensive fault studies and machine-learning classification — Understand how to systematically inject faults at every node in a distribution system using EMT simulation, and how the resulting dataset can be used to train a machine-learning algorithm for automated fault detection and classification.
4. Grid integration of inverter-based resources (IBRs) — Learn frequency scanning techniques using admittance-based voltage perturbation in the DQ reference frame, and simulation-based grid code compliance testing for grid-forming converters assessed against published interconnection standards.

Waste heat is everywhere: car engines, industrial machinery, kitchen appliances—even your own body. Some of that lost energy can be converted into electricity using thermoelectric generators: compact, solid-state devices that produce power directly from temperature differences without the need for spinning turbines or moving parts.

But designing materials that make these systems efficient has long been an engineering slog, requiring slow simulations and painstaking experiments to identify combinations that conduct electricity while limiting unwanted heat flow.

Now researchers in Japan have built an artificial-intelligence tool that can design thermoelectric generators 10,000 times faster than conventional approaches. Prototypes built based on the tool’s recommendations performed on par with today’s leading thermoelectric devices, the study found.

The research, reported 15 April in Nature, could boost a long-promised but not widely adopted clean-energy technology by dramatically accelerating the search for affordable materials and device designs that efficiently convert heat into electricity. Takao Mori, deputy director of the Research Center for Materials Nanoarchitectonics in Tsukuba, Japan, and his team conducted the research.

“It’s a solid piece of work and points to the future role that AI will play in the design” of such technologies, says Zhifeng Ren, the director of the Texas Center for Superconductivity at the University of Houston, who was not involved in the study.

Thermoelectric Generators Convert Waste Heat

Thermoelectric generators have been around for decades, quietly powering spacecraft, supplying electricity to gas pipelines in isolated locations, and running remote sensors in places where changing batteries is impractical. But high costs and modest performance metrics have largely confined the devices to niche applications. Hopes of broader deployment in oil refineries, steel mills, and other heavy industries have yet to materialize, leaving enormous quantities of waste heat untapped.

Large power plants typically rely instead on steam-driven systems that convert heat into electricity by boiling water to spin turbines. Those systems are highly efficient at large scales but require moving parts, maintenance, and relatively high operating temperatures that make them ill-suited for recovering heat from scattered or lower-temperature sources.

Thermoelectric generators work better for those jobs. Their compact, solid-state design allows them to harvest smaller amounts of heat from surfaces such as engine exhaust pipes, factory boilers, server racks, and high-performance electronics where conventional turbines would be impractical.

But progress in thermoelectric generators (TEGs) has long been hamstrung by the slow, painstaking design process. That’s because it requires researchers to hunt for materials that can simultaneously conduct electricity efficiently while minimizing heat flow that does not contribute to power generation.

Finding this rare pairing is essential for harnessing the Seebeck effect, a phenomenon in which a temperature difference across two semiconductors drives an electric current. To achieve that, researchers often spend days or weeks evaluating a single configuration by sifting through possible designs using slow physics simulations.

AI Speeds Design of Thermoelectric Generators

The new AI-based approach dramatically speeds that search. Dubbed TEGNet, the publicly available tool is built on a neural-network framework trained to approximate the complex physics equations that describe heat flow and electrical transport in thermoelectric materials. Instead of repeatedly solving these equations from scratch, the model learns how materials behave and treats them as modular components that can be combined in many different ways. This allows researchers to rapidly screen thousands of potential device architectures and estimate their performance in milliseconds.

“This speed enables exhaustive exploration of design parameters, uncovering optimal device configurations that might otherwise be overlooked,” wrote materials scientists Jing Cao, from Singapore’s Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR), and Ady Suwardi at Chinese University of Hong Kong, in a commentary published in Nature.

To test the approach, Mori’s team used TEGNet to optimize two types of generator designs. One, known as a segmented unicouple, stacks multiple thermoelectric materials together so each operates most efficiently within a particular temperature range. The second pairs two complementary semiconductors, known as n-type and p-type materials, that produce electricity when heat flows across them.

After scanning thousands of possible configurations, the AI identified device geometries predicted to deliver strong performance. The researchers then fabricated prototype generators using spark plasma sintering, a method that rapidly compresses powdered materials into dense solid components using pulses of electric current. Both designs achieved conversion efficiencies of about 9 percent under temperature conditions typical of industrial waste heat, where thermoelectric devices are most commonly deployed.

That number might not sound spectacular. But any technology that converts heat into electricity faces a built-in ceiling on efficiency, determined by the temperature difference between its hot and cold sides—a fundamental thermodynamic constraint known as the Carnot limit. Within those bounds, the new designs from Mori and his colleagues rank among the better-performing thermoelectric generators reported for this temperature range.

And when it comes to thermoelectrics, even modest gains can matter: Small improvements in efficiency can determine whether recovering waste heat is economically worthwhile or not.

AI Finds Cheaper Thermoelectric Materials

Another limitation in thermoelectrics is the cost of materials and fabrication. The field has long depended on semiconductor material such as bismuth telluride, which contains relatively scarce tellurium and often requires carefully controlled crystal growth and microstructural alignment to achieve high performance. This increases manufacturing complexity and expense.

By contrast, Mori says, some of the AI-designed devices identified by TEGNet can be made using simpler fabrication approaches and, in some cases, avoid bismuth telluride altogether. Although full details remain confidential because of ongoing industry collaborations, he says, preliminary cost estimates suggest the designs could move thermoelectric generators closer to economic viability for industrial waste heat applications.

“From the estimated cost,” Mori says, “we can project an industrially competitive power-generation cost for the first time in thermoelectric history.”

This story was updated on 24 April, 2026 to clarify that materials used in thermoelectric generators must minimize heat flow.

Examining how a U.S. Interregional Transmission Overlay could address aging grid infrastructure, surging demand, and renewable integration challenges.

What Attendees will Learn

1. Why the current regional grid structure is approaching its limits — Explore how coal-fired generation retirements, renewable integration, aging infrastructure past its 50-year lifespan, and exponential large-load growth from data centers and manufacturing reshoring are creating unprecedented pressure on the U.S. transmission system.
2. How an Interregional Transmission Overlay (ITO) would work — Understand the architecture of a high-capacity overlay using HVDC and 765 kV EHVAC technologies, how it would bridge the East/West/ERCOT seams, integrate renewable generation from resource-rich regions to demand centers, and potentially reduce electric system costs by hundreds of billions of dollars through 2050.
3. The five major challenges facing interregional transmission — Examine the obstacles of cross-state planning coordination, investment barriers including permitting and cost allocation, energy market harmonization across regions, supply chain limitations for specialized equipment, and political and regulatory uncertainties that must be navigated.
4. Actionable steps to begin building the ITO roadmap — Learn how utilities and developers can identify strategic corridors, form multi-stakeholder oversight entities, coordinate regional studies, secure state and federal support through FERC Order 1920 and DOE programs, and develop equitable cost allocation frameworks to move from vision to implementation.

Why does a chocolatier build a railroad? For Milton S. Hershey, it was a logical response to a sugar shortage brought on by World War I. The Hershey Chocolate Co. was by then a chocolate-making powerhouse, having refined the automation and mass production of its products, including the eponymous Hershey’s Milk Chocolate Bar and the bite-size Hershey’s Kiss. To satisfy its many customers, the company needed a steady supply of sugar. Plus, it wanted a way to circumvent the American Sugar Refining Co., also known as the Sugar Trust, which had a virtual monopoly on sugar processing in the United States.

Why Did Hershey Build an Electric Railroad in Cuba?

Beginning in 1916, Hershey looked to Cuba to secure his sugar supply. According to historian Thomas R. Winpenny, the chocolate magnate had a “personal infatuation” with the lush, beautiful island. What’s more, U.S. business interests there were protected by a treaty known as the Platt Amendment, which made Cuba a satellite state of the United States.

Like many industrialists of the day, Hershey believed in vertical integration, and the company’s Cuban operation eventually expanded to include five sugar plantations, five modern sugar mills, a refinery, several company towns, and an oil-fired power plant with three substations to run it all.

A 1943 rail pass entitled the holder to travel on all ordinary passenger trains of the Hershey Electric Railway. Hershey Community Archives

The company also built a railroad. To maximize the sugar yield, the cane needed to be ground promptly after being cut, and the rail system offered an efficient means of transporting the cane to the mills, and ensured that the mills operated around the clock during the harvest. By 1920, one of Hershey’s three main sites was processing 135,000 tonnes of cane, yielding 14.4 million kilograms of sugar.

Initially, the Hershey Cuban Railway consisted of a single 56-kilometer-long standard gauge track on which ran seven steam locomotives that burned coal or oil. But due to the high cost of the imported fuel and the inefficiency of the locomotives, Hershey began electrifying the line in 1920. Although it was the first electrified train in Cuba, rail lines in Europe and the United States were already being electrified.

In addition to powering the various Hershey entities, the generating station supplied Matanzas and the smaller towns with electricity. F.W. Peters of General Electric’s Railway and Traction Engineering Department published a detailed account of the system in the April 1920 General Electric Review.

Hershey’s Company Towns

The company town of Central Hershey became the headquarters for Hershey’s Cuba operations. (“Central” is the Cuban term for a mill and the surrounding settlement.) It sat on a plateau overlooking the port of Santa Cruz del Norte, about halfway between Havana and Matanzas in the heart of Cuba’s sugarcane region.

Hershey imported the industrial utopian model he had established in Hershey, Penn., which was itself inspired by Richard and George Cadbury’s Bournville Village outside Birmingham, England.

The chocolate magnate Milton S. Hershey had a “personal infatuation” with Cuba.Underwood Archives/Getty Images

In Cuba as in Pennsylvania, Hershey’s factory complex was complemented by comfortable homes for his workers and their families, as well as swimming pools, baseball fields, and affordable medical clinics staffed with doctors, nurses, and dentists. Managers had access to a golf course and country club in Central Hershey. Schools provided free education for workers’ children.

Milton Hershey himself had very little formal education, and so in 1909 he and his wife, Catherine, established the Hershey Industrial School in Hershey, Penn. There, white, male orphans received an education until they were 18 years old. Now known as the Milton Hershey School, the school has broadened its admission criteria considerably over the years.

