Green Energy

General Motors will receive $7,999,997 in federal funding to automate the sorting and de-hazarding of end-of-life electric vehicle batteries, the U.S. Department of Energy announced Thursday.

The grant is part of over $44.8 million in funding from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law (BIL) for eight projects around the country that will attempt to lower the cost of electric vehicles by lowering the costs of recycling EV batteries and their components. This is intended to supplement $92 million in previously allocated funds for EV battery recycling and equitable EV access.

“The United States is securing a resilient domestic battery supply chain, thanks to the Biden-Harris Administration’s historic investments in innovation and battery recycling efforts,” said U.S. Secretary of Energy Jennifer M. Granholm. “Finding new life for used batteries will significantly reduce pollution and our reliance on other nations, while lowering costs and supporting the clean energy transition.”

Each project will tackle an individual aspect of EV battery recycling. See full details below:

• General Motors LLC (Pontiac, MI) will receive $7,999,997 to develop and demonstrate an automatic sorting and de-hazarding system for end-of-life EV batteries, with an aim of developing techniques that can be used by automotive recyclers, dealers, and mechanic shops.
• B2U Storage Solutions, Inc. (Los Angeles, CA) will receive $3,461,724 to design, fabricate, test, and demonstrate a low-cost, reusable, stackable, fire-resistant, compliant, and real-time monitored system for transporting second-life and defective, damaged, or recycled EV batteries.
• Caterpillar Inc (Chillicothe, IL) will receive $5,039,849 to develop a new or improved battery pack design for off-highway (non-light duty) vehicle batteries that will result in a more efficient dismantling process and explore innovative technologies aimed at reducing labor time needed for dismantling.
• ReJoule Incorporated (Signal Hill, CA) will receive $6,316,383 to develop and scale a technology for EV battery diagnostics that will check for system-level safety hazards and detect damage or defects at the point of collection.
• Rochester Institute of Technology (Rochester, NY) will receive $7,107,540 to develop and demonstrate a process that accelerates condition assessment of collected EV batteries and semi-automates dismantling of end-of-life EV batteries using machine learning.
• Siemens Corporation, Technology (Princeton, NJ) will receive $7,998,766 to demonstrate an automated approach for battery disassembly and apply learnings towards designing batteries that are more easily disassembled.
• Tennessee Technological University (Cookeville, TN) will receive $4,867,519 to design, develop, demonstrate, and validate innovative compact mobile preprocessing hubs that can be transported and deployed at local collection points to safely dismantle and shred end-of-life EV batteries.
• University of Akron (Akron, OH) will receive $2,000,000 to eliminate the flow of plastics/polymers from end-of-life EV battery packs to landfills, while simultaneously retrieving and recycling them to be used as raw materials for new batteries.

Cornell engineers have come up with a solution to a tricky problem: where to install charging stations for electric vehicles so they’re convenient for drivers and profitable for investors. The findings are published in the journal Applied Energy.

Without abundant and well-placed charging stations, consumers will purchase fewer electric vehicles. Without enough electric vehicle owners, publicly available charging stations won’t be profitable; that means there will be fewer of them.

“Improving charging-station infrastructure is essentially the chicken-and-the-egg problem,” said co-author Oliver Gao, the Howard Simpson 1942 Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Cornell Engineering.

The research team found that in urban settings, installing an equal mix of two different kinds of stations—one that charges at a medium speed and another that charges more quickly—and distributing them strategically increases the chances that drivers will use them. And that in turn improves the profitability for investors by 50% to 100%, compared to current random placement strategies.

“Placing publicly available charging stations around cities sounds like a simple thing, but mathematically, it’s actually very hard,” said lead author Yeuchen Sophia Liu, Ph.D., an operations researcher in Gao’s laboratory.

That’s because simple models don’t allow for the complexity of thousands of possible driver decisions, Liu said, not to mention factors like traffic and road characteristics.

So the team reached back six decades to use Bayesian optimization, a mathematics strategy that uses past attempts at optimization to inform each subsequent attempt. That results in a much faster and more productive analysis. It has become popular in machine learning algorithms.

