Charging an EV at home doesn’t seem like an inconvenience—until you find yourself dragging a cord around a garage or down a rainy driveway, then unplugging and coiling it back up every time you drive the kids to school or run an errand. For elderly or disabled drivers, those bulky cords can be a physical challenge.
As it was for smartphones years ago, wireless EV charging has been the dream. But there’s a difference of nearly four orders of magnitude between the roughly 14 watt-hours of a typical smartphone battery and that of a large EV. That’s what makes the wireless charging on the 108-kilowatt-hour pack in the forthcoming Porsche Cayenne Electric so notable.
To offer the first inductive charger on a production car, Porsche had to overcome both technical and practical challenges—such as how to protect a beloved housecat prowling below your car. The German automaker demonstrated the system at September’s IAA Mobility show in Munich.
This article is part of our special report Top Tech 2026.
With its 800-volt architecture, the Cayenne Electric can charge at up to 400 kW at a public DC station, enough to fill its pack from 10 to 80 percent in about 16 minutes. The wireless system delivers about 11 kW for Level 2 charging at home, where Porsche says three out of four of its customers do nearly all their fill-ups. Pull the Cayenne into a garage and align it over a floor-mounted plate, and the SUV will charge from 10 to 80 percent in about 7.5 hours. No plugs, tangled cords, or dirty hands. Porsche will offer a single-phase, 48-ampere version for the United States after buyers see their first Cayennes in mid-2026, and a three-phase, 16-A system in Europe.
Porsche’s Wireless Charging is Based on an Old Concept
The concept of inductive charging has been around for more than a century. Two coils of copper wire are positioned near one another. A current flowing through one coil creates a magnetic field, which induces voltage in the second coil.
In the Porsche system, the floor-mounted pad, 78 centimeters wide, plugs into the home’s electrical panel. Inside the pad, which weighs 50 kilograms, grid electricity (at 60 hertz in the United States, 50 Hz in most of the rest of the world) is converted to DC and then to high-frequency AC at 2,000 V.The resulting 85-kilohertz magnetic field extends from the pad to the Cayenne, where it is converted again to DC voltage.
The waterproof pad can also be placed outdoors, and the company says it’s unaffected by leaves, snow, and the like. In fact, the air-cooled pad can get warm enough to melt any snow, reaching temperatures as high as 50 °C.
The Cayenne’s onboard charging hardware mounts between its front electric motor and battery. The 15-kg induction unit wires directly into the battery.
In most EVs, plug-in (conductive) AC charging tops out at around 95 percent efficiency. Porsche says its wireless system delivers 90 percent efficiency, despite an air gap of roughly 12 to 18 cm between the pad and vehicle.
Last year, Oak Ridge National Laboratory transferred an impressive 270 kilowatts to a Porsche Taycan with 95 percent efficiency.
“We’re super proud that we’re just below conductive AC in charging efficiency,” says Simon Schulze, Porsche’s product manager for charging hardware. Porsche also beats inductive phone chargers, which typically max out at about 70 percent efficiency, Schulze says.
When the car gets within 7.5 meters of the charging pad, the Cayenne’s screen-based parking-assist system turns on automatically. Then comes a kind of video game that requires the driver to align a pair of green circles on-screen, one representing the car, the other the pad. It’s like a digital version of the tennis ball some people hang in their garage to gauge parking distance. There’s ample wiggle room, with tolerances of 20 cm left to right, and 15 cm fore and aft. “You can’t miss it,” according to Schulze.
Induction loops detect any objects between the charging plate and the vehicle; such objects, if they’re metal, could heat up dangerously. Radar sensors detect any living things near the pad, and will halt the charging if necessary. People can walk near the car or hop aboard without affecting a charging session.
Christian Holler, Porsche’s head of charging systems, says the system conforms to International Commission on Non-Ionizing Radiation Protection standards for electromagnetic radiation. The field remains below 15 microteslas, so it’s safe for people with pacemakers, Porsche insists. And the aforementioned cat wouldn’t be harmed even if it strayed into the magnetic field, though “its metal collar might get warm,” Schulze says.
The Porsche system’s 90 percent efficiency is impressive but not record-setting. Last year, Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) transferred 270 kW to a Porsche Taycan with 95 percent efficiency, boosting its state of charge by 50 percent in 10 minutes. That world-record wireless rate relied on polyphase windings for coils, part of a U.S. Department of Energy project that was backed by Volkswagen, Porsche’s parent company.