Hershey duplicated this concept in the Cuban company town of Central Rosario, founding the Hershey Agricultural School. The first students were children whose parents had died in a horrific 1923 train accident on the Hershey Electric Railway. The high-speed, head-on collision between two trains killed 25 people and injured 50 more.

Milton Hershey was a generous philanthropist, and by most accounts he truly cared for his employees and their welfare, and yet his early 20th-century paternalism was not without fault. He was a fierce opponent of union activity, and any hard-won pay increases for workers often came at the expense of profit-sharing benefits. Like other U.S. businessmen in Cuba, Hershey employed migrant seasonal labor from neighboring Caribbean islands, undercutting the wages of local workers. Historians are still wrangling with how to capture the long-lasting effects of U.S. economic imperialism on Cuba.

Can the Hershey Electric Railway Be Revived?

Hershey continued to acquire new sugar plantations in Cuba throughout the 1920s, eventually owning about 24,300 hectares and leasing another 12,000 hectares. In 1946, a year after Milton Hershey’s death and amid growing political uncertainty on the island, the company sold its Cuban interests to the Cuban Atlantic Sugar Co. In addition to Hershey’s sugar operations, the sale included a peanut oil plant, four electric plants, and 404 km of railroad track plus locomotives and train cars.

Service on the Hershey Electric Railway in Cuba continued into at least the 2010s but became increasingly sporadic, with aging equipment like this car at the Central Hershey station. Hershey Community Archives

The Central Hershey sugar refinery continued to operate even after the Cuban Revolution but eventually closed in 2002. Passenger service, meanwhile, continued on the Hershey Electric Railway, albeit sporadically: By 2012, there were only two trips a day between Havana and Matanzas. This video, from 2013, gives a good sense of the route:

A colleague of mine who studies Cuban history told me that in his travels to the country over almost 30 years, he has never been able to ride the Hershey electric train. It was always out of service or had restricted service due to the island’s chronic electricity shortages, which have only gotten worse in recent years. I’ve been trying to find out if any part of the line is still operating. If you happen to know, please add a comment below.

Cuba’s frequent power outages make it difficult to operate the Hershey Electric Railway. In this 2009 photo, passengers await the restoration of electricity so they can continue their journey.Adalberto Roque/AFP/Getty Images

A 2024 analysis of the economic potential and challenges of reactivating Cuba’s Hershey Electric Railway noted that an electric railway could be a hedge against climate change and geopolitical factors. But it also acknowledged that frequent power outages and damaged infrastructure argue against reactivating the electrified railway, and it favored the diesel engines used on most of Cuba’s rail network.

Cuba has been mostly off-limits to U.S. tourists for my entire life, but it was one of my grandmother’s favorite vacation spots. I would love to imagine a future where political ties are restored, the power grid is stabilized, and the Hershey Electric Railway is reopened to the Cuban public and to curious visitors like me.

Part of a continuing series looking at historical artifacts that embrace the boundless potential of technology.

An abridged version of this article appears in the May 2026 print issue as “This Chocolate Empire Ran on Electric Rails.”

References

In April 1920, F.W. Peters of General Electric’s Railway and Traction Engineering Department wrote a detailed account called “Electrification of the Hershey Cuban Railway” in the General Electric Review, which was later abstracted in Scientific American Monthly to reach a broader audience.

Thomas R. Winpenny’s article “Milton S. Hershey Ventures into Cuban Sugar” in Pennsylvania History: A Journal of Mid-Atlantic Studies, Fall 1995, provided background to the business side of Hershey’s Cuba enterprise.

Florian Wondratschek’s 2024 article “Between Investment Risk and Economic Benefit: Potential Analysis for the Reactivation of the Hershey Railway in Cuba” in Transactions on Transport Sciences brought the story up to the present.

And if you’re interested in a visual take on the Hershey operation on Cuba, check out the documentary Milton Hershey’s Cuba by Ric Morris, a professor of Spanish and linguistics at Middle Tennessee State University.

Check out the interior of the self-driving car in Spielberg’s Minority Report that whisks Tom Cruise’s character toward jail: There are only two seats.

Perhaps taking a page from that sleekly designed sci-fi, Lucid Motors revealed the Lunar, a hyperefficient robotaxi concept, at its recent Investor Day in New York City. With its two side-by-side seats, compact size, and a cabin freed from a steering wheel, pedals, and garrulous cabbie, the Lunar defies more than a century of taxi tradition.

Lucid, which has partnered with Uber to deploy up to 20,000 of its seven-passenger Gravity SUVs as robotaxis, says that as many as 90 percent of taxi trips involve one or two passengers. Since passengers almost never sit up front in a human-driven taxi, having two rows of seats in this energy-saving model makes little sense, says Zach Walker, Lucid’s chief of advanced product creation. “People already view the front seat of a taxi as a no-go land,” he declares.

The Lunar is a scaled-down version of Lucid’s forthcoming midsize Cosmos and Earth SUV’s. Walker explains that for the project his team was freed for a “technical moonshot” that could make this car among the world’s most energy-efficient production EVs. That kind of efficiency could be critical for a fledgling robotaxi business that seeks to squeeze every kilowatt and penny from cars that could might be cruising up to 20 hours a day, seven days a week.

The Cosmos, a Tesla Model Y competitor, is no slouch, at up to 7.24 kilometers (4.5 miles) of driving range for every kilowatt-hour of battery energy, thanks to its new Atlas power train and a class-best 0.22 coefficient of drag. The Lunar advances the company’s goal of “radical efficiency” by further shrinking its battery size, to about 55 kilowatt-hours, down from 69 kWh in the Cosmos. Walker says the Lunar could deliver up to 9.7 kilometers (6 miles) of driving range for every kilowatt-hour of battery—nearly double the efficiency of a typical four-seat electric SUV. A quick calculation suggests that would be enough to travel more than 500 kilometers (310 miles) on a charge, despite the Lunar’s relatively pint-size battery.

Downsizing Can Be a Virtuous Circle

Downsizing batteries is a design tactic expounded by Lucid founder and former CEO Peter Rawlinson. He believed it sets off a virtuous circle or “convergent series” of efficiency gains, allowing less nonactive battery-pack material, supporting structures, and downsized brakes and suspension components. In other words, each weight reduction means that slightly less battery can deliver the same driving range. Up to a point, anyway.

Sam Abuelsamid, an engineer and vice-president of market research for Telemetry, agrees the weight of a power train or battery can lead to a virtuous—or vicious—circle in engineering. “A Hummer EV is the worst example on the electric side, carrying almost 3,000 pounds of battery, but also all the structure (and associated components) to support it,” he notes.

Taxis have traditionally been big, lumbering, and fuel-thirsty. Consider the iconic yellow cabs that Checker Motors built in Michigan from 1922 to 1982, or London’s tall-roofed hackney cabs, originally designed to provide head room for men’s top hats and bowlers. But today, Abuelsamid says, two-passenger robotaxis make obvious sense for urban areas where they are most likely to proliferate.

“They have a smaller footprint, use less energy, and reduce congestion in cities,” Abuelsamid says. “You just wouldn’t want them for your entire fleet.”

Efficiency gains can pay special dividends in robotaxis, which some industry leaders envision logging up to 100,000 miles a year. For every 1 kWh reduction in battery size, Walker calculates, that robotaxi workhorse would save up to $1,000 a year in operating costs. Lucid says the Lunar could reduce operating costs by 40 percent versus larger robotaxis retrofitted from passenger cars, such as Waymo’s Jaguar iPace models.

Regarding charging, the larger Cosmos can already add 200 miles of range in 14 minutes on a DC fast charger. With its superior per-kilometer efficiency, the Lunar could likely add 200 miles in closer to 10 minutes, reducing service downtime that’s another critical calculation for taxi operators.

At Investor Day in New York City, Lucid’s interim CEO March Winterhoff and Uber President Andrew Macdonald sat inside a Lunar concept car, which was shown with no doors—the better to flaunt its 36-inch display screen and spacious cabin. The Lunar integrates a large array of sensors to create a bird’s-eye view of its environment, including lidar, cameras, and radar. It’s powered by Nvidia’s new Drive Thor system-on-a-chip, designed to support Level-4 or Level-5 autonomy with 1,000 teraflops of compute performance for critical inference processing.

Dispensing With the Giggle Factor

Where Lucid’s Air and Gravity models are known for blistering acceleration and sporty handling, a utilitarian robotaxi has no need for “the giggle factor,” as Walker dubs it. That creates more opportunities for savings, and passenger comfort. A chassis can be optimized for a comfy ride and low NVH (noise, vibration, and harshness). Meanwhile, driver pedals, a steering wheel and complex linkages, and electrified assists are all eliminated. Dynamic steering, beefed-up body control or massive wheels and tires to boost cornering? No need. After all, there’s no human driver to experience those sensations. And a taxi passenger’s worst nightmare is a driver who thinks he’s Max Verstappen.

Of course, robotaxis bring their own set of tech challenges. According to Walker, a current robotaxi might use up to 24 kWh of energy over 20 hours to sense its environment and operate safely. Most of that goes to processors and onboard sensors, with lidar an especial energy hog.

Though the Lunar remains a concept for now, it’s no sci-fi fantasy. The Lunar was designed to use the same components front and rear as other midsize Lucids, differing only in its downsized battery and center passenger section. No complex, costly reengineering is required, and the Lunar could share a production line with those showroom SUVs. For all those reasons, Walker says the Lunar is fundamentally sound and ready to scale. All Lucid needs are customers.

“We still have our day jobs, but this was like our midnight project that we were all obsessed with making,” Walker says. “We think the [robotaxi] industry is primed for a really cool takeoff.”

Kentucky’s bourbon industry produces vast quantities of waste grain that is costly to transport and process. Researchers have now found a way to turn that by-product into high-performance energy-storage materials with potential applications in electric vehicles and large-scale grid storage.

More than 95 percent of all bourbon whiskey is made in Kentucky. For each barrel of bourbon, the industry also produces between six and 10 times as much “stillage”—a slurry of spent grain and water. This is normally sold to farmers as a livestock feed or soil additive, but it needs to be dried out first to reduce the weight and make it easier to process.

