In 2024, technologies to combat climate change soared above the clouds in electricity-generating kites, traveled the oceans sequestering carbon, and permeated the earth to power agritech in a new way. If these don’t ring a bell, fret not! We’ve gathered our top 10 climate tech stories of the past year here for you to explore.
Climate tech is a rapidly advancing interdisciplinary field—we here at IEEE Spectrum are excited to see what stories about these technologies we’ll be writing about for you in 2025.
Stuart Bradford
Those breathtaking views of the
aurora borealis this year were a harbinger of dangerous electromagnetic pulses (EMPs) from solar storms. EMPs can destroy electronic systems and overload power grids, causing blackouts. They aren’t just generated by solar activity;
human attackers could also generate EMPs, for example by detonating a nuclear weapon high in the atmosphere. Fortunately, researchers like
Yilu Liu, who’s at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, are working on the problem. In a
Q&A with IEEE SpectrumIEEE Spectrum, she explains the dangers of EMPs and how her lab is working on designing buildings that protect sensitive equipment inside.
Kitepower
In remote or inaccessible locations, where a wind turbine just isn’t feasible, there is a
new option for renewable energy generation: Kites.
Kitepower, based in the Netherlands, is working to implement an electricity-generating kite system, called the
Hawk. As the wind pulls on their kites’ ground tether, it generates a force that is converted into electrical power. The 60-square-meter kites can fly as high as 350 meters (over twice the height of a wind turbine) to catch stronger and steadier winds. The kites come with a 400-kilowatt-hour battery, and the entire system fits into a standard shipping container. Kitepower hopes to send the Hawk to remote communities that currently rely on diesel generators, providing them with a cleaner source of power that takes up much less space than a wind turbine.
Trane Technologies
Historically,
heat pumps have struggled to function in the cold, with most operating at a reduced capacity around 4 °C, and failing at about -15 °C. But now, with improvements in their compressors, heat-pump manufacturers say they have the technology
to heat homes just as efficiently in bitter cold as they do in milder winter temperatures. Heat pumps
work by moving and compressing fluids that have a very low boiling point. The compressor is the element that increases the fluid-turned-vapors’ temperature and pressure, so improvements in the compressor’s motor speed and timing of injecting more vapor have made heat pumps more efficient in colder temperatures. The U.S. Department of Energy in partnership with Natural Resources Canada is hosting the
Cold-Climate Heat Pump Technology Challenge, where eight heap pump manufacturers are testing their heat pumps, with a goal of performing at maximum capacity—even at -15 °C.
Tennessee Tech University
Smart agriculture IoT devices help farmers understand the big picture idea of what is going on all over their land by measuring GPS coordinates, moisture levels, temperatures, acidity, nutrients, and more. The problem is supplying enough power to those scattered sensors. But what if we used something that already connects all of the devices? That’s right—
the soil. Researchers at
Tennessee Technological University designed a method of transmitting power through the ground. The researchers’ 2-acre test network transmitted power at 60 hertz, expending only 0.1 kilowatt-hour per day. If they had paid retail rates for that power, it would have cost them just over a penny a day.
Ebb Carbon
Ebb Carbon is a California-based startup poised to start removing hundreds of tonnes of carbon dioxide from the air. Their
carbon dioxide removal plant in Port Angeles, Washington, called
Project Macoma, will use an electrochemical process to split seawater into acidic and basic portions. The acidic stream will be neutralized or shipped out, and the basic stream will be released into the ocean. There, it will mix with carbon dioxide to create bicarbonate, a stable way to store carbon. As the project captures and stores CO
2 from the ocean, the ocean would be able to draw more CO
2 from the air. Although many ocean scientists are skeptical of marine geoengineering projects like this one, The U.S. Department of Energy has developed a US $100 million
Carbon Shot program that will fund carbon dioxide removal and storage, including in ocean reservoirs.
Luigi Avantaggiato
Millions of tonnes of solar panels will reach the end of their lives in 2025. They contain silicon, silver, and copper—materials that are very valuable but hard to extract from the hardware. The best current processes for
solar panel recycling can recover 90 percent of these metals, but they are expensive and often use toxic chemicals. Startup
9-Tech has a recycling process that
recovers up to 90 percent of the materials without using toxic chemicals or releasing pollutants into the environment. Workers at 9-Tech’s pilot factory manually remove the aluminum frame, junction box, and tempered glass from the solar panels. Then the remaining materials are fed into a furnace at 400 °C, and emerging pollutants are captured with a filter. A series of sieves separates the glass and silicon, then the silicon is sent to an acid bath where ultrasonic waves split it from its attached silver. The process is expensive, but the materials recovered are high quality, which should help to offset the cost, says the startup founders.
McKibillo
If we want to fully decarbonize the aviation industry, we’re going to have to think outside of the box.
Ian McKay presents a possible future where we use
stadium-sized microwave arrays to beam up power to antennae on airplanes. These microwaves could pass through clouds and not harm passengers, though they would heat up the air considerably, possibly damaging nearby birds. Though nothing like this has ever been attempted, technological improvements suggest this may be possible, including a CalTech startup that intends to use phased arrays to
beam solar power from satellites to Earth. Even with huge technological barriers and possible regulatory issues, this thought experiment is worth considering, because less-fanciful options for decarbonizing aviation
have their own problems.
Climeworks
Climeworks, a Zurich-based company, says its new
direct-air capture (DAC) technology will remove millions of tonnes of carbon dioxide by the end of the decade. Their
latest facility will eventually pull 36,000 tonnes of CO
2 out of the air each year. Their
new DAC technology relies on a new sorbent (the material that absorbs CO
2) with a geometry that has been modified to expose more surface area to the air, capturing twice as much CO
2. The new design will modify their collector units’ structure from three-tiered racks to a cube-like design, with four walls of collectors surrounding a central shaft. These will be used in the
Project Cypress DAC Hub, a project funded by the U.S. Department of Energy to create the first one-million-tonne carbon dioxide removal hub in the United States.
Alfred Hicks/NREL
Solar panels are built to last. In order to withstand harsh weather, changing temperatures, and the wear and tear of decades of use, they need a tight seal on their
photovoltaic materials. Most manufacturers create this seal by adding sticky polymer layers between the glass panes. But these polymers become incredibly difficult to remove at the
end of a solar panel’s life. Researchers at the U.S.
National Renewable Energy Lab have found a way to meld the glass without a polymer,
melting it together with femtosecond
lasers. This intense beam of photons changes the optical absorption of the glass, generating a small plasma of ionized glass atoms which melt the glass sheets together. This new method creates solar panels that last longer and are easier to recycle.
STDCT at NUS
Data centers are energy guzzlers, especially in warmer climates. But researchers in Singapore are now testing ways
to cool them sustainably. A collaboration of over 20 tech companies, universities, and government agencies are working together on the
Sustainable Tropical Data Centre Testbed. They are testing a new
StatePoint Liquid Cooling system, where a hydrophobic microporous membrane creates a liquid-to-air heat exchanger that chills water. This system is more effective in hot and humid environments as it produces cold water instead of cold air. The researchers will also test a prototype
desiccant-coated heat and mass exchanger, coated in a desiccant material that absorbs water vapor from the air passing over it, drying out the air to dehumidify the data center. In the future, they hope to bring these energy-saving technologies to tropical data centers all over the globe.
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