That effort, Holler says, spawned a Ph.D. paper from VW engineer Andrew Foote. Yet the project had different goals from the one that led to the Cayenne charging system. ORNL was focused on maximum power transfer, regardless of cost, production feasibility, or reliability, he says.
By contrast, designing a system for showroom cars “requires a completely different level of quality and processes,” Holler says.
High Cost Could Limit Adoption
Cayenne buyers in Europe will pay around €7,000 (roughly US $8,100) for the optional charger. Porsche has yet to price it for the United States.
Loren McDonald, chief executive of Chargeonomics, an EV-charging analysis firm, said wireless charging “is clearly the future,” with use cases such as driverless robotaxis, curbside charging, or at any site “where charging cables might be an annoyance or even a safety issue.”
But for now, inductive charging’s costly, low-volume status will limit it to niche models and high-income adopters, McDonald says. Public adoption will be critical “so that drivers can convenience-charge throughout their driving day—which then increases the benefits of spending more money on the system.”
Porsche acknowledges that issue; the system conforms to wireless standards set by the Society of Automotive Engineers so that other automakers might help popularize the technology.
“We didn’t want this to be proprietary, a Porsche-only solution,” Schulze says. “We only benefit if other brands use it.”
This giant bubble on the island of Sardinia holds 2,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide. But the gas wasn’t captured from factory emissions, nor was it pulled from the air. It came from a gas supplier, and it lives permanently inside the dome’s system to serve an eco-friendly purpose: to store large amounts of excess renewable energy until it’s needed.
Developed by the Milan-based company Energy Dome, the bubble and its surrounding machinery demonstrate a first-of-its-kind “CO2 Battery,” as the company calls it. The facility compresses and expands CO2 daily in its closed system, turning a turbine that generates 200 megawatt-hours of electricity, or 20 MW over 10 hours. And in 2026, replicas of this plant will start popping up across the globe.
We mean that literally. It takes just half a day to inflate the bubble. The rest of the facility takes less than two years to build and can be done just about anywhere there’s 5 hectares of flat land.
This article is part of our special report Top Tech 2026.
The first to build one outside of Sardinia will be one of India’s largest power companies, NTPC Limited. The company expects to complete its CO2 Battery sometime in 2026 at the Kudgi power plant in Karnataka, in India. In Wisconsin, meanwhile, the public utility Alliant Energy received the all clear from authorities to begin construction of one in 2026 to supply power to 18,000 homes.
And Google likes the concept so much that it plans to rapidly deploy the facilities in all of its key data-center locations in Europe, the United States, and the Asia-Pacific region. The idea is to provide electricity-guzzling data centers with round-the-clock clean energy, even when the sun isn’t shining or the wind isn’t blowing. The partnership with Energy Dome, announced in July, marked Google’s first investment in long-duration energy storage.
“We’ve been scanning the globe seeking different solutions,” says Ainhoa Anda, Google’s senior lead for energy strategy, in Paris. The challenge the tech giant has encountered is not only finding a long-duration storage option, but also one that works with the unique specs of every region. “So standardization is really important, and this is one of the aspects that we really like” about Energy Dome, she says. “They can really plug and play this.”
Google will prioritize placing the Energy Dome facilities where they’ll have the most impact on decarbonization and grid reliability, and where there’s a lot of renewable energy to store, Anda says. The facilities can be placed adjacent to Google’s data centers or elsewhere within the same grid. The companies did not disclose the terms of the deal.
Anda says Google expects to help the technology “reach a massive commercial stage.”
Getting creative with long-duration energy storage
All this excitement is based on Energy Dome’s one full-size, grid-connected plant in Ottana, Sardinia, which was completed in July. It was built to help solve one of the energy transition’s biggest challenges: the need for grid-scale storage that can provide power for more than 8 hours at a time. Called long-duration energy storage, or LDES in industry parlance, the concept is the key to maximizing the value of renewable energy.
When sun and wind are abundant, solar and wind farms tend to produce more electricity than a grid needs. So storing the excess for use when these resources are scarce just makes sense. LDES also makes the grid more reliable by providing backup and supplementary power.