“The Bayesian optimization model algorithm allows us to simulate millions of individual behaviors, while at the same time finding answers efficiently and quickly,” Liu said.

The team set up an algorithm that used Bayesian optimization to analyze data from the Atlanta region, home to about 6 million people. They studied the behavior of 30,000 vehicles on more than 113,000 simulated trips, forecasting a variety of commuter traffic patterns.

The algorithm found an optimal placement using only 2% of the runtime of existing benchmark methods. “This enables the use of the algorithm on a more complex, real-world scale,” Liu said.

The team found that medium speed “level-2” commercial charging stations and direct-current, fast-charging “DCFC” stations serve different needs. Drivers who park for 20 minutes—while running into a grocery store, for example—are likely to choose fast charging spots. But if someone is going to work and parking for several hours, the driver will likely select the level-2 station.

In addition, a sensitivity analysis demonstrated that factors such as the size of the battery electric vehicle market, charging preferences and charging price have significant impacts on the optimal placement and profitability of an electric vehicle charging infrastructure project.

The findings have important implications, Liu said. In the U.S., according to the paper, eight states have adopted California’s Zero Emission Vehicle program mandate to have at least 3.3 million zero-emission light-duty vehicles—replacing carbon combustion engine cars—on the road by 2025.

“Economically strategic placement of charging stations could play a pivotal role in accelerating the transition to zero-emission vehicles,” Liu said.

Retrofitting a portion of the US shipping fleet from internal combustion engines to battery-electric systems could significantly reduce greenhouse gas emissions and be largely cost effective by 2035, according to a new study from Berkeley Lab researchers recently published in Nature Energy.

Shipping represents 3% of total US greenhouse gas emissions from transportation, making it an important target for decarbonization. But electrifying ships is more challenging than electrifying cars from both a technical and a market perspective.

A ship is a much bigger capital investment than a car and has a lifespan of several decades. While better battery technology in recent years has meant EVs with longer ranges, ships are vastly heavier than cars and can travel very long distances between ports. These heavy weights and long distances have led some to think that electrifying shipping isn’t feasible.

The researchers decided to test that assumption, said Won Young Park, the study’s lead and an energy policy researcher at Berkeley Lab.

“Our analysis includes the feasibility of electrification for 100% of all trips, while also exploring excluding a small percentage of very long single trips, which could be potentially addressed through optimized operations across multiple vessels,” he said.

“Declining battery costs coupled with increasing battery energy densities, cleaner grids, optimized vessel operations, and valuing the battery’s second life create a unique electrification opportunity in domestic shipping.”

The researchers analyzed US-flagged ships less than 1,000 gross tonnage, which includes primarily passenger ships and three types of tugboats. They identified 6,323 such ships. Of those, 2,722 had enough data from the Automatic Identification System, an automatic tracking system for vessels, to understand the length and patterns of the trips they made.

Park and his colleagues found that excluding just 1% of the longest trips made electrifying the ships much more feasible, allowing for batteries two-thirds smaller than would be needed for the longest trips. For passenger ships, the size could be reduced by 85%, they found.

How much electrification reduces emissions depends on the carbon intensity of the electricity used for charging. These 6,323 ships contribute 9.5% of the total US domestic shipping emissions, according to the paper. The researchers looked at three scenarios for the carbon intensity of the electrical grid over time.

Scenario one was the status quo, scenario two was 95% electricity decarbonization by 2050, and scenario three a more aggressive 95% decarbonization by 2035. Retrofitting these ships could reduce maritime CO₂ equivalent emissions by 34–73% in 2035, with the highest reduction reached through the third scenario.

The researchers also looked at how electrifying shipping could be cost effective, meaning that retrofitting to battery electric costs the same or less as operating an equivalent internal combustion engine vessel. For internal combustion engine ships, the total cost included fuel, operations and maintenance, and the social cost of CO₂ equivalent emissions and air pollution.

For the battery-powered ships, the total cost included batteries, charging, operations and maintenance, cost for charging infrastructure, the social cost of CO₂ equivalent emissions, and the battery’s second-life value at the end of first life. The researchers compared these costs under scenarios again including the percentage of total trips, carbon intensity of the electrical grid, and different cost scenarios for the battery system and charging costs.