This is a major burden on distilleries, says Josiel Barrios Cossio, a graduate student in the University of Kentucky’s chemistry department. It either requires a lot of time and space to dry the stillage out via evaporation, or an expensive heating process. He and his colleagues have demonstrated that they can instead directly convert the wet stillage into useful carbon materials that can be used to make electrodes for batteries and supercapacitors.

RELATED: 4 Weird Things You Can Turn Into a Supercapacitor

In research presented at the spring meeting of the American Chemical Society in Atlanta today, Barrios Cossio showed that the carbon materials could be used to create supercapacitors that match or exceed the energy density of commercial devices, and hybrid lithium-ion supercapacitors that can store up to 25 times as much energy as conventional designs. While the work is just a proof-of-concept, Barrios Cossio says, it could ultimately allow distilleries to turn a waste stream into a source of profit.

“And it’s a win-win scenario, because we can potentially have a more renewable and abundant biomass source, or feedstock, to produce these materials that are every day more in demand from the car industry and renewable energy applications,” he says.

Innovative Energy-Storage Solutions

Barrios Cossio first conceived of the idea while taking part in a research traineeship run by the U.S. National Science Foundation aimed at finding solutions to problems related to water, energy, and food systems. After visiting several distilleries and seeing the scale of the waste produced, as well as the challenges these businesses face in disposing of it, he began thinking of ways to put the stillage to more productive use.

He discovered a group at the Friedrich Schiller University Jena, in Jena, Germany, that had developed a process for converting waste grain from beer breweries into electrode materials for energy-storage devices. Barrios Cossio then spent a summer internship at the lab to learn about their techniques.

After returning to the United States, Barrios Cossio contacted several distilleries to source some stillage to experiment with and soon got a response from the Wilderness Trail Distillery in Danville, Kentucky. “I asked them, ‘Can I take a gallon of stillage?’” he says. “They replied to me some days later saying, ‘Yeah, you are welcome to take it. I would prefer that you take 10,000 gallons and get rid of the stillage from that day.’”

University of Kentucky researchers developed supercapacitor electrodes using bourbon distillery waste that can store more energy per kilogram than commercial devices.Josiel Barrios Cossio

To turn the stillage into useful materials, the researchers relied on a process called hydrothermal carbonization. This involves heating the wet slurry at high pressure to create a fine black carbon powder called hydrochar. One benefit of the process, says Barrios Cossio, is that the high water content of the stillage helps generate the pressure required to power the conversion.

The resulting hydrochar was then used to create two different high-value carbon materials. In one experiment, the team combined the hydrochar with potassium hydroxide and heated the mixture to around 800 °C, creating a material called activated carbon. This material is extremely porous, which means it can have a surface area higher than 1,000 square meters per gram, says Barrios Cossio. That makes it ideal for creating high-capacity supercapacitors, which store energy as charged ions on the surface of the electrode material.

The team showed that a coin-sized double-layer capacitor built using their hydrochar-derived electrodes could store up to 48 watt hours per kilogram—on par with commercially available supercapacitors.

The team also showed that they could create “hard carbon” by heating their hydrochar in a furnace at 200 °C. This material has a similar structure to graphite, which is made up of orderly stacks of single-atom-thick graphene sheets. Unlike graphite, however, in hard carbon the sheets are arranged more haphazardly. This leads to many small pores and defects, which are ideal for storing alkali metal ions, such as lithium and sodium, commonly used in batteries.

Barrios Cossio used their hydrochar-derived hard carbon to create a batterylike electrode infused with lithium ions, and then combined this with an electrode made of activated carbon to produce a hybrid supercapacitor. The device represents a balance between the high-energy capacity of batteries and the fast discharging speeds of capacitors, which Barrios Cossio says could be particularly useful for applications like electric vehicles and grid stabilization.

At present, the devices are just a proof-of-concept. Barrios Cossio admits that scaling up the process to industrial levels will require considerable refinement. The team is also currently conducting a techno-economic analysis to assess whether the approach is commercially viable. But project supervisor Marcelo Guzman, a professor of chemistry at the University of Kentucky, says it could be a promising and sustainable way to meet the growing demand for energy storage.

“Kentucky is a state that has been investing since 2019 heavily in trying to develop an industry for batteries for cars,” he says. “There has been billions of dollars going into that sector, so there is going to be a big need for material supply. We think we came on board with that problem at the right time, in the right place, and we could have materials that could be really interesting to the battery industry.”

Last week’s Nvidia GTC conference highlighted new chip architectures to power AI. But as the chips become faster and more powerful, the remainder of data center infrastructure is playing catch-up. The power-delivery community is responding: Announcements from Delta, Eaton, Schneider Electric, and Vertiv showcased new designs for the AI era. Complex and inefficient AC-to-DC power conversions are gradually being replaced by DC configurations, at least in hyperscale data centers.

“While AC distribution remains deeply entrenched, advances in power electronics and the rising demands of AI infrastructure are accelerating interest in DC architectures,” says Chris Thompson, vice president of advanced technology and global microgrids at Vertiv.

AC-to-DC Conversion Challenges

Today, nearly all data centers are designed around AC utility power. The electrical path includes multiple conversions before power reaches the compute load. Power typically enters the data center as medium-voltage AC (1 to 35 kilovolts), is stepped down to low-voltage AC (480 or 415 volts) using a transformer, converted to DC inside an uninterruptible power supply (UPS) for battery storage, converted back to AC, and converted again to low-voltage DC (typically 54 V DC) at the server, supplying the DC power computing chips actually require.

“The double conversion process ensures the output AC is clean, stable, and suitable for data center servers,” says Luiz Fernando Huet de Bacellar, vice president of engineering and technology at Eaton.

That setup worked well enough for the amounts of power required by traditional data centers. Traditional data center computational racks draw on the order of 10 kW each. For AI, that is starting to approach 1 megawatt. At that scale, the energy losses, current levels, and copper requirements of AC-to-DC conversions become increasingly difficult to justify. Every conversion incurs some power loss. On top of that, as the amount of power that needs to be delivered grows, the sheer size of the convertors, as well as the connector requirements of copper busbars, becomes untenable. According to an Nvidia blog, a 1-MW rack could require as much as 200 kilograms of copper busbar. For a 1-gigawatt data center, it could amount to 200,000 kg of copper.

Benefits of High-Voltage DC Power

By converting 13.8-kV AC grid power directly to 800 V DC at the data center perimeter, most intermediate conversion steps are eliminated. This reduces the number of fans and power-supply units, and leads to higher system reliability, lower heat dissipation, improved energy efficiency, and a smaller equipment footprint.

“Each power conversion between the electric grid or power source and the silicon chips inside the servers causes some energy loss,” says Bacellar.

Switching from 415-V AC to 800-V DC in electrical distribution enables 85 percent more power to be transmitted through the same conductor size. This happens because higher voltage reduces current demand, lowering resistive losses and making power transfer more efficient. Thinner conductors can handle the same load, reducing copper requirements by 45 percent, a 5 percent improvement in efficiency, and 30 percent lower total cost of ownership for gigawatt-scale facilities.

“In a high-voltage DC architecture, power from the grid is converted from medium-voltage AC to roughly 800-V DC and then distributed throughout the facility on a DC bus,” said Vertiv’s Thompson. “At the rack, compact DC-to-DC converters step that voltage down for GPUs and CPUs.”

A report from technology advisory group Omdia claims that higher voltage DC data centers have already appeared in China. In the Americas, the Mt. Diablo Initiative (a collaboration among Meta, Microsoft, and the Open Compute Project) is a 400-V DC rack power distribution experiment.

Innovations in DC Power Systems

A handful of vendors are trying to get ahead of the game. Vertiv’s 800-V DC ecosystem that integrates with Nvidia Vera Rubin Ultra Kyber platforms will be commercially available in the second half of 2026. Eaton, too, is well advanced in its 800-V DC systems innovation courtesy of a medium-voltage solid-state transformer (SST) that will sit at the heart of DC power distribution system. Meanwhile Delta, has released 800-V DC in-row 660-kW power racks with a total of 480 kW of embedded battery backup units. And, SolarEdge is hard at work on a 99%-efficient SST that will be paired with a native DC UPS and a DC power distribution layer.

But much of the industry is far behind. Patrick Hughes, senior vice president of strategy, technical, and industry affairs for the National Electrical Manufacturers Association, says most innovation is happening at the 400-V DC level, though some are preparing 800-V DC. He believes the industry needs a complete, coordinated ecosystem, including power electronics, protection, connectors, sensing, and service‑safe components that scale together rather than in isolation. That, in turn, requires retooling manufacturing capacity for DC‑specific equipment, expanding semiconductor and materials supply, and clear, long‑term demand commitments that justify major capital investment across the value chain.

“Many are taking a cautious approach, offering limited or adapted solutions while waiting for clearer standards, safety frameworks, and customer commitments,” said Hughes. “Building the supply chain will hinge on stabilizing standards and safety frameworks so suppliers can design, certify, manufacture, and install equipment with confidence.”

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As electronics demand higher energy density, one component has proved challenging to shrink: the capacitor. Making a smaller capacitor usually requires thinning the dielectric layer or electrode surface area, which has often resulted in a reduction of power. A new polymer material could help change that.

In a study published 18 February in Nature, a Pennsylvania State University–led team reported a capacitor crafted from a polymer blend that can operate at temperatures up to 250 °C while storing roughly four times as much energy as conventional polymer capacitors. Today’s advanced polymer capacitors typically function only up to about 100 °C, meaning engineers often rely on bulky cooling systems in high-power electronics. The research team has filed a patent for the polymer capacitors and plans to bring them to market.

Capacitors deliver rapid bursts of energy and stabilize voltage in circuits, making them essential in applications ranging from electric vehicles and aerospace electronics to power-grid infrastructure and AI data centers. Yet while transistors have steadily shrunk with advances in semiconductor manufacturing, passive components such as capacitors and inductors have not scaled at the same pace.

“Capacitors can account for 30 to 40 percent of the volume in some power electronics systems,” says Qiming Zhang, an electrical engineering researcher at Penn State and study author, explaining why it’s important to make smaller capacitors.