The problem is that even the best new grid-scale storage systems on the market—mainly lithium-ion batteries—provide only about 4 to 8 hours of storage. That’s not long enough to power through a whole night, or multiple cloudy and windless days, or the hottest week of the year, when energy demand hits its peak.
After the CO2 leaves the dome, it is compressed, cooled, reduced to a liquid, and stored in pressure vessels. To release the energy, the process reverses: The liquid is evaporated, heated, expanded, and then fed through a turbine that generates electricity. Luigi Avantaggiato
Lithium-ion battery systems could be increased in size to store more and last longer, but systems of that size usually aren’t economically viable. Other grid-scale battery chemistries and approaches are in development, such as sodium-based, iron-air, and vanadium redox flow batteries. But the energy density, costs, degradation, and funding complications have challenged the developers of those alternatives.
The tried-and-true grid-scale storage option—pumped hydro, in which water is pumped between reservoirs at different elevations—lasts for decades and can store thousands of megawatts for days. But these systems require specific topography, a lot of land, and can take up to a decade to build.
CO2 Batteries check a lot of boxes that other approaches don’t. They don’t need special topography like pumped-hydro reservoirs do. They don’t need critical minerals like electrochemical and other batteries do. They use components for which supply chains already exist. Their expected lifetime stretches nearly three times as long as lithium-ion batteries. And adding size and storage capacity to them significantly decreases cost per kilowatt-hour. Energy Dome expects its LDES solution to be 30 percent cheaper than lithium-ion.
China has taken note. China Huadian Corp. and Dongfang Electric Corp. are reportedly building a CO2-based energy-storage facility in the Xinjiang region of northwest China. Media reports show renderings of domes but give widely varying storage capacities—including 100 MW and 1,000 MW. The Chinese companies did not respond to IEEE Spectrum’s requests for information.
“What I can say is that they are developing something very, very similar [to Energy Dome’s CO2 Battery] but quite large in scale,” says Claudio Spadacini, Energy Dome’s founder and CEO. The Chinese companies “are good, they are super fast, and they have a lot of money,” he says.
Why is Google investing in CO2 Batteries?
When I visited Energy Dome’s Sardinia facility in October, the CO2 had just been pumped out of the dome, so I was able to peek inside. It was massive, monochromatic, and pretty much empty. The inner membrane, which had been holding the uncompressed CO2, had collapsed across the entire floor. A few pockets of the gas remained, making the off-white sheet billow up in spots.
Meanwhile, the translucent outer dome allowed some daylight to pass through, creating a creamy glow that enveloped the vast space. With no structural framing, the only thing keeping the dome upright was the small difference in pressure between the inside and outside air.
“This is incredible,” I said to my guide, Mario Torchio, Energy Dome’s global marketing and communications director.
“It is. But it’s physics,” he said.
Outside the dome, a series of machines connected by undulating pipes moves the CO2 out of the dome for compressing and condensing. First, a compressor pressurizes the gas from 1 bar (100,000 pascals) to about 55 bar (5,500,000 pa). Next, a thermal-energy-storage system cools the CO2 to an ambient temperature. Then a condenser reduces it into a liquid that is stored in a few dozen pressure vessels, each about the size of a school bus. The whole process takes about 10 hours, and at the end of it, the battery is considered charged.
To discharge the battery, the process reverses. The liquid CO2 is evaporated and heated. It then enters a gas-expander turbine, which is like a medium-pressure steam turbine. This drives a synchronous generator, which converts mechanical energy into electrical energy for the grid. After that, the gas is exhausted at ambient pressure back into the dome, filling it up to await the next charging phase.
Energy Dome engineers inspect the dryer system, which keeps the gaseous CO₂ in the dome at optimal dryness levels at all times.Luigi Avantaggiato
It’s not rocket science. Still, someone had to be the first to put it together and figure out how to do it cost-effectively, which Spadacini says his company has accomplished and patented. “How we seal the turbo machinery, how we store the heat in the thermal-energy storage, how we store the heat after condensing…can really cut costs and increase the efficiency,” he says.
The company uses pure, purpose-made CO2 instead of sourcing it from emissions or the air, because those sources come with impurities and moisture that degrade the steel in the machinery.
What happens if the dome is punctured?