In the 95% electricity decarbonization by 2035 scenario, electrifying up to 85% of these ships covering 99% of annual trips would be cost effective in 2035, they found.

The researchers also studied how much charging energy the ships would need for successful electrification. They found about half of the charging needs could be concentrated at 20 US ports.

“The electrification potential is concentrated at relatively few ports, including New York–New Jersey, New Orleans, and Houston,” said Hee Seung Moon, a Berkeley Lab postdoctoral researcher and first author of the paper. “This implies that focusing infrastructure investments on these ports will facilitate vessel electrification.”

“Our analysis offers an essential first step in understanding battery-electric shipping options,” Park said. “It lays a foundation for future research and policy development to identify optimal locations for prioritizing battery electrification based on individual ship activity and local grid emissions.”

Though fall began on September 22, it still feels like summer for many in Texas and across the United States. Each year, summer temperatures occur earlier and last longer—a problem experienced across the globe. According to the U.N., the Earth is already about 1.1°C warmer than in the late 1800s and greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise.

One method to reduce the carbon footprint is through green hydrogen, an energy carrier produced by renewable energy sources. Its production contributes to global efforts to achieve the U.N.’s decarbonization goal to reduce emissions by 45% by 2030 and reach net zero by 2050. Two researchers in the Department of Multidisciplinary Engineering at Texas A&M University are working toward this goal.

Dr. Keshawa Shukla, professor of practice in subsea engineering, and interdisciplinary engineering doctoral student Vy Le, are designing an offshore hydrogen hub that can produce green hydrogen from the electrolysis of water, using the electricity obtained from an offshore wind substation.

Dr. Shukla and Vy Le’s research involves designing an offshore fixed bottom hydrogen hub that produces and stores green hydrogen from water electrolysis using electricity generated from the renewable power source of an offshore fixed bottom wind farm known as a substation. This process splits water into hydrogen and oxygen gases.

Hydrogen is then processed, compressed, and stored onboard in liquid form. The economy of the hydrogen production system is evaluated using software for the existing offshore wind farms.

“Green hydrogen is the renewable energy carrier of the future, which makes this project very rewarding to work on. Also, it offers the highest efficiency among other energy sources,” Le said. Dr. Shukla is her Ph.D. advisor and encouraged her to join the project.

Vy Le presented their research at the Offshore Technology Conference 2024. Their paper, “Renewable Energy: Process Design of Green Hydrogen Production Systems Utilizing Offshore Wind Energy,” was published in the OTC 2024 Proceedings accessible through One Petro and was co-authored with Shashikant Sarada, vice-president of offshore wind engineering at WSP.

Vy Le and Dr. Shukla have created a conceptual process design for a green hydrogen production system using offshore wind power from a neighboring offshore substation. They evaluated the economics of the green hydrogen production process and identified major risks.

Moving forward, they hope to collaborate with industry and research funding agencies. Though the study of green hydrogen production involves many technical and economic challenges, Vy Le and Dr. Shukla remain passionate about the research.

“Figuring out the solutions and contributions devoted to addressing the challenges for net-zero energy production has motivated me to work on this very exciting project,” Vy Le said. “More importantly, the greatest motivation that keeps me moving forward is the support from Dr. Shukla and his industry network, the MTDE department faculty and staff, my colleagues and my family.”

A fully electric vehicle fleet is globally hailed as a transformative solution to slow climate change. But how green are EV batteries? Will they help save us from a warming planet or add to an ever-increasing problem?

Within the U.S. alone, the transportation sector was responsible for 29% of all greenhouse gas emissions in 2022, more than any other sector. And according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, nearly 80% of these emissions come from vehicles that travel on the nation’s roads and highways.

“A future where the transportation sector transitions to EVs would be a game changer,” says Patricia Hidalgo-Gonzalez, an assistant professor in the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at the Jacobs School of Engineering and affiliate member at the UC San Diego Center for Energy Research.

“Greenhouse gas emissions have caused global temperatures to increase, which already has caused very serious environmental impacts, such as acidification and warming of the ocean, melting of glaciers and extreme weather events.” She adds, “It is of the utmost importance that we put our best efforts to mitigate climate change and prevent it from having more frequent and adverse impacts.”