A Plastics Blend More Powerful Than Its Parts

The research team combined two commercially available engineered plastics: polyetherimide (PEI), originally developed by General Electric and widely used in industrial equipment, and PBPDA, known for strong heat resistance and electrical insulation. When processed together under controlled conditions, the polymers self-assemble into nanoscale structures that form thin dielectric films inside capacitors. Those structures help suppress electrical leakage while allowing the material to polarize strongly in an electric field, allowing greater energy storage.

The resulting material exhibits an unusually high dielectric constant—a measure of how much electrical energy a material can store. Most polymer dielectrics have values around four, but the blended polymer dielectric in the new work had a value of 13.5.

“If you look at the literature up to now, no one has reached this level of dielectric constant in this type of polymer system,” Zhang says. “Putting two commonly used polymers together and seeing this kind of performance was a surprise to many people.”

Because the material can remain operational even at elevated temperatures—such as those from extreme environmental heat or hot spots in densely built components—capacitors built from this polymer could potentially store the same amount of energy in a smaller package.

“With this material, you can make the same device using about [one-fourth as much] material,” Zhang says. “Because the polymers themselves are inexpensive, the cost does not increase. At the same time, the component can become smaller and lighter.”

How the Polymer Mix Improves Capacitors

The researchers’ finding is “a big advancement,” says Alamgir Karim, a polymer research director at the University of Houston who was not involved in the Penn State development. “Normally when you mix polymers, you don’t expect the dielectric constant to increase.”

Karim says the effect likely arises from nanoscale interfaces created when the polymers partially separate. “At about a 50–50 mixture, the polymers don’t fully mix and instead create a very large interfacial area,” he says. “Those interfaces may be where the unusual electrical behavior comes from.”

If the material can be produced at scale, it could help address a key bottleneck in high-power electronics. Higher-temperature capacitors could reduce cooling requirements and allow engineers to pack more power into smaller systems—an advantage for aerospace platforms, electric vehicles, the electric grid, and other high-temperature environments.

But translating the concept from laboratory methods to commercial manufacturing may present challenges, says Zongliang Xie, a postdoctoral researcher at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, in California. The Penn State team is now producing small dielectric films, but industrial capacitor manufacturing typically requires continuous rolls of material that can extend for kilometers.

“Industry generally prefers extrusion-based processing because it’s easier and cheaper to control,” Xie says. “Scaling to produce great lengths of film while maintaining the same structure and performance could complicate matters. There’s potential, but it’s also challenging.”

Still, researchers say the discovery demonstrates that new performance limits may still be unlocked using familiar materials. “Developing the material is only the first step,” Zhang says. “But it shows people that this barrier can be broken.”

In the fictional nation of Beryllia, the 2026 World Chalice Games were set to begin as the country faced an unrelenting heat wave. The grid, already under strain from the circumstances, was dealt a further blow when a coordinated set of attacks including vandalism, drone, and ballistic attacks by an adversary, Crimsonia, crippled the grid’s physical infrastructure.

This scenario, inspired by the upcoming 2026 World Cup and the 2028 Olympic Games in Los Angeles, was an exercise in studying how utilities can prevent and mitigate, among other dangers, physical attacks on power grids. Called GridEx, the exercise was hosted by the Electricity Information Sharing and Analysis Center (E-ISAC) from 18 to 20 November 2025, and was described in a report released on 2 March. GridEx has been held every two years since 2011.

“We know that threat actors look to exploit certain circumstances,” says Michael Ball, CEO of E-ISAC, which is a program of the North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC), about designing the Beryllia scenario. “The Chalice Games became a good example of how we could build a scenario around a threat actor.”

Physical attacks on the grid are rising in the U.S., and GridEx attendance was up in November as utilities grapple with how to prevent and mitigate attacks. Participation in the exercise was at its highest level since 2019, according to the new report. Given the number of organizations present, GridEx estimates that more than 28,000 individual players participated, including utility workers and government partners, an all-time high since the exercise began.

Rising Physical Threats to Power Grids

The U.S. and Canadian grids face growing security issues from physical threats, including vandalism, assault of utility workers, intrusion of property, and theft of components, like copper wiring. NERC’s 2025 E-ISAC end-of-year report cites more than 3,500 physical security breaches that calendar year, about 3 percent of which disrupted electricity. That’s up from 2,800 events cited in the 2023 report (3 percent of those also resulted in electricity disruptions). Yet despite a number of recent high-profile attacks in the United States, physical attacks on the grid are happening worldwide.

“They’re not uniquely a U.S. thing,” says Danielle Russo, executive director of the Center for Grid Security at Securing America’s Future Energy, a nonpartisan organization focused on advancing national energy security. Russo says that while attacks are common in places like Ukraine, they’re not limited to wartime scenarios. “Other countries that are not experiencing direct conflict are experiencing increasing amounts of physical attacks on their energy infrastructure,” she says. Take Germany for example: On 3 January, an arson attack by left-wing activists in Berlin caused a five-day blackout affecting 45,000 households. That came after a suspected arson attack on two pylons in September 2025 left 50,000 Berlin households without power. Some German officials cite domestic extremism and fears of Russian sabotage in recent years as reasons for heightened security concerns over critical infrastructure.

Henrik Beuster, spokesman for grid operator Stromnetz Berlin, stands in front of the Lichterfelde power plant on 7 January after a suspected attack disrupted power supply in the area. Britta Pedersen/Picture Alliance/Getty Images

The uptick in attacks on the U.S. grid has been anchored by a number of incidents in recent years. In December 2025, an engineer in San Jose, Calif., was sentenced to 10 years in prison for bombing electric transformers in 2022 and 2023. A Tennessee man was arrested in November 2024 for attempting to attack a Nashville substation using a drone armed with explosives. And in 2023, a neo-Nazi leader was among two arrested in a plot to attack five substations around Baltimore with firearms, part of an increasing trend in white supremacist groups planning to attack the U.S. energy sector.

“Since [E-ISAC] started publishing data back in 2016, we’ve seen a large and consistent increase in the number of reported physical security incidents per year,” says Michael Coe, the vice president of physical and cyber security programs at the American Public Power Association, a trade group that works with E-ISAC to plan GridEx. While not all data is publicly available, Coe says there’s been a “tenfold” increase over the past decade in the number of reported physical attacks on the grid.

Drone Attacks: A Grid Security Challenge

During the fictional World Chalice Games scenario, drone attacks destroyed Beryllia’s substation equipment, highlighting a threat that’s gained traction as more drones enter the airspace.

“The question we get all the time is, how do you tell if it’s a bad actor, or if it’s a 12-year-old kid that got the drone for their birthday?” says Erika Willis, the program manager for the substations team at the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI).

One strategy to track and alert utilities to potential threats such as drones is called sensor fusion. The system includes a pan-tilt-zoom camera capable of 360-degree motion mounted on top of a tripod or pole with four installed radars. The radars combine with the camera for a dual system that can track drones even if they’re obstructed from view, says Willis. For instance, if a nearby drone flies behind a tree, hidden from the camera, the radars will still pick up on it. The technology is currently being tested at EPRI’s labs in Charlotte, N.C., and Lenox, Mass.

EPRI is also exploring how robotics and AI can improve security systems, Willis says. One approach involves integrating AI analysis into robotic technology already surveilling substation perimeters. Using AI can improve detection of break-ins and damage to fencing around substations, Willis says. “As opposed to a human having to go through 200 images of a fence, you can have the AI overlays do some of those algorithms…. If the robot has done the inspection of the substation 100 times, it can then relay to you that there’s an anomaly,” Willis says.

Prisma Photonics deploys fiber sensing technology that uses reflected optical signals to detect perturbations from vehicles and other sources near underground fiber cable.Prisma Photonics

Already, a number of utilities in the United States are using AI integrations in their security and monitoring processes. That’s thanks in part to Tel Aviv–based Prisma Photonics, a software company that launched in 2017 and has since deployed its fiber-sensing technology across thousands of miles of transmission infrastructure in the U.S., Canada, Europe, and Israel. A file-cabinet-size unit plugs into a substation and sends light pulses down existing fiber optic cables 30 miles in each direction. As the pulses travel down the cables, a tiny fraction of the light is reflected back to the substation unit. An AI model processes the results and can classify events based on patterns in the optical signal as a result of perturbations happening around the fiber cable.

“If we identify an event that we don’t have a classification for, and we get a feedback from a customer saying, ‘Oh, this was a car crash,’ then we can classify that in the model to say this is actually what happened,” says Tiffany Menhorn, Prisma Photonics’ vice president of North America.

As preparations get underway for the ninth GridEx, in 2027, Ball says participation in the exercises alone isn’t enough to bolster grid security. Instead, he wants utilities to take what they learn from the training and apply it in their own operations. “It’s the action of doing it, versus our statistic of saying, ‘Here’s what our growth was.’ That growth should relate to the readiness and capability of the industry.”

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When the Trump administration last year sought to freeze construction of offshore wind farms by citing concerns about interference with military radar and sonar, the implication was that these were new issues. But for more than a decade, the United States, Taiwan, and many European countries have successfully mitigated wind turbines’ security impacts. Some European countries are even integrating wind farms with national defense schemes.

“It’s not a choice of whether we go for wind farms or security. We need both,” says Ben Bekkering, a retired vice admiral in the Netherlands and current partner of the International Military Council on Climate and Security.

It’s a fact that offshore wind farms can degrade radar surveillance systems and subsea sensors designed to detect military incursions. But it’s a problem with real-world solutions, say Bekkering and other defense experts contacted by IEEE Spectrum. Those solutions include next-generation radar technology, radar-absorbing coatings for wind turbine blades, and multi-mode sensor suites that turn offshore wind farm security equipment into forward eyes and ears for defense agencies.

How Do Wind Farms Interfere With Radar?

Wind turbines interfere with radar because they’re large objects that reflect radar signals. Their spinning blades can introduce false positives on radar screens by inducing a wavelength-shifting Doppler effect that gets flagged as a flying object. Turbines can also obscure aircraft, missiles, and drones by scattering radar signals or by blinding older line-of-sight radars to objects behind them, according to a 2024 U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) report.

“Real-world examples from NATO and EU Member States show measurable degradation in radar performance, communication clarity, and situational awareness,” states a 2025 presentation from the €2 million (US $2.3 million) offshore wind Symbiosis Project, led by the Brussels-based European Defence Agency.