On the downside, Energy Dome’s facility takes up about twice as much land as a comparable capacity lithium-ion battery would. And the domes themselves, which are about the height of a sports stadium at their apex, and longer, might stand out on a landscape and draw some NIMBY pushback.
And what if a tornado comes? Spadacini says the dome can withstand wind up to 160 kilometers per hour. If Energy Dome can get half a day’s warning of severe weather, the company can just compress and store the CO2 in the tanks and then deflate the outer dome, he says.
If the worst happens and the dome is punctured, 2,000 tonnes of CO2 will enter the atmosphere. That’s equivalent to the emissions of about 15 round-trip flights between New York and London on a Boeing 777. “It’s negligible compared to the emissions of a coal plant,” Spadacini says. People will also need to stay back 70 meters or more until the air clears, he says.
Worth the risk? The companies lining up to build these systems seem to think so.
This article appears in the January 2026 print issue as “Grid-Scale CO2 Batteries Will Take Off in 2026.”
Demand for electricity is up in the United States, and so is its price. One way to increase supply and lower costs is to build new power plants, but that can take years and cost a fortune. Talgat Kopzhanov is working on a faster, more affordable solution: the generator replacement interconnection process.
The technique links renewable energy sources to the grid connections of shuttered or underutilized power facilities and coal plants. The process uses the existing interconnection rights and infrastructure when generating electricity, eliminating the years-long approval process for constructing new U.S. power facilities.
Talgat Kopzhanov
Employer
Middle River Power, in Chicago
Job title
Asset manager
Member grade
Senior member
Alma maters
Purdue University in West Lafayette, Ind., and Indiana University in Bloomington
Kopzhanov, an IEEE senior member, is an asset manager for Middle River Power, based in Chicago. The private equity–sponsored investment and asset management organization specializes in U.S. power generation assets.
“Every power plant has its own interconnection rights,” he says, “but, amazingly, most are not fully utilizing them.” Interconnection rights give a new power source—such as solar energy—permission to connect to a high-voltage transmission system.
“We build the new renewable energy resources on top of them,” Kopzhanov says. “It’s like colocating a new power plant.”
He recently oversaw the installation of two generator-replacement interconnection projects, one for a solar system in Minnesota and the other for a battery storage facility in California.
A fast-track approach that cuts costs
Artificial intelligence data centers are driving up demand and raising electricity bills globally. Although tech companies and investors are willing to spend trillions of U.S. dollars constructing new power facilities, it can take up to seven years just to secure the grid interconnection rights needed to start building a plant, Kopzhanov says. The lengthy process involves system planning, permit requests, and regulatory approvals. Only about 5 percent of new projects are approved each year, he says, in part because of grid reliability issues.
The interconnection technique takes about half the time, he says, bringing cleaner energy online faster. By overcoming interconnection bottlenecks, such as major transmission upgrades that delay renewable projects, the process speeds up project timelines and lowers expenses.
Power Engineers Are In Short Supply
If you want to work in a secure, recession-proof industry, consider a career in power engineering, Kopzhanov says—especially in an unstable job market, when even Amazon, Microsoft, and other large companies are laying off thousands of engineers.
The power industry desperately needs engineers. The global power sector will require between 450,000 and 1.5 million more engineers by 2030 to build, implement, and operate energy infrastructure, according to an IEEE Spectrumarticle based on a study conducted this year of the power engineering workforce by the IEEE Power & Energy Society.
One of the reasons for the shortage, Kopzhanov says, is that the power sector doesn’t seem exciting to young engineers.
“It has not been popular because the technologies we’re implementing nowadays were invented quite a long time ago,” he says. “So there were not too many recent innovations.”
But with new technologies being introduced, such as the generator replacement interconnection process, now is a great time to get into the industry, he says.
“We are facing lots of different kinds of interesting and big challenges, and we definitely need power engineers who can solve them, such as the supply and demand situation facing us,” he says. “We need right-minded people who can deal with that.
“Until this point, the marvelous engineering systems that have been designed and built with close to 100-percent reliability are not going to be the case moving forward, so we have to come up with innovative approaches.”
Just because you have a power engineering degree, however, doesn’t mean you have to work as a power engineer, he says.
“Most students might assume they will have to dedicate themselves to only being a power engineer for the rest of their life—which is not the case,” he says. “You can be on the business side or be an asset manager like me.