To help lessen the global warming caused by these emissions, in 2022, the California Air Resources Board approved a nation-leading clean car rule that drew a year-by-year roadmap, with all new cars and light trucks sold in California required to be zero-emissions vehicles by 2035.

The mandate allows car manufacturers to make up their car sales in the state with 20% of plug-in hybrid vehicles—which combine gas and electricity—with the remainder of their sales to comprise full-battery electric and hydrogen fuel cell vehicles. With this charge, California joined several other countries in its efforts; other states, including Oregon, Massachusetts, Washington and New York, are following its lead.

Early adopters have paved the way, and sales of EVs continue to climb worldwide. EVs have become more economical and attractive than ever before, with more car companies offering hybrid or full-battery electric vehicles. The battery is what makes an EV possible, typically a lithium-ion battery. And much like traditional, fossil fuel-powered internal combustion engines, these batteries are made from limited natural resources.

Battery basics

Surprisingly, the cells used for EV lithium-ion batteries are not terribly different in components from cell phone and laptop batteries, explains Ping Liu, professor and the William Coles Endowed Chair in the Aiiso Yufeng Li Family Department of Chemical and Nano Engineering at the Jacobs School of Engineering, and the director of its Sustainable Power and Energy Center.

The battery cells are “the heart of a battery,” Liu says, and the number of cells in a battery dictates both its size and capacity.

There are four main components that comprise each battery cell: the cathode, the anode, the electrolyte and the separator. The parts can be thought of as a sandwich, with the cathode and anode serving a similar role to the outer bread slices, while the electrolyte and separator are like the fillings.

Multiple elements are typically used within these cells, including lithium, nickel, cobalt, manganese, iron, graphite and copper, among others.

Sourcing the various materials needed for lithium-ion batteries involves countries from across the globe.

Much of the world’s supply of lithium is located in Bolivia, Chile and Argentina; the cobalt primarily comes from the Democratic Republic of the Congo; phosphates from countries in Africa; graphite from northern China; and nickel from Australia, Indonesia, Canada, Brazil and Russia. Manganese and iron can be sourced from many places. Most of these metals are mined.

“Mining these days is extremely efficient,” says Liu. “But, at least for lithium, mining is not the only way to source the metal.”

The U.S. is poised to become a lithium powerhouse. A 2023 study by the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory revealed a staggering amount of lithium—3,400 kilotons—within geothermal brines beneath Southern California’s Salton Sea.

The geothermal brines—hot, concentrated saline solutions that can be used to generate power—could potentially supply enough lithium for over 375 million EV batteries, far surpassing the total number of vehicles currently on U.S. roads.

Construction of the first dedicated, large-scale lithium extraction and renewable geothermal facility in the Salton Sea area began in 2024.

Yet Liu offers a caveat: “The Salton Sea has a lot of other heavy metals in it, and getting lithium out versus getting out lithium that’s useful are two completely different things,” he says. “Extracting something that’s pure enough, free of contaminants, suitable for battery use and for it to make economic sense—those are different questions altogether.”

Mass production

Domestically, the U.S. currently does not have a way to source all the raw materials for lithium-ion batteries or any commercial manufacturing plants to build the batteries at scale. To do so would involve significant capital investment in physical public infrastructure as well as in training a workforce and building out the necessary facilities.

“The U.S. has a long road ahead as it explores a move toward EV battery manufacturing,” says Liu.

Initial thoughts were that the U.S. could develop battery manufacturing facilities in Imperial County to use the lithium as close to its extraction point as possible.

But there are additional energy, water and transportation infrastructure—as well as workforce training—hurdles that have to be overcome before those facilities can be built, explains Isaac Martin, a professor and the chair of the Department of Urban Studies and Planning in the School of Social Sciences. Martin is studying the ability for high-wage, high-skilled blue-collar labor to be expanded in the area as a result of the lithium discovery.

Daily driver

Once the raw materials for the batteries are sourced, they are manufactured and installed. Most EV batteries will last at least 10 years.

