Enlarge / In Texas, solar facilities compete for space with a whole lot of nothing.

Earlier this week, the US' Energy Information Agency (EIA) gave a preview of the changes the nation's electrical grid is likely to see over the coming year. The data is based on information submitted to the Department of Energy by utilities and power plant owners, who are asked to estimate when generating facilities that are planned or under construction will come online. Using that information, the EIA estimates the total new capacity expected to be activated over the coming year.

Obviously, not everything will go as planned, and the capacity estimates represent the production that would result if a plant ran non-stop at full power—something no form of power is able to do. Still, the data tends to indicate what utilities are spending their money on and helps highlight trends in energy economics. And this year, those trends are looking very sunny.

Big changes

Last year , the equivalent report highlighted that solar power would provide nearly half of the 46 Gigawatts of new capacity added to the US grid. This year, the grid will add more power (just under 55 GW), and solar will be over half of it, at 54 percent. In most areas of the country, solar is now the cheapest way to generate power , and the grid additions reflect that. The EIA also indicates that at least some of these are projects that were delayed due to pandemic-induced supply chain disruptions.

Enlarge / The framework needed to deploy the hardware worked on Earth, so it's time to test it in space. (credit: Caltech/Momentus)

Solar power has become the lowest-cost way to generate electricity on Earth. But building it on Earth places some significant limits on how much power it can generate, with the darkness and clouds that often get in the way. So there have always been a few people who liked the idea of putting solar panels where they could produce electricity around the clock: space.

While that would get you near-24/7 power production, it comes with a collection of very obvious drawbacks: high launch costs, inability to service the hardware, and the challenge of getting the power back down to where it's needed. How these trade-offs play out in the energy marketplace has been difficult to determine, partly because the energy market is changing so rapidly, and partly because we don't really know what the space-based solar hardware would look like.

Thanks to some funding from a private donor, however, California Institute of Technology researchers have quietly been working on developing the technology needed to get space-based solar to work. And they're apparently ready to subject some test hardware to the rigors of space, thanks to this morning's successful Falcon 9 launch.

Enlarge / Diesel engines can be modified to burn a diesel-hydrogen mix. (credit: DjelicS )

A team of engineers at the University of New South Wales (UNSW) in Sydney has figured out a way to run a diesel engine on a mix of diesel and hydrogen, dramatically lowering its emissions.

Why do we even need a diesel-hydrogen hybrid engine when there are already many great electric vehicles available? EVs are definitely great for households, but they still don’t match heavy diesel engines’ performance in some contexts, such as mining, long-distance transportation, power generation, and agriculture.

At present, there are 26,000 trains in the US that run on diesel, and there are potentially millions of trucks, generators, and other industry-grade equipment that require diesel to deliver optimum performance. It might take decades for EV technology to replace diesel engines in such industries. While it’s easy for a normal person to sell an old car and buy a new EV, such changes come at a high cost to industries.

Enlarge / The right membrane can make hydrogen production much easier. (credit: Andriy Onufriyenko )

With renewable energy becoming cheaper, there's a growing impetus to find ways of economically storing it. Batteries can handle short-term fluxes in production but may not be able to handle longer-term shortfalls or seasonal changes in power output. Hydrogen is one of several options being considered that has the potential to serve as a longer-term bridge between periods of high renewable productivity.

But hydrogen comes with its own issues. Obtaining it by splitting water is pretty inefficient, energy-wise, and storing it for long periods can be challenging . Most hydrogen-producing catalysts also work best with pure water—not necessarily an item that's easy to obtain as climate change is boosting the intensity of droughts.

A group of researchers based in China has now developed a device that can output hydrogen when starting with seawater—in fact, the device needs to be sitting in seawater to work. The key concept for getting it to work will be familiar to anyone who understands how most waterproof clothing works.

Enlarge (credit: Tunvarat Pruksachat )

The past several years have seen a lot of unexpected turbulence in the global energy market. Lockdowns during the early pandemic response caused energy use to plunge in 2020, but carbon emissions soared as the economy rebounded in 2021. Early 2022, however, saw Russia invade Ukraine and attempt to use its energy exports as leverage over European countries, leading to worries about a resurgence in coal use and a corresponding surge in emissions.