“The power sector is an extremely dynamic and vast area. You’ll have many paths to pursue along your career journey.”
Kopzhanov has been involved with several recent generator replacement interconnection installations. In May a large-scale solar project in Minnesota replaced a retiring coal plant with approximately 720 megawatts of solar-powered generators, making it the largest solar-generating facility in the region. The first 460 MW of capacity is expected to be operational soon.
Another new installation, developed with Middle River, is a portfolio of battery storage projects colocated with natural gas facilities in California. It used existing and incremental interconnection capacity to add the storage system. The surplus renewable energy from the batteries will be used during peak times to reduce the plant’s greenhouse gas emissions, according to a Silicon Valley Clean Energy article about the installation.
“These projects are uniquely positioned to be colocated with existing power plants,” Kopzhanov says. “But, at the same time, they are renewable and sustainable sources of power—which is also helping to decarbonize the environment and meet the emission-reduction goals of the state.”
Influenced by Kazakhstan’s power industry
Born and raised in Taraz, Kazakhstan, Kopzhanov was surrounded by relatives who worked in the power industry. It’s not surprising that he has pursued a career in the field.
Until 1991, when the country was still a Soviet republic, most Kazakhs were required to help build the country’s power and transmission systems, he says. His mother and father are chemical engineers, and his grandfather was involved in the power industry. They told him about how they designed the transformers and overhead power lines. From a young age, he knew he wanted to be an engineer too, he says.
Today the Central Asian country is a major producer of oil, gas, and coal.
Kopzhanov left Kazakhstan in 2008 to pursue a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering at Purdue University, in West Lafayette, Ind.
After graduating in 2012, he was hired as an electrical design engineer by Fluor Corp. in Farnborough, England. He oversaw the development of a master plan for a power project there. He also engineered and designed high-voltage switchgears, substations, and transformers.
“Every power plant has its own interconnection rights but, amazingly, most are not fully utilizing them.”
In 2015 he joined ExxonMobil in Houston, working as a project manager. During his six years there, he held managerial positions. Eventually, he was promoted to asset advisor and was responsible for evaluating the feasibility of investing in decarbonization and electrification projects by identifying their risks and opportunities.
He decided he wanted to learn more about the business aspects of running a company, so he left in 2021 to pursue an MBA at Indiana University’s Kelley School of Business, in Bloomington. During his MBA program, he briefly worked as a consultant for a lithium-ion manufacturing firm, offering advice on the viability of their proposed projects and investments.
“Engineers aren’t typically connected to the business world,” he says, “but having an understanding of what the needs are and tailoring your future goals toward that is extremely important. In my view, that’s how you’ll become a great technical expert. I definitely recommend that engineers have some kind of understanding of the business side.”
He joined Middle River shortly after graduating from Indiana with his MBA in 2023.
The power of membership
Kopzhanov was introduced to IEEE by a colleague at ExxonMobil after he asked the member about an IEEE plaque displayed on his desk. The coworker explained the activities he was involved in, as well as the process for joining. Kopzhanov became a member in 2019, left, and then rejoined in 2023.
“That was one of the best decisions I have made,” he says.
A member of the IEEE Power & Energy Society, he says its publications, webinars, conferences, and networking events keep him current on new developments.
“Being able to follow what’s happening in the industry, especially in the space where you’re working, is something that has benefited me a lot,” he says.
He has helped organize conferences and reviews research papers.
“It’s those little things that have a significant impact,” he says. “Volunteering is a key piece of belonging to IEEE.”
Fast, direct-current charging can charge an EV’s battery from about 20 percent to 80 percent in 20 minutes. That’s not bad, but it’s still about six times as long as it takes to fill the tank of an ordinary petrol-powered vehicle.
One of the major bottlenecks to even faster charging is cooling, specifically uneven cooling inside big EV battery packs as the pack is charged. Hydrohertz, a British startup launched by former motorsport and power-electronics engineers, says it has a solution: fire liquid coolant exactly where it’s needed during charging. Its solution, announced in November, is a rotary coolant router that fires coolant exactly where temperatures spike, and within milliseconds—far faster than any single-loop system can react. In laboratory tests, this cooling tech allowed an EV battery to safely charge in less than half the time than was possible with conventional cooling architecture.