Yet, one of the widespread criticisms of EVs is that they use electricity that might not be generated by renewable resources. So isn’t using an EV run by, for example, coal-powered electricity just as bad for the environment?

That is not the case at all, answers Liu.

Even if EVs are charged with electricity that is generated by a problematic source, they still offer an environmental benefit.

“Gasoline vehicles are a problem,” says Liu. “Not only are they polluting, they are also polluting in a diffuse fashion because there are so many vehicles dispersing their pollutants as they travel.” A power plant that might be emitting greenhouse gas and pollution, however, is doing so in a concentrated fashion that is likely located in more remote areas, so environmental mitigation and cleanup are easier to manage.

“People who don’t like EVs usually say that if the electricity is dirty, you actually do not save anything,” says Liu. “But that’s not really true—there is still a benefit as well as a potential to utilize clean energy to power them.”

Beyond their eco-friendly advantages, EVs are better equipped to handle the growing computing power needed to operate today’s advanced cars. While gasoline-powered vehicles have alternators that can create the electrical energy needed to operate onboard computers, Liu explains, EVs can easily run the existing computer systems with the capability to operate even more complicated ones as designs evolve.

“As you need more and more electric-powered elements in vehicles, particularly in fully autonomous vehicles, electrification is made for it,” says Liu.

Reuse and recycle

Just because an EV might reach the end of its primary use doesn’t mean its battery is dead. According to Liu, after years of easy use, such as short daily commutes, these batteries could have a second life. However, the reuse of EV batteries comes down to economic feasibility.

“There are a lot of intuitively good ideas that turn out to be quite costly,” says Liu. Finding a secondary use for an EV battery “sounds like a great idea because the battery isn’t dead, so we should squeeze more out of it,” he says.

But “after the battery has serviced the car for, say, eight years, and you take it out, then you have to recertify the battery,” he adds. “It is still good, but is it still safe? You may need to separate the good cells from the bad ones before putting the battery back together.”

But once the EV battery has officially reached the end of its life, what’s next? Well, recycling doesn’t quite look like what you’d expect, but it is possible.

“When these batteries were originally designed, they were not designed to be recycled,” says Liu. “In fact, the lithium-ion battery is probably one of the most difficult batteries to recycle.”

So while recycling is possible, Liu says, the issue is at what economic and environmental cost.

Today, lithium-ion batteries are recycled by refinery companies such as Umicore, a large-scale battery recycling company headquartered in Belgium that has been operating for decades.

“Traditional recycling involves burning the existing batteries in a high-temperature furnace,” explains Zheng Chen, a professor in the Aiiso Yufeng Li Family Department of Chemical and Nano Engineering at the Jacobs School of Engineering.

“Graphite and other organic materials will be burned away, and the rest of the materials will fuse together to form two components: a metal alloy and ceramics,” says Chen. “The ceramics have minimal value and are often dumped or repurposed to pave the roads.”

The metal alloy, on the other hand, contains valuable elements. However, extracting these elements requires further treatment with strong acids and other harsh chemicals to separate and purify the metals. “These metals will be reused for making precursors that can be further processed to make new battery materials,” he adds.

Despite the cost of recycling, Liu is confident that as EV batteries reach the end of their lifespan, they will never cause an e-waste crisis. “Everything can be recycled,” he says.

And Chen is positive about the future. The U.S. Department of Energy and the California Energy Commission are very interested in expanding the domestic capability of EV battery recycling, and the number of startups in this space is growing. Chen himself is part of a startup, ExPost Technology, that is focused on a new recycling strategy for lithium-ion batteries.

The potential of change

When it comes down to it, will EV batteries make a difference? And will the U.S. and California be able to make the necessary regulatory changes and infrastructure investments to build up battery manufacturing plants and recycling?

“The overall benefits of EVs are that they’re a way to radically reduce our dependence on fossil fuels and, in particular, to lower emissions,” says David Victor, a professor and the Peter Cowhey Center on Global Transformation Chair in Innovation and Public Policy at the School of Global Policy and Strategy and the director of the Deep Decarbonization Initiative.