As 2022 draws to a close, however, there are many indications that things aren't going to be all that bad. Coal use has risen, but not as much as feared, and the booming renewables market has largely offset its impact on emissions. Meanwhile, Europe has made rapid adjustments to its energy supplies and appears to be in a position to handle this winter's likely energy demands.

Europe has gotten ready

In many parts of Europe, energy use peaks in the winter with the onset of cold weather. A lot of the heating demand, along with some demand for electricity, is met by burning natural gas, and Russia is a major supplier for the continent. With Russia's invasion of Ukraine, European sanctions initiated a series of threats and then curtailments in Russia's delivery of natural gas, ultimately ending with the apparent sabotage of one of the most significant natural gas pipelines.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images )

On Thursday, the Biden administration announced the latest in its renewable energy efforts, this time focused on a technology that hasn't really arrived yet: floating offshore wind turbines. Compared to turbines directly anchored on the seafloor, floating versions are estimated to cost about 50 percent more, placing large ocean areas off-limits to economic energy development. The program announced today will create a " wind shot " that aims to drop the costs by more than 70 percent over the next decade and position the US as an industry leader in this industry.

Will it float?

While offshore wind is booming in Europe and China (and poised for a belated takeoff in the US), existing hardware is built directly up from the seafloor, which requires sitting in shallow waters. This works out well for the US East Coast, where a broad continental shelf can host massive wind farms, many of which are in the permitting and planning stages. Most of those projects involve a partnership with European companies, as the US's long delay in adopting offshore wind has ceded the industry to the countries that pioneered the field.

Based on a newly released map of the potential for offshore wind in the US, many areas with good potential are too deep to be exploited by wind turbines affixed to the ocean floor. This includes nearly the entire West Coast, Hawaii, and the Great Lakes. Even along the East Coast, floating turbines could greatly expand the areas open to development.

Enlarge / Pouch cells of the sort tested for endurance. (credit: Cuberg)

While lithium-ion batteries have experienced steady improvements, a lot of research has gone into new chemistries that provide a much larger leap in performance. Some of that work has focused on materials like silicon or sulfur that can potentially store far more lithium than existing electrode materials. But other options get rid of electrode materials entirely. These include lithium-air and lithium-metal batteries.

All of these have faced issues with stability, with batteries based on the technology having a short life span compared to existing lithium-ion batteries (though batteries with some silicon are already in use). But on Thursday, a company is announcing that a lithium-metal battery it has in development has reached a stability that's competitive with existing lithium-ion batteries, retaining 80 percent of its initial capacity out to nearly 700 charge/discharge cycles—and that this has been validated by an outside testing lab.

To learn more about this advance and where lithium metal might get used, we talked with Richard Wang, founder of Cuberg , a subsidiary of battery giant Northvolt .

Enlarge / Bioreactors that host algae would be one option for carbon sequestration—as long as the carbon is stored somehow. (credit: Getty Images )

On Thursday, the US Department of Energy (DOE) announced the latest program to come out of the bipartisan infrastructure funding package that was passed last year. In this case, the money is going to foster the development of a technology that we'll almost certainly need but is currently underdeveloped: capture of carbon dioxide from the air and its stable storage. The infrastructure law set aside $3.5 billion for direct air capture, and the DOE plans to use that to fund four facilities spread across the US.

Direct air capture has suffered from a bit of a catch-22. Most scenarios for limiting end-of-century warming assume we'll emit enough carbon dioxide in the next few decades to overshoot our climate goals and will therefore need to remove some from the atmosphere. That would necessitate the development of direct air capture technologies. But, at present, there's no way to fund the operation of a facility to do the capturing, so the technology remains immature and its economics poorly understood.

The DOE's funding has the potential to change some of that. It has a total of $3.5 billion to spend in the years 2022 through 2026. It plans to use that to fund four carbon-capture and storage centers spread across the US, each with the capability of permanently storing a million metric tons of carbon dioxide a year.