However, “measurable” doesn’t always mean major. U.S. agencies that monitor radar have continued to operate “without significant impacts” from wind turbines thanks to field tests, technology development, and mitigation measures taken by U.S. agencies since 2012, according to the DOE. “It is true that they have an impact, but it’s not that big,” says Tue Lippert, a former Danish special forces commander and CEO of Copenhagen-based security consultancy Heimdal Critical Infrastructure.

To date, impacts have been managed through upgrades to radar systems, such as software algorithms that identify a turbine’s radar signature and thus reduce false positives. Careful wind farm siting helps too. During the most recent designation of Atlantic wind zones in the U.S., for example, the Biden administration reduced the geographic area for a proposed zone off the Maryland coast by 79 percent to minimize defense impacts.

Radar impacts can be managed even better by upgrading hardware, say experts. Newer solid-state, phased-array radars are better at distinguishing turbines from other objects than conventional mechanical radars. Phased arrays shift the timing of hundreds or thousands of individual radio waves, creating interference patterns to steer the radar beams. The result is a higher-resolution signal that offers better tracking of multiple objects and better visibility behind objects in its path. “Most modern radars can actually see through wind farms,” says Lippert.

One of the Trump administration’s first moves in its overhaul of civilian air traffic was a $438 million order for phased-array radar systems and other equipment from Collins Aerospace, which touts wind farm mitigation as one of its product’s key features.

Saab’s compact Giraffe 1X combined surface-and-air-defense radar was installed in 2021 on an offshore wind farm near England.Saab

Can Wind Farms Aid Military Surveillance?

Another radar mitigation option is “infill” radar, which fills in coverage gaps. This involves installing additional radar hardware on land to provide new angles of view through a wind farm or putting radar systems on the offshore turbines to extend the radar field of view.

In fact, wind farms are increasingly being tapped to extend military surveillance capabilities. “You’re changing the battlefield, but it’s a change to your advantage if you use it as a tactical lever,” says Lippert.

In 2021, Linköping, Sweden–based defense contractor Saab and Danish wind developer Ørsted demonstrated that air defense radar can be placed on a wind farm. Saab conducted a two-month test of its compact Giraffe 1X combined surface-and-air-defense radar on Ørsted’s Hornsea 1 wind farm, located 120 kilometers east of England’s Yorkshire coast. The installation extended situational awareness “beyond the radar horizon of the ground-based long-range radars,” claims Saab. The U.K. Ministry of Defence ordered 11 of Saab’s systems.

Putting surface radar on turbines is something many offshore wind operators do already to track their crew vessels and to detect unauthorized ships within their arrays. Sharing those signals, or even sharing the equipment, can give national defense forces an expanded view of ships moving within and around the turbines. It can also improve detection of low altitude cruises missiles, says Bekkering, which can evade air defense radars.

Sharing signals and equipment is part of a growing trend in Europe toward “dual use” of offshore infrastructure. Expanded dual-use sensing is already being implemented in Belgium, the Netherlands, and Poland, and was among the recommendations from Europe’s Symbiosis Project.

Baltic Power

In fact, Poland mandates inclusion of defense-relevant equipment on all offshore wind farms. Their first project carries radar and other sensors specified by Poland’s Ministry of Defense. The wind farm will start operating in the Baltic later this year, roughly 200 km south of Kaliningrad, a Russian exclave.

The U.K. is experimenting too. Last year, West Sussex–based LiveLink Aerospace demonstrated purpose-built, dual-use sensors atop wind turbines offshore from Aberdeen. The compact equipment combines a suite of sensors including electro-optical sensors, thermal and visible light cameras, and detectors for radio frequency and acoustic signals.

In the past, wind farm operators tended to resist cooperating with defense projects, fearing that would turn their installations into military targets. And militaries were also reluctant to share, because they are used to having full control over equipment.

But Russia’s increasingly aggressive posture has shifted thinking, say security experts. Russia’s attacks on Ukraine’s power grid show that “everything is a target,” says Tobhias Wikström, CEO for Luleå, Sweden–based Parachute Consulting and a former lieutenant colonel in Sweden’s air force. Recent sabotage of offshore gas pipelines and power cables is also reinforcing the sense that offshore wind operators and defense agencies need to collaborate.

Why Is Sweden Restricting Offshore Wind?

Contrary to Poland and the U.K., Sweden is the one European country that, like the U.S. under Trump’s second administration, has used national security to justify a broad restriction on offshore wind development. In 2024, Sweden rejected 13 projects along its Baltic coast, which faces Kaliningrad, citing anticipated degradation in its ability to detect incoming missiles.

Saab’s CEO rejected the government’s argument, telling a Swedish newspaper that the firm’s radar “can handle” wind farms. Wikström at Parachute Consulting also questions the government’s claim, noting that Sweden’s entry into NATO in 2024 gives its military access to Finnish, German, and Polish air defense radars, among others, that together provide an unobstructed view of the Baltic. “You will always have radars in other locations that will cross-monitor and see what’s behind those wind turbines,” says Wikström.

Politics are likely at play, says Wikström, noting that some of the coalition government’s parties are staunchly pro-nuclear. But he says a deeper problem is that the military experts who evaluate proposed wind projects, as he did before retiring in 2021, lack time and guidance.

By banning offshore wind projects instead of embracing them, Sweden and the U.S. may be missing out on opportunities for training in that environment, says Lippert, who regularly serves with U.S. forces as a reserves liaison officer with Denmark’s Greenland-based Joint Arctic Command. As he puts it: “The Chinese and Taiwanese coasts are plastered with offshore wind. If the U.S. Navy and Air Force are not used to fighting in littoral environments filled with wind farms, then they’re at a huge disadvantage when war comes.”

As data-center developers frantically seek to secure power for their operations, one startup is proposing a novel solution: Build them into floating offshore wind turbines.

San Francisco–based offshore wind-power developer Aikido Technologies today announced its plans to start housing data centers in the underwater tanks that keep its turbine platforms afloat. The turbines will supply the power for the servers, and onboard batteries and grid connection will provide backup.

The company’s first prototype, a 100-kilowatt unit, is scheduled to launch in the North Sea off the coast of Norway by the end of this year. A 15-to-18-megawatt project off the coast of the United Kingdom may follow in 2028.

Aikido is one of several companies planning data centers in unusual places—underwater, on floating buoys, in coal mines and now on offshore wind turbines. The creativity stems from the forces of several trends: rapidly rising energy demand from data centers, the need for domestic renewable power production, and limited real estate.

The North Sea serves as an ideal first spot for floating, wind-powered data centers because European policymakers and companies are looking to regain domestic control over energy production. They’re also looking to host an AI economy on servers within the continent’s boundaries. Floating wind platforms keep the compute out of sight while tapping the stronger, more consistent air streams that blow over deep waters, where traditional, seabed-mounted turbine monopiles can’t go.

“A lot of energy in the clean-energy space is focused on powering AI data centers quickly, reliably, and cleanly in a way that does not upset neighbors and remains safe, fast, and cheap,” says Ramez Naam, an independent clean-energy investor who does not have a stake in Aikido. “Aikido has that, and a smart team,” he says.

Floating Wind-Power Designs Evolve

Aikido’s design builds on many iterations tested by the growing floating wind industry. When Norwegian energy giant Equinor finished construction on the world’s first floating wind farm in 2017, it kept the turbines upright with ballasted steel columns extending 78 meters into the water—a design called a spar platform. This gave it a dense mass like the keel of a boat. Since then, the floating wind industry has largely coalesced around a semisubmersible design based on oil and gas platforms. Semisubmersibles don’t go as deep as spar platforms; instead, they extend buoyancy horizontally. Anchors, chains, and ropes keep the platform floating within a certain radius.

Aikido is taking the semisubmersible approach. Its football-field-size platform holds the turbine in the center, and three legs extend tripod-like outward, like a Christmas-tree stand. At the end of each leg is a ballast that reaches 20 meters deep. This holds tanks largely filled with fresh water to maintain the platform’s buoyancy in the salty ocean.

The data centers will go in the upper part of each ballast tank. There’s room for a 3- to 4-MW data hall in each tank, giving the platform a combined compute of 10 to 12 MW. Below the data halls is an open chamber used as a safety barrier, and below that sit the freshwater tanks. The water is piped up to the data center for liquid cooling of the servers. The warmed water is then funneled back down the ballast into the tank. There, proximity to the cold ocean water cools it again as the heat is conducted out through the tank’s steel walls.

“We have this power from the wind. We have free cooling. We think we can be quite cost competitive compared to conventional data-center solutions,” says Aikido CEO Sam Kanner. “This crunch in the next five years is an opportunity for us to prove this out and supply AI compute where it’s needed.”

One challenge, he says, is that liquid cooling can’t cover all the data center’s needs. For example, heat generated from Ethernet switches that connect the GPUs can’t be liquid-cooled with commercially available technology. So Aikido installed an air-conditioning method for that.

Another challenge is the marine environment, which is “pretty brutal to engineer around because there’s the increased salinity, there’s debris, and there’s various kinds of corrosion and fouling of metal piping that you wouldn’t have in a freshwater environment,” says Daniel King, a research fellow at the Foundation for American Innovation in Washington who focuses on AI infrastructure.

Offshore Data Centers Face Challenges

Aikido’s plan avoids the prickly not-in-my-backyard complaints that are dogging both onshore wind and data-center projects. It might also circumvent some inquiries into water usage and power demand too, or so Aikido’s thinking goes.

But it might not be that easy. “Instinctively many people reach for offshore or even orbital outer-space data centers as a way to circumvent the typical burdens of environmental reviews,” says King. “But there could be more or additional requirements around discharging heat and the effects that has on marine life that are different from the considerations of a terrestrial data center. It’s unclear to me whether this actually makes life easier or harder for a developer.”

Prefabricated data halls could be installed quayside, followed by final electrical and plumbing connections to commission the data center.Aikido

Aikido’s “design choice to use the fresh water in the ballast as a working fluid is a novel one” that, thanks to the closed-loop system, may “alleviate some of the engineering problems you see when a really high temperature fluid is pumping its heat directly into a marine environment,” King says.