Yet with any technological change comes questions of feasibility. “One of the challenges in the clean energy revolution is how do you manage priorities when they conflict—how do you keep those conflicts from generating paralysis?” says Victor. “The U.S. and California are aggressive about environmental protection but make it really hard to build anything that disturbs the environment.”

Victor adds, “What we do know about the clean energy revolution is that we’re going to have to build stuff,” such as industrial facilities, power lines and mines.

And Liu is quick to point out that there is a lot of innovation currently going on. “It will require a lot of ingenuity from all the students and researchers, engineers and policymakers, and everyone to make it happen.

“To stand up an industry will take the whole society,” Liu says. “It will be very difficult. But it can be done.”

For many decades, fusion has been touted as the ultimate source of abundant, clean electricity. Now, as the world faces the need to reduce carbon emissions to prevent catastrophic climate change, making commercial fusion power a reality takes on new importance.

In a power system dominated by low-carbon variable renewable energy sources (VREs) such as solar and wind, “firm” electricity sources are needed to kick in whenever demand exceeds supply—for example, when the sun isn’t shining or the wind isn’t blowing and energy storage systems aren’t up to the task. What is the potential role and value of fusion power plants (FPPs) in such a future electric power system—a system that is not only free of carbon emissions but also capable of meeting the dramatically increased global electricity demand expected in the coming decades?

Working together for a year and a half, investigators in the MIT Energy Initiative (MITEI) and the MIT Plasma Science and Fusion Center (PSFC) have been collaborating to answer that question. They found that depending on its future cost and performance, fusion has the potential to be critically important to decarbonization. Under some conditions, the availability of FPPs could reduce the global cost of decarbonizing by trillions of dollars.

More than 25 experts together examined the factors that will impact the deployment of FPPs, including costs, climate policy, operating characteristics, and other factors. They present their findings in a new report titled “The Role of Fusion Energy in a Decarbonized Electricity System.”

“Right now, there is great interest in fusion energy in many quarters—from the private sector to government to the general public,” says the study’s principal investigator (PI) Robert C. Armstrong, MITEI’s former director and the Chevron Professor of Chemical Engineering, Emeritus. “In undertaking this study, our goal was to provide a balanced, fact-based, analysis-driven guide to help us all understand the prospects for fusion going forward.”

Accordingly, the study takes a multidisciplinary approach that combines economic modeling, electric grid modeling, techno-economic analysis, and more to examine important factors that are likely to shape the future deployment and utilization of fusion energy. The investigators from MITEI provided the energy systems modeling capability, while the PSFC participants provided the fusion expertise.

Fusion technologies may be a decade away from commercial deployment, so the detailed technology and costs of future commercial FPPs are not known at this point. As a result, the MIT research team focused on determining what cost levels fusion plants must reach by 2050 to achieve strong market penetration and make a significant contribution to the decarbonization of global electricity supply in the latter half of the century.

The value of having FPPs available on an electric grid will depend on what other options are available, so to perform their analyses, the researchers needed estimates of the future cost and performance of those options, including conventional fossil fuel generators, nuclear fission power plants, VRE generators, and energy storage technologies, as well as electricity demand for specific regions of the world. To find the most reliable data, they searched the published literature as well as results of previous MITEI and PSFC analyses.

Overall, the analyses showed that while the technological demands of harnessing fusion energy are formidable, so are the potential economic and environmental payoffs of adding this firm, low-carbon technology to the world’s portfolio of energy options.

Perhaps the most remarkable finding is the “societal value” of having commercial FPPs available.

“Limiting warming to 1.5 degrees C requires that the world invest in wind, solar, storage, grid infrastructure, and everything else needed to decarbonize the electric power system,” explains Randall Field, executive director of the fusion study and MITEI’s director of research. “The cost of that task can be far lower when FPPs are available as a source of clean, firm electricity.”

Moreover, the benefit varies depending on the cost of the FPPs. For example, assuming that the cost of building a FPP is $8,000 per kilowatt (kW) in 2050 and falls to $4,300/kW in 2100, the global cost of decarbonizing electric power drops by $3.6 trillion. If the cost of a FPP is $5,600/kW in 2050 and falls to $3,000/kW in 2100, the savings from having the fusion plants available would be $8.7 trillion. (Those calculations are based on differences in global gross domestic product and assume a discount rate of 6 percent. The undiscounted value is about 20 times larger.)