A Smarter Way to Move Coolant
Hydrohertz calls its solution Dectravalve. It looks like a simple manifold, but it contains two concentric cylinders and a stepper motor to direct coolant to as many as four zones within the battery pack. It’s installed in between the pack’s cold plates, which are designed to efficiently remove heat from the battery cells through physical contact, and the main coolant supply loop, replacing a tangle of valves, brackets, sensors, and hoses.
To keep costs low, Hydrohertz designed Dectravalve to be produced with off-the-shelf materials, and seals, as well as dimensional tolerances that can be met with the fabrication tools used by many major parts suppliers. Keeping things simple and comparatively cheap could improve Dectravalve’s chances of catching on with automakers and suppliers notorious for frugality. “Thermal management is trending toward simplicity and ultralow cost,” says Chao-Yang Wang, a mechanical and chemical engineering professor at Pennsylvania State University whose research areas include dealing with issues related to internal fluids in batteries and fuel cells. Automakers would prefer passive cooling, he notes—but not if it slows fast charging. So, at least for now, Intelligent control is essential.
“If Dectravalve works as advertised, I’d expect to see a roughly 20 percent improvement in battery longevity, which is a lot.”–Anna Stefanopoulou, University of Michigan
Hydrohertz built Dectravalve to work with ordinary water-glycol, otherwise known as antifreeze, keeping integration simple. Using generic antifreeze avoids a step in the validation process where a supplier or EV manufacturer would otherwise have to establish whether some special formulation is compatible with the rest of the cooling system and doesn’t cause unforeseen complications. And because one Dectravalve can replace the multiple valves and plumbing assemblies of a conventional cooling system, it lowers the parts count, reduces leak points, and cuts warranty risk, Hydrohertz founder and CTO Martyn Talbot claims. The tighter thermal control also lets automakers shrink oversize pumps, hoses, and heat exchangers, improving both cost and vehicle packaging.
The valve reads battery-pack temperatures several times per second and shifts coolant flow instantly. If a high-load event—like a fast charge—is coming, it prepositions itself so more coolant is apportioned to known hot spots before the temperature rises in them.
Multizone control can also speed warm-up to prevent the battery degradation that comes from charging at frigid temperatures. “You can send warming fluid to heat half the pack fast so it can safely start taking load,” says Anna Stefanopoulou, a professor of mechanical engineering at the University of Michigan who specializes in control systems, energy, and transportation technologies. That half can begin accepting load, while the system begins warming the rest of the pack more gradually, she explains. But Dectravalve’s main function remains cooling fast-heating troublesome cells so they don’t slow charging.
Quick response to temperature changes inside the battery doesn’t increase the cooling capacity, but it leverages existing hardware far more efficiently. “Control the coolant with more precision and you get more performance for free,” says Talbot.
Charge Times Can Be Cut By 60 Percent
In early 2025, the Dectravalve underwent bench testing conducted by the Warwick Manufacturing Group (WMG), a multidisciplinary research center at the University of Warwick, in Coventry, England, that works with transport companies to improve the manufacturability of battery systems and other technologies. WMG compared Dectravalve’s cooling performance with that of a conventional single-loop cooling system using the same 100-kilowatt-hour battery pack. During fast-charge trials from 10 percent to 80 percent, Dectravalve held peak cell temperature below 44.5 °C and kept cell-to-cell temperature variation to just below 3 °C without intervention from the battery management system. Similar thermal performance for the single-loop system was made possible only by dialing back the amount of power the battery would accept—the very tapering that keeps fast charging from being on par with gasoline fill-ups.
Keeping the cell temperatures below 50 °C was key, because above that temperature lithium plating begins. The battery suffers irreversible damage when lithium starts coating the surface of the anode—the part of the battery where electrical charge is stored during charging—instead of filling its internal network of pores the way water does when it’s absorbed by a sponge. Plating greatly diminishes the battery’s charge-storage capacity. Letting the battery get too hot can also cause the electrolyte to break down. The result is inhibited flow of ions between the electrodes. And reduced flow within the battery means reduced flow in the external circuit, which powers the vehicle’s motors.
Because the Dectravalve kept temperatures low and uniform—and the battery management system didn’t need to play energy traffic cop and slow charging to a crawl to avoid overheating—charging time was cut by roughly 60 percent. With Dectravalve, the battery reached 80 percent state of charge in between 10 and 13 minutes, versus 30 minutes with the single-cooling-loop setup, according to Hydrohertz.