Offshore sites are also vulnerable to sabotage, King notes. Since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, fleets of vessels directed by the Kremlin have reportedly started messing with offshore wind and communications infrastructure in northern Europe. Russian and Chinese boats have allegedly cut subsea cables in recent years.

But vandalism is a risk anywhere, including at conventional data centers, Aikido CEO Kanner notes. Unlike those on land, where the local police have jurisdiction, Aikido’s data centers would enjoy protection from national coast guards, which he suggests gives an added degree of security.

North Sea Hosts Clean Energy

Kanner first began thinking about offshore wind turbines as a place to build data centers after a chance phone call with a cryptocurrency billionaire. The financier wanted to know whether turbines in international waters could power servers generating digital tokens at a moment when crypto-mining faced increased scrutiny from regulators. The talks fizzled. But that encounter sparked Kanner’s curiosity about how to use power generated onboard floating turbines.

When ChatGPT emerged in 2022 and sparked a heated debate over how to power and cool such technology, the idea to put the data center in the floating turbine clicked for Kanner. The idea really congealed after he met with the chief executive of Portland, Ore.–based Panthalassa. The wave-energy company was proposing to enclose small, remote data centers in buoys attached to equipment that generates power from the surf. Panthalassa just completed its full-scale prototype tests off the coast of Washington state last summer.

At that point, Aikido had already designed a modular platform for floating wind turbines. Each platform consists of 13 major steel components that are snapped together with pin joints—like IKEA furniture. The platforms fold up in a flat configuration that takes up roughly half the space of other designs, allowing it to be transported by a wider range of ships, according to Aikido. From there, it was a matter of figuring out how to accommodate a data center in the unused space.

Aikido’s prototype will use a refurbishedVesta V-17 turbine. It will need onboard batteries for backup power and will also be connected to the grid for additional power during seasons with less wind. Aikido envisions eventually sprinkling its data centers among large arrays of offshore turbines to tap into that larger power infrastructure.

Between Russia’s threat to expand its war in Ukraine to EU countries and the Trump administration’s bid to pressure Denmark into ceding sovereignty of Greenland to Washington, Europe is scrambling to build up its own energy production and AI capabilities. The North Sea, increasingly, looks like a primary theater of that effort. In January, nearly a dozen European nations banded together in a pact to transform the North Sea into a “reservoir” of clean power from offshore wind.

This article appears in the May 2026 print issue as “Prototype Offshore Wind Turbines Could House Data Centers.”

This webinar looks at a Battery Electric Virtual Vehicle Model of a mid-size BEV, and uses Simulink and Simscape to facilitate design exploration, component refinement, and system-level optimization. The virtual vehicle comprises five subsystems: Electric powertrain, driveline, refrigerant cycle, coolant cycle, and passenger cabin. The model will be tested using different drive cycles, cooling, and heating scenarios. The results will be analyzed to determine the impact of the different design parameters on vehicle consumption.

The resulting virtual vehicle will be used to:

• Test different drive cycles and environmental conditions
• Perform sensitivity analysis
• Optimize model to improve thermal performance and consumption

Every time Russia attacks Ukraine’s power infrastructure, Ukrainian engineers risk their lives in the scramble to get electricity flowing again. It’s a dangerous job at best, and a lethal one at worst. It also requires creativity. Time pressure and equipment shortages make it nearly impossible to rebuild things exactly as they were, so engineers must redesign on the fly.

These dangerous, stressful conditions have led to more engineers being hurt or killed. The rate of injuries among Ukrainian workers in electricity generation, transmission, and distribution jumped nearly 50 percent after Russia’s full-scale invasion began four years ago, according to data provided byAntonina Nagorna, who leads the Department of Epidemiology and Physiology of Work at the Kundiiev Institute of Occupational Health, in Kiev. By her count at least 48 people had died on the job through the end of 2025, either while repairing damage or during the bombardment itself.

Transmission mastermind Oleksiy Brecht joined that grim count in January. Brecht, who was director for network operations and development at the Ukrainian grid operator Ukrenergo, died while coordinating work at Ukraine’s most attacked electrical switchyard, Kyivska, west of the capital. He was 47 years old.

Brecht’s life and death are a window into the realities of thousands of Ukrainian engineers who face conditions beyond what most engineers could imagine. “The war completely transformed the professional life of a top-manager engineer,” says Mariia Tsaturian, an energy analyst and chief communication officer at the think tank Ukraine Facility Platform, who previously worked with Brecht at Ukrenergo. “As for junior staff, their world was turned upside down entirely. A substation engineer working under shelling is something no one had ever seen or experienced before,” she says.

How Russia Attacks Ukraine’s Grid

Over the course of the war, Russia has increasingly focused on destroying Ukraine’s energy infrastructure. It sends attack drones almost daily during the winter there, when heat and electricity is needed most to survive the bitter cold. Every 10 days or so it barrages Ukraine’s power system with combinations of missiles and hundreds of drones, repeatedly mangling equipment and cutting off power. The cold imposed on Ukrainian homes is especially hard on former prisoners of war held in Russia, where cold is routinely employed as a form of torture.

In the first two years of the war, keeping the grid flowing was a 24/7 job. But Ukrenergo has adapted to the impossible since then, says Vitaliy Zaychenko, Ukrenergo’s CEO, who somehow found a moment to speak with IEEE Spectrum via video call. Now, “we are more prepared for each attack. We have well-trained teams. We have support from Europe,” he says.

But the risk involved in repairing the grid remains unnerving. Last month a crew from DTEK, Ukraine’s biggest private-sector energy firm, was traveling between locations when it was targeted by a Russian drone. They heard the drone coming and escaped before their bucket truck was destroyed. Russian forces have employed “double tap” attacks against DTEK’s crews, targeting their power infrastructure with a follow-up strike designed to kill first responders—a practice confirmed by the U.N.

When Russia began targeting power infrastructure in October 2022, Brecht’s job shifted from high-level direction of grid planning and maintenance to near-constant triage and real-time system reengineering. Most weeks, Brecht spent several days in the field, crisscrossing the country to coordinate work at smashed substations. Brecht would often be found on site figuring out how to restart power using whatever equipment was available. “It was a unique decision every time,” says Zaychenko.

Oleksiy Brecht died in January while overseeing repairs to a bombed-out substation near Kyiv. He called his employees at Ukrenergo “my fighters. They called him “our general.”Ukrenergo

Zaychenko noted Brecht’s “genius” for finding creative grid fixes, his passion and leadership skills, and his credibility with power brokers in Ukraine and abroad. Brecht scoured the globe sourcing critical replacement parts, including stockpiled or older equipment from international utilities. Transformers, which can take a year or more to source, are especially precious.

When the right equipment wasn’t forthcoming, Brecht figured out how to make do. For example, he would deploy transformers from Western Europe rated for 400 kilovolts to restart a 330-kV circuit. He would adapt transformers designed for 60-hertz alternating current for emergency use on Ukraine’s 50-Hz grid. “He would find a way,” says Zaychenko, who worked closely with Brecht for over 20 years.

Brecht’s assistant at Ukrenergo, Svitlana Dubas-Veremiienko, says he also contributed to the teams’ morale and confidence. She shared on Facebook that he smoked “like a locomotive” at the worst times, and yet exuded calm: “In his presence, chaos subsided,” she wrote. Brecht was not easy to intimidate. “He was someone who never feared anything or anyone,” adds Tsaturian.

Brecht’s work proved so essential that Ukrenergo’s former Deputy CEO Andrii Nemyrovskyi recalls telling Ukraine’s Ministry of Defense in 2022 that the military must protect two people: Zaychenko, because he ran grid operations, and Brecht because “system operations requires that the system exists.” Last week, President Zelenskyy posthumously named Brecht a “Hero of Ukraine” for “strengthening the energy security of Ukraine under martial law.”

Ukraine’s Power Infrastructure Under Fire

Brecht joined Ukrenergo in 2002 after earning his degree in power engineering from Igor Sikorsky Kyiv Polytechnic Institute. Over the next 20 years, he held leadership positions in dispatching and grid planning and development. He joined Ukrenergo’s management board in June 2022 and served as its interim leader in 2024.

Brecht’s contributions to Ukraine’s wartime survival began with several key upgrades to Ukrenergo’s technical capabilities ahead of the February 2022 invasion. He reintroduced “live line” techniques, providing training and equipment that enable crews to work on circuits while they continue to carry power to homes and to sustain critical needs.

Brecht also led preparations for Ukraine’s disconnection from the Russian grid and synchronization with Europe’s. When the invasion began, Ukraine’s Minister of Energy at the time, Herman Halushchenko, had argued that switching from Russia’s grid to Europe’s was too risky, according to Tsaturian and Nemyrovskyi. But Brecht insisted—correctly, as hindsight has shown—that synchronizing with Europe would provide crucial stability and backup power. At his urging, theswitch was completed in daring fashion during the first weeks of the invasion.

(Halushchenko was dismissed last year following longstanding allegations of corruption and Russian influence in Ukraine’s energy sector that gave way to indictments in November 2025 that have rocked President Zelenskyy’s government. In January, Halushchenko was detained while attempting to leave the country and charged with money laundering.)

DTEK workers conduct repairs on 26 January following a Russian attack in Kyiv.Danylo Antoniuk/Cover Images/AP

A Ukrainian Electrical Engineer’s Final Day

Brecht’s final act of service followed the mass destruction of January 19—a day when Kyiv’s high temperature was –10° C. That night, Russian forces targeted Ukraine’s energy infrastructure with 18 ballistic missiles, a hypersonic cruise missile, 15 conventional cruise missiles, and 339 drones.

The impact included catastrophic damage at the 750-kV Kyivska substation, which feeds electricity to the capital and ensures cooling power for two nuclear power plants.

Brecht was leading a team of about 100 people who were undoing the damage when he made a deadly choice. He picked up a section of busbar—solid conduits that connect circuits within substations. It had been blasted to the ground and, unbeknownst to Brecht, was carrying lethal voltage. It’s unclear whether its circuit was still connected, or if it had picked up voltage from another circuit.

Zaychenko says an investigation is ongoing to provide answers. “I don’t know why he touched this busbar. Maybe because of tiredness. Maybe something else,” he says. “He was trying to help the team to do this job quickly. It was a huge mistake and a huge loss for us.”