The goal of other analyses was to determine the scale of deployment worldwide at selected FPP costs. Again, the results are striking. For a deep decarbonization scenario, the total global share of electricity generation from fusion in 2100 ranges from less than 10% if the cost of fusion is high to more than 50% if the cost of fusion is low.

Other analyses showed that the scale and timing of fusion deployment vary in different parts of the world. Early deployment of fusion can be expected in wealthy nations such as European countries and the United States, which have the most aggressive decarbonization policies. But certain other locations—for example, India and the continent of Africa—will have great growth in fusion deployment in the second half of the century due to a large increase in demand for electricity during that time.

“In the U.S. and Europe, the amount of demand growth will be low, so it’ll be a matter of switching away from dirty fuels to fusion,” explains Sergey Paltsev, deputy director of the MIT Center for Sustainability Science and Strategy and a senior research scientist at MITEI. “But in India and Africa, for example, the tremendous growth in overall electricity demand will be met with significant amounts of fusion along with other low-carbon generation resources in the later part of the century.”

A set of analyses focusing on nine subregions of the United States showed that the availability and cost of other low-carbon technologies, as well as how tightly carbon emissions are constrained, have a major impact on how FPPs would be deployed and used. In a decarbonized world, FPPs will have the highest penetration in locations with poor diversity, capacity, and quality of renewable resources, and limits on carbon emissions will have a big impact.

For example, the Atlantic and Southeast subregions have low renewable resources. In those subregions, wind can produce only a small fraction of the electricity needed, even with maximum onshore wind buildout. Thus, fusion is needed in those subregions, even when carbon constraints are relatively lenient, and any available FPPs would be running much of the time.

In contrast, the Central subregion of the United States has excellent renewable resources, especially wind. Thus, fusion competes in the Central subregion only when limits on carbon emissions are very strict, and FPPs will typically be operated only when the renewables can’t meet demand.

An analysis of the power system that serves the New England states provided remarkably detailed results. Using a modeling tool developed at MITEI, the fusion team explored the impact of using different assumptions about not just cost and emissions limits but even such details as potential land-use constraints affecting the use of specific VREs. This approach enabled them to calculate the FPP cost at which fusion units begin to be installed.

They were also able to investigate how that “threshold” cost changed with changes in the cap on carbon emissions. The method can even show at what price FPPs begin to replace other specific generating sources. In one set of runs, they determined the cost at which FPPs would begin to displace floating-platform offshore wind and rooftop solar.

“This study is an important contribution to fusion commercialization because it provides economic targets for the use of fusion in the electricity markets,” notes Dennis G. Whyte, co-PI of the fusion study, former director of the PSFC, and the Hitachi America Professor of Engineering in the Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering. “It better quantifies the technical design challenges for fusion developers with respect to pricing, availability, and flexibility to meet changing demand in the future.”

The researchers stress that while fission power plants are included in the analyses, they did not perform a “head-to-head” comparison between fission and fusion, because there are too many unknowns. Fusion and nuclear fission are both firm, low-carbon electricity-generating technologies; but unlike fission, fusion doesn’t use fissile materials as fuels, and it doesn’t generate long-lived nuclear fuel waste that must be managed.

As a result, the regulatory requirements for FPPs will be very different from the regulations for today’s fission power plants—but precisely how they will differ is unclear. Likewise, the future public perception and social acceptance of each of these technologies cannot be projected, but could have a major influence on which generation of technologies is used to meet future demand.

The results of the study convey several messages about the future of fusion. For example, it’s clear that regulation can be a potentially large cost driver. This should motivate fusion companies to minimize their regulatory and environmental footprint with respect to fuels and activated materials. It should also encourage governments to adopt appropriate and effective regulatory policies to maximize their ability to use fusion energy in achieving their decarbonization goals.

For companies developing fusion technologies, the study’s message is clearly stated in the report: “If the cost and performance targets identified in this report can be achieved, our analysis shows that fusion energy can play a major role in meeting future electricity needs and achieving global net-zero carbon goals.”