Emily Waltz

If you search up Hawaii’s Keāhole Point on Google Maps, center it on your screen, and then zoom out until you can see the edges of the globe, one thing will become abundantly clear: The Pacific Ocean is very, very big. In a few months, on this volcanic headland on Hawaii’s Big Island, marine-tech startup Captura will begin pumping as much of the mighty Pacific through its pipes and tanks as it can. The company’s

5 min read Emily Waltz is the power and energy editor at IEEE Spectrum. The Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory runs nuclear-fusion reactions in a stellarator built with mostly off-the-shelf parts. Jayme Thornton IEEE Spectrum’s most-read energy stories of 2024 centered on creative ways to produce, store and connect more carbon-free energy. Our readers wanted to know more about power beaming, new kinds of nuclear fusion, vertical solar farms, powerful ways to drill deeper into the

4 min read Emily Waltz is the power and energy editor at IEEE Spectrum. Google and Amazon have invested in nuclear reactors that will use tri-structural isotropic (TRISO) particle fuel: golf ball-size graphite spheres packed with uranium, carbon, and oxygen. When Meta announced last week that it’s looking for a nuclear energy developer to power its future AI operations, it joined a growing cadre of tech companies all suddenly repeating the same refrain: We need more

5 min read Emily Waltz is the power and energy editor at IEEE Spectrum. Research expeditions conducted at sea using a rotating gravity machine and microscope found that the Earth’s oceans may not be absorbing as much carbon as researchers have long thought. Oceans are believed to absorb roughly 26 percent of global carbon dioxide emissions by drawing down CO2 from the atmosphere and locking it away. In this system, CO2 enters the ocean, where

Inside a shipping container in an industrial area of Venice, the Italian startup 9-Tech is taking a crack at a looming global problem: how to responsibly recycle the 54 million to 160 million tonnes of solar modules that are expected to reach the end of their productive lives by 2050. Recovering the materials won’t be easy. Solar panels are built to withstand any environment on Earth for 20 to 30 years, and even after sitting

7 min read Emily Waltz is the power and energy editor at IEEE Spectrum. South 8 Technologies Nearly 400 exhibitors representing the boldest energy innovations in the United States came together last week at the annual ARPA-E Energy Innovation Summit. The conference, hosted in Dallas by the U.S. Advanced Research Projects Agency–Energy (ARPA-E), showcased the agency’s bets on early-stage energy technologies that can disrupt the status quo. U.S. Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm spoke at

2 min read Emily Waltz is the power and energy editor at IEEE Spectrum. Yilu Liu is one of the researchers at Oak Ridge National Laboratory studying how buildings (and their electrical circuits) can be protected from electromagnetic pulses. Stuart Bradford This year, the sun will reach solar maximum, a period of peak magnetic activity that occurs approximately once every 11 years. That means more sunspots and more frequent intense solar storms. Here on Earth,

4 min read NREL researchers developed a technique to weld the glass of solar panel modules with a femtosecond laser. Alfred Hicks/NREL Solar panels are built to last 25 years or more in all kinds of weather. Key to this longevity is a tight seal of the photovoltaic materials. Manufacturers achieve the seal by laminating a panel’s silicon cells with polymer sheets between glass panes. But the sticky polymer is hard to separate from the