When Batteries Keep Cool, They Live Longer
Using Warwick’s temperature data, Hydrohertz applied standard degradation models and found that cooler, more uniform packs last longer. Stefanopoulou estimates that if Dectravalve works as claimed, it could boost battery life by roughly 20 percent. “That’s a lot,” she says.
Still, it could be years before the system shows up on new EVs, if ever. Automakers will need years of cycle testing, crash trials, and cost studies before signing off on a new coolant architecture. Hydrohertz says several EV makers and battery suppliers have begun validation programs, and CTO Talbot expects licensing deals to ramp up as results come in. But even in a best-case scenario, Dectravalve won’t be keeping production-model EV batteries cool for at least three model years.
Spain’s grid operator, Red Eléctrica, proudly declared that electricity demand across the country’s peninsular system was met entirely by renewable energy sources for the first time on a weekday, on 16 April 2025.
Just 12 days later, at 12:33 p.m. on Monday, 28 April, Spain and Portugal’s grids collapsed completely, plunging some 55 million people into one of the largest blackouts the region has ever seen. Entire cities lost electricity in the middle of the day. In the bustling airports of Madrid, Barcelona, and other key hubs, departure boards went blank. No power. No Internet. Even mobile phone service—something most people take for granted—was severely compromised. It was just disconnection and disruption. On the roads, traffic lights stopped functioning, snarling traffic and leaving people wondering when the power would return.
The size and scale of the impact were unsettling, but the scariest part was the speed at which it happened. Within minutes, the whole of the Iberian Peninsula’s energy generation dropped from roughly 25 GW to less than 1.2 GW.
While this may sound like a freak accident, incidents like this will continue to happen, especially given the rapid changes to the electrical grid over the past few decades. Worldwide, power systems are evolving from large centralized generation to a multitude of diverse, distributed generation sources, representing a major paradigm shift. This is not merely a “power” problem but also a “systems” problem. It involves how all the parts of the power grid interact to maintain stability, and it requires a holistic solution.
Power grids are undergoing a massive transformation—from coal- and gas-fired plants to millions of solar panels and wind turbines scattered across vast distances. It’s not just a technology swap. It’s a complete reimagining of how electricity is generated, transmitted, and used. And if we get it wrong, we’re setting ourselves up for more catastrophic blackouts like the one that hit all of Spain and Portugal. The good news is that a solution developed by our group at Illinois Institute of Technology over the past two decades and commercialized by our company, Syndem, has achieved global standardization and is moving into large-scale deployment. It’s called Virtual Synchronous Machines, and it might be the key to keeping the lights on as we transition to a renewable future.
Rapid Deployment of Renewable Energy
TheInternational Energy Agency (IEA) created a Net Zero by 2050 roadmap that calls for nearly 90 percent of global electricity generation to come from renewable, distributed sources, with solar photovoltaic (PV) and wind accounting for almost 70 percent. We are witnessing firsthand a paradigm shift in power systems, moving from centralized to distributed generation.
The IEA projects that renewable power installations will more than double between 2025 and 2030, underscoring the urgent need to integrate renewables smoothly into existing power grids. A key technical nuance is that many distributed energy resources (DERs) produce direct current (DC) electricity, while the grid operates on alternating current (AC). To connect these resources to the grid, inverters convert DC into AC. To understand this further, we need to discuss inverter technologies.
Professor Beibei Ren’s team at Texas Tech University built modules for a SYNDEM test bed with 12 modules and a substation module, consisting of 108 converters. Beibei Ren/Texas Tech University
Most of the inverters currently deployed in the field directly control the current (power) injected to the grid while constantly following the grid voltage, often referred to as grid-following inverters. Therefore, this type of inverter is a current source, meaning that its current is controlled, but its terminal voltage is determined by what it connects to. Grid-following inverters rely on a stable grid to inject power from renewable sources and operate properly. This is not a problem when the grid is stable, but it becomes one when the grid is less stable. For instance, when the grid goes down or experiences severe disturbances, grid-following inverters typically trip off, meaning they don’t provide support when the grid needs them most.