Charles Proteus Steinmetz was a towering figure in the early decades of electrical engineering, easily the intellectual equal of Thomas Edison and Nikola Tesla—men he considered his friends. One of Steinmetz’s most significant achievements was to quantify and characterize the phenomenon of magnetic hysteresis—the behavior of magnetism in materials—and then devise a simple law that allowed for predictable transformer and motor design. He also established a revolutionary framework for analyzing AC circuits, which is still taught today in power engineering. And from 1893, he served as chief consulting engineer at General Electric at a pivotal moment for the young company and for the U.S. effort to expand its power grid. For these and other accomplishments, he was well known in his time, even if he’s not exactly a household name today.

Steinmetz was also an evangelist for electric vehicles. In March 1920, he typed out his thoughts, comparing the pros and cons of EVs to the gasoline-propelled alternative. Among the advantages: low cost of maintenance, reliability, simplicity of operation, and lower cost of operation. The disadvantages: dependence on charging stations, limited range on a single charge, and lower speeds. More than a century later, his list remains remarkably pertinent.

Steinmetz could often be seen decked out in a suit and top hat, smoking his trademark BlackStone panatela cigar while riding around Schenectady, N.Y., in his 1914 Detroit Electric sedan. According to John Spinelli, emeritus professor of electrical and computer engineering at Union College, in Schenectady, sometimes both Steinmetz and his chauffeur sat in the backseat—you could control the car from both the front and the rear—so that it would appear to be a driverless car. With a top speed of 40 kilometers per hour (25 miles per hour), the car ran on 14 six-volt batteries and could go about 48 km between charges.

Steinmetz’s 1914 Detroit Electric car is now at Union College in Schenectady, N.Y., where Steinmetz had founded, chaired, and taught in the department of electrical engineering.Paul Buckowski/Union College

In 1971, the car was purchased by Union College, where Steinmetz had founded, chaired, and taught in the department of electrical engineering. The car had been discovered rotting in a field, so it needed some work. Over the next decade, faculty and engineering students restored it to its former glory. Still in running condition, it’s now on permanent display at the college.

Steinmetz’s Contributions to Electrical Engineering

Karl August Rudolf Steinmetz was born in 1865 in Breslau, Prussia (now known as Wrocław, Poland). He studied mathematics, physics, and the burgeoning field of electricity at the University of Breslau. He also joined a student socialist club and edited the party newspaper, The People’s Voice. He completed his doctoral studies, but before receiving his degree, Steinmetz fled to Switzerland in 1888, after his socialist writings came under the scrutiny of the Bismarck government.

Steinmetz immigrated to New York the following year, anglicized his first name, dropped his two middle names, and added Proteus, a nickname he had picked up at university (after the shape-shifting sea god of Greek mythology). Eventually, he became a U.S. citizen.

Charles Proteus Steinmetz solved a number of important problems that helped the power grid expand.Bettmann/Getty Images

In January 1892, Steinmetz burst onto the engineering scene when he read his paper “On the Law of Hysteresis” before the American Institute of Electrical Engineers, a forerunner of today’s IEEE. I can’t quite imagine sitting through the delivery of its 62 pages, but those assembled recognized its groundbreaking nature. The ideas Steinmetz outlined allowed engineers to calculate power losses in the magnetic components of electrical machinery during the design phase. Prior to this, the design process for transformers and electric motors was largely trial and error, and power losses could be measured only after the machine was built, which greatly added to the cost.

Steinmetz was not just an equations and theory guy, though. He loved working in the lab and building things. In 1893, General Electric acquired the small manufacturing firm of Eickemeyer & Osterheld, in Yonkers, N.Y., where Steinmetz had worked since shortly after his arrival in the United States. So Steinmetz began his new life as a corporate engineer, an interesting turn for the socialist. During his first few years with GE, he mostly designed generators and transformers. But he also created an informal position for himself as a consultant, giving expert opinions on various problems across divisions. He eventually formalized this role, becoming GE’s chief consulting engineer, and he maintained a relationship with the company for the rest of his life, even after joining the faculty of Union College in 1902.

By the time Steinmetz died in 1923 at the age of 58, he had been granted more than 200 patents and had made major contributions to various subfields in electrical engineering, including phasors and complex numbers (for steady-state AC analysis); electrical transients, switching surges, and surge protection (based on his research on lightning); industrial research (including how to run a corporate lab); and engineering methods (by writing textbooks that standardized practice).

Why Steinmetz Believed in Electric Cars

By 1914, Steinmetz was convinced that the future of transportation was electric. In June, he addressed the National Electric Light Association convention in Philadelphia with a bold prediction: “I have no doubt that in 10 years, more or less—rather less than more—we will see the field of the pleasure and business vehicle covered by such an electric car in large numbers. And I believe I underestimate when I say that 1,000,000 or more will be used.”

As we now know, Steinmetz was overly optimistic. At the time, there were about 1.2 million gasoline-powered cars in use in the United States, and only about 35,000 EVs. It would take until 2018 for the number of EVs (including plug-in hybrids) on U.S. roads to surpass a million. Worldwide, there are now about 60 million electric vehicles in use.

But Steinmetz had his reasons. He firmly believed that electric vehicles would flourish in urban areas, where most rides involved short distances at low speed. He also thought EVs would be a boon for power companies, which were eager to drum up more business, especially at night. With 1 million electric cars being charged about 5 kilowatt-hours on most nights, and at a rate of 5 cents per kilowatt-hour, Steinmetz predicted US $75 million (about $2.5 billion today) of new business for central power stations each year.

In 1971, Union College purchased Steinmetz’s car, which had been found rotting in a field, and faculty and students restored it to working condition.Special Collections & Archives/Schaffer Library/Union College

Steinmetz went to work to improve the electric car. He developed a double-rotor motor that was integrated into the rear axle, which did away with the need for a mechanical differential or drive shaft and drastically reduced the overall weight, which improved the mileage. Dey Electric Corp. incorporated Steinmetz’s design into its electric roadster and priced it under $1,000. Unfortunately, an internal combustion engine Ford Model T cost about half as much, and the Dey roadster flopped, ending production within a year.

Undeterred, Steinmetz formed the Steinmetz Electric Motor Car Corp. in 1920 with the initial goal of bringing to market an electric truck for deliveries and light industrial use. The first truck debuted on a cold February day in 1922 with a publicity stunt of climbing the steep Miller Avenue hill in Brooklyn, N.Y. According to a report in The New York Times, the vehicle went up the 14.5 percent grade between Jamaica Avenue and Highland Boulevard in 51 seconds. During a second climb, it stopped a number of times to show how easily it restarted. The truck had a range of 84 km (52 miles).

The company planned to manufacture 1,000 trucks per year and 300 lightweight delivery cars, plus a five-passenger coupe, but it made a total of only 48 vehicles. After Steinmetz died in 1923, the company soon ceased operation.

Steinmetz wasn’t only bullish on the electric car, but on electricity in general. A New York Times article recorded his belief that by 2023, we would work no more than 4 hours a day, 200 days a year because electricity would have eliminated the drudgery and unpleasantness of labor. He also predicted that electricity would bring about an end to urban pollution: “Every city would be a spotless town.” With an expansion of leisure time, people would be healthier, engaging in gardening (especially growing their own food) and pursuing educational interests to become “much more intelligent and self-expressive creature[s].”

Steinmetz’s Chosen Family

I decided to write about Steinmetz last year, after IEEE Spectrum published an essay I wrote about why engineering needs the humanities. The article contains this line: “In 1909, none other than Charles Proteus Steinmetz advocated for including the classics in engineering education.” I had been impressed to learn of Steinmetz’s recognition of the value of a liberal arts education. But my copy editor didn’t know who Steinmetz was or why he merited the qualifier “none other.” More people should know about this remarkable man, I decided. And so I went looking for a museum object associated with him, so I could include him in a Past Forward column.

Steinmetz [left] was easily the intellectual equal of Thomas Edison [right], whom he considered a friend.Corbis/Getty Images

The electric car is only one avenue into Steinmetz’s life. I could instead have looked into Steinmetz solids (the geometric shapes that form when two or three identical cylinders intersect at right angles), Steinmetz curves (the edges of a Steinmetz solid), or the Steinmetz equivalent circuit (a mathematical model that describes a transformer using resistors and inductors). But none of those concepts could be easily captured in a picture-worthy object. His love of his electric car, on the other hand, was a fun and fitting entry point for this most unusual engineer.

I also saw an opportunity to highlight how Steinmetz became a family man. Steinmetz had dwarfism—he stood just 122 centimeters tall—as well as kyphosis, a severe curvature of the spine, as did his father and grandfather. He didn’t wish to pass along those traits, and so he never married or had children of his own. But that didn’t mean he didn’t want a family.

In 1903, Steinmetz’s favorite lab assistant, Joseph LeRoy Hayden, told his boss that he was getting married. Steinmetz invited the couple to dinner, and then invited them to live in his large home. They agreed to this unusual living arrangement, with Corinne Rost Hayden running the household and cooking for her husband and Steinmetz. She forced the men to set aside their work for regular family meals.

Eventually, the Hayden family expanded, welcoming Joe, Midge, and Billy. Steinmetz legally adopted the elder Hayden, thereby gaining three grandchildren as well. Steinmetz, whom The New York Times had named a “modern Jove” who “hurls thunderbolts at will” (from a high-voltage lightning generator), delighted at entertaining the grandkids with wondrous tricks of electricity and chemistry.

In writing about the history of electrical engineering, I sometimes fall into the trap of focusing too much on the technology. But it’s just as important to recognize the people behind the technology—their personalities, their frailties, their feelings, their challenges. Steinmetz faced adversity for his political beliefs, for being an immigrant, and for his physical stature, yet none of that ever stopped him. In word and deed, he showed that he had a generous heart as mighty as his intellect.

Part of a continuing series looking at historical artifacts that embrace the boundless potential of technology.

An abridged version of this article appears in the March 2026 print issue as “Charles Proteus Steinmetz Loved His Electric Car.”

References

IEEE Power & Energy Magazine published Steinmetz’s pro/con list comparing electric cars to those with internal combustion engines in the September/October 2005 issue, along with a goodbiographical overview of Steinmetz by Carl Sulzberger.

Union College published a nice story about the restoration of Steinmetz’s electric car in 2014, when it received its permanent home on campus.

There are many biographies of Steinmetz, one published as early as 1924, but I am particularly fond of Steinmetz: Engineer and Socialist by Ronald Kline (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992).

Gilbert King’s 2011 article “Charles Proteus Steinmetz, the Wizard of Schenectady” for Smithsonian magazine describes Steinmetz’s chosen family and includes several fun anecdotes not mentioned above.

As electric vehicles roll off assembly lines, a bottleneck sits upstream: lithium refinement. Turning raw lithium into the compounds needed for batteries is expensive, messy, and energy intensive, but Mangrove Lithium, a Vancouver-based startup, has a better way. The company has developed an electrochemical refining process that converts lithium feedstocks into battery-grade lithium hydroxide.

Converting raw lithium to lithium hydroxide typically requires roasting spodumene—a mineral from which lithium is derived—at high temperatures, and then leaching it with acid to convert it to lithium sulfate. That compound then needs to be converted to lithium hydroxide. “It’s a thermochemical reaction that uses heavy amounts of reagent chemicals, and generates a sodium sulfate waste stream,” says Ryan Day, Mangrove Lithium’s director of operations.

Further tightening the bottleneck, the majority of the world’s lithium—60 to 70 percent—is now refined in China, and export restrictions and geopolitical tensions have disrupted supply chains in recent years. Shipping raw lithium overseas to be refined also adds to batteries’ total carbon footprint. A new model for lithium refining could reshape not just the economics of electric vehicles but also the geography and environmental footprint of the global battery supply chain.

Mangrove’s demo plant in British Columbia is scheduled to start production in the second half of 2026.

How Does Mangrove’s Refinement Work?

Mangrove replaces the conventional, resource-intensive reaction with a process that uses electricity, water, and oxygen. In an electrochemical cell, they flow brine through an electrolyzer, which consists of a metal box with three compartments between the cathode and anode. The compartments are separated by ion exchange membranes, semipermeable barriers that allow only certain ions to pass. Lithium sulfate flows through the central compartment, and the cell’s electric field splits the salt apart. “Lithium, which is a positive ion, will move across a membrane toward the cathode,” says Day. There, “we are reacting oxygen and water to create hydroxide ions, which join with the lithium from the salt to make lithium hydroxide.”

Meanwhile, on the opposite side of the cell, the sulfate—a negative ion—moves toward the anode, where water is being split to produce protons and oxygen gas. The protons combine with sulfate ions to make sulfuric acid.

“You run that process continuously, and over time you’re generating lithium hydroxide, which you can send to a crystallizer,” Day says. “There’s no significant waste product, and all you’re feeding in is brine, water, oxygen, and electricity.” The sulfuric acid is recovered and can be circulated back upstream to leach more brine from the raw feed material.

In general, keeping the ion exchange membrane intact is one of the biggest challenges for scaling this type of process, says Feifei Shi, assistant professor of energy engineering at Penn State. Shi, who researches electrochemical-based refinement methods, notes that the approach can more easily activate the necessary reactions, but faces limitations for large-scale applications.

The electrochemical process separates out lithium by passing it through three compartments separated by semipermeable barriers. Mangrove Lithium

Mangrove’s Oxygen-Based Cathode

Mangrove’s key innovation and what enables the process is an oxygen-based cathode. “Driving the reaction requires detailed engineering,” says Day. The company designed an electrode that lets a gas and a liquid react together, using just enough water to make the oxygen reaction work—without adding so much that it floods the system and creates hydrogen gas instead.

The electrodes are made with a proprietary process that combines several dedicated layers that allow for a balanced flow of water and oxygen to access the active catalyst sites. This design favors the oxygen-reduction reaction for over 99.5 percent of the total cathode activity. It also reduces the amount of electricity needed to drive the process, because “oxygen reduction requires less voltage than water reduction,” Day says. Demand for battery minerals is surging beyond just lithium, with automakers competing for supplies of nickel, cobalt, graphite, and manganese. Simultaneously, utilities are deploying grid-scale batteries that use the same materials in even larger volumes. Refining capacity—not just mining—could become the critical choke point in this buildout, because battery makers require highly specified, ultrapure compounds.

While Mangrove is initially targeting lithium, their electrochemical architecture is not inherently lithium-specific, and could be adapted to other battery materials that face similar purification bottlenecks. Nickel and cobalt sulfate production, for example, still rely on multistep precipitation and solvent-extraction processes that generate significant waste and require large reagent inputs. “It would work immediately in application to other alkali-metal salts,” Day says.

Mangrove’s demo plant in British Columbia will make 1,000 tonnes per year of lithium hydroxide. If the company can scale its technology as it hopes, it could begin to reshape not just the battery supply chain but also the geopolitics of the energy transition.

A new type of hydroelectric energy system that doesn’t use water was cause for the champagne to flow in January when engineers at RheEnergise in the United Kingdom succeeded in driving a pilot project to a peak power of 500 kilowatts. The system is a fresh take on pumped-storage hydroelectricity (PSH) power, a century-old technology first implemented in Switzerland in 1907 that has since been adopted globally and grown into a major form of energy storage. In 2023, pumped storage provided nearly 200 gigawatts in global installed capacity—over 90 percent of the world’s long-duration energy storage. Hence its nickname: the world’s biggest battery.

PSH works by pumping water up to a higher reservoir during periods of excess electricity from renewables or when demand from the grid is low, and letting the water flow back down under gravity through turbines to a lower reservoir when demand is high. The simplicity of the concept makes PSH efficient, cost-effective, long-lasting, and reliable with relatively low running costs once constructed.

“Pumped hydro is very mature,” says Tamas Bertenyi, a cofounder and chief technology officer of RheEnergise. “In terms of long-duration storage—let’s say 8 to 10 hours—it’s incredibly low cost. So there’s probably a hydro industry in most countries of the world.”

But PSH also has its downsides. Besides high upfront costs and long construction times, Bertenyi says the biggest disadvantage is its lack of scalability. “You need a suitable mountain, and you need to have a river running along the bottom. You also need an alpine valley you can dam up, and there are just not a lot of sites where you can do that.”

To make PSH scalable, RheEnergise has revamped the technology by constructing a closed-loop system and replacing water with a proprietary fluid it calls High-Density Fluid, which has 2.5 times the density of water. “It is so dense that if you threw a block of concrete into a pool of the fluid, it would float,” says Bertenyi.

In developing the fluid, RheEnergise worked with the University of Exeter in England, where Richard Cochrane (now deceased), a cofounder of the company, was a professor of renewable energy systems. The researchers sought to engineer a mineral-rich fluid that is not only much denser than water but has a manageable viscosity, is environmentally benign, and causes minimal abrasion or corrosion. That took “a lot of engineering and a lot of science,” says Bertenyi, because it raised two contradictory challenges: Have a low enough viscosity to flow like water but be dense enough to not go anywhere in the case of an accident.

How does RheEnergise’s High-Density Fluid work?

To reduce the fluid’s risk to the environment (from spills or entering the food chain), it’s formulated as a suspension mixture that suspends the particulate minerals, rather than dissolving them as a solution might. The fluid’s high density solved this problem: In the event of spillage, the particles will simply dry and settle, and not seep deep into soil or groundwater, according to Bertenyi.

RheEnergise formulated a dense yet low-viscosity fluid in its effort to make pumped-storage hydroelectricity possible in more places.RheEnergise

At the same time, the fluid—which is actually 80 percent solid particulates by mass—needed to have a viscosity as low as water to flow through pipes and turbines. Thus, the fluid was engineered to have a thick viscosity when it’s not moving, but have a decreased viscosity when pumped through a PSH system: a shear-thinning non-Newtonian behavior.

“Given the system can generate the same energy output from gentler slopes and lower elevations than traditional pumped hydro, it makes far more sites viable worldwide—including low hills and urban fringe areas—not just mountainous regions,” says George Aggidis, a professor emeritus of energy engineering at Lancaster University in the U.K. “And its long-duration storage makes it suitable for balancing generation by renewables, a gap where batteries alone can be expensive.”

The pilot project consists of a higher reservoir constructed at a height of 80 meters, with fiberglass pipes 2.5 meters in diameter feeding a shared chamber; while the lower reservoir is a simple concrete construction, “basically a large swimming pool,” says Bertenyi. Both reservoirs are buried underground and connected by a steel pipe to form a closed loop, leaving just the powerhouse containing the turbine, pump, fluid-management system, and the electrical control system visible.

“We expect our commercial projects to use two or four 5-megawatt turbines, so 10 to 20 MW is the sweet spot,” says Bertenyi. Having achieved peak power with its pilot project, he says the company is working with partners to bring the technology to commercialization, including turbine manufacturers that will produce modular turbines engineered to work with its fluid. The company aims to deliver its first fully commercial system by the end of 2028. Potential customers include independent power producers, utility companies, and energy-project developers.

But RheEnergise can expect to face some challenges along the way. Besides being capital intensive, “larger scale deployment will require substantial civil works, permit requirements, and engineering coordination,” says Aggidis. “This is more complex than plug-and-play battery systems.”

Then there’s the competition. Aggidis points to sodium-ion and flow batteries, which are modular, fast to install and rapidly decreasing in cost. Other emerging technologies include compressed-air energy storage, hydrogen storage, and thermal storage that are also seeking to get a foothold in the rapidly expanding energy-storage market.

This post was updated on 25 February 2026 to clarify that RheEnergise’s name for its proprietary fluid is High-Density Fluid. High-Density Hydro, which was originally used, is the name of the company’s overall system.

The first time she tried to seduce me,
(atoms falling in a vacuum)
she asked about blackberries—
(every mass exerts some gravity)

Did I know their season, where they grow?
(galvanometers, gravimeters)
I could answer both easily—
(tools to measure small attractions)

down the dirt road in September.
(devices that report, don’t interfere)
She eagerly went there with me,
(variations in readings occur)

We ate more berries than we kept.
(electron exchange may explain this)
The sweet dark juice painted our lips.
(equilibrium then entropy)