In recent years, attempts to address grid instability have led to the rise of grid-forming inverters. As the name suggests, these inverters could help form the grid. These usually refer to an inverter that controls its terminal voltage, including both the amplitude and frequency, which indirectly controls the current injected into the grid. This inverter behaves as a voltage source, meaning that its terminal voltage is regulated, but its current is determined by what it is connected to. Unlike grid-following inverters, grid-forming inverters can operate independently from the grid. This makes them useful in situations where the grid goes down or isn’t available, such as during blackouts. They can also help balance supply and demand, support voltage, and even restart parts of the grid if it shuts down.
One issue is that the term “grid-forming” means different things to different people. Some of them lack clear physical meaning or robust performance under complex grid conditions. Many grid-forming controls are model-based and may not scale properly in large systems. As a result, the design and control of these inverters can vary significantly. Grid-forming inverters made by different companies may not be interoperable, especially in large or complex power systems, which can include grid-scale battery systems, high-voltage DC (HVDC) links, solar PV panels, and wind turbines. The ambiguity of the term is increasingly becoming a barrier for grid-forming inverters, and no standards have been published yet.
Systemic Challenges When Modernizing the Grid
Let’s zoom out for a moment to examine the broader landscape of structural challenges we need to address when transitioning today’s grid into its future state. This transition is often called the democratization of power systems. Just as in politics, where democracy means everyone has a say, this transition in power systems means that every grid player can play a role. The primary difference between a political democracy and a power system is that the power system needs to maintain the stability of its frequency and voltage. If we apply a purely democratic approach to manage the power grid, it will sow the seeds for potential systemic failure.
The second systemic challenge is compatibility. The current power grid was designed long ago for a few big power plants—not for millions of small, intermittent energy sources like solar panels or wind turbines. Ideally, we’d build a whole new grid to fit today’s needs, but that would bring too much disruption, cost too much, and take too long. The only feasible option is to somehow make various grid players compatible with the grid. To better conceptualize this, think about the invention of the modem, which solved the compatibility issues between computers and telephone systems, or the widespread adoption of USB ports. These inventions made many devices, such as cameras, printers, and phones, compatible with computers.
The third systemic challenge is scalability. It’s one thing to hook up a few solar panels to the grid. It’s entirely different to connect millions of them and still keep everything running safely and reliably. It’s like walking one large dog versus walking hundreds of chihuahuas at once. It is crucial for future power systems to adopt an architecture that can operate at different scales, allowing a power grid to break into smaller grids when needed or reconnect to operate as one grid, all autonomously. This is crucial to ensure resilience during extreme weather events, natural disasters, and/or grid faults.
To address these systemic challenges, the technologies need to undergo a seismic transformation. Today’s power grids are electric-machine-based, with electricity generated by large synchronous machines in centralized facilities, often with slow dynamics. Tomorrow’s grid will run on power electronic converters—small, distributed, and with fast dynamics. It’s a significant change, and one we need to plan for carefully.
The Key Is Synchronization
Traditional fossil fuel power plants use synchronous machines to generate electricity, as they can inherently synchronize with each other or the grid when connected. In other words, they autonomously regulate their speeds and the grid frequency around a preset value, meeting a top requirement of power systems. This synchronization mechanism has underpinned the stable operation and organic expansion of power grids for over a century. So, preserving the synchronization mechanism in today’s grids is crucial for addressing the systemic challenges as we transition from today’s grid into the future.
Unlike traditional power plants, inverters are not inherently synchronous, but they need to be. The key enabling technology is called virtual synchronous machines (VSMs). These are not actual machines, but instead are power electronic converters controlled through special software codes to behave like physical turbines. You can think of them as having the body of power converters with the brain of the older spinning synchronous machines. With VSMs, distributed energy resources can synchronize and support the grid, especially when something unexpected happens.
Syndem’s all-in-one reconfigurable and reprogrammable power electronic converter educational kit.SYNDEM
This naturally addresses the systemic challenges of compatibility and scalability. Like conventional synchronous machines, distributed energy resources are now compatible with the grid and can be integrated at any scale. But it gets better. First, inverters can be added to existing power systems without major hardware changes. Second, VSMs support the creation of small, local energy networks—known as microgrids—that can operate independently and reconnect to the main grid when needed. This flexibility is particularly useful during emergencies or power outages. Lastly, VSMs provide an elegant solution for the common concern about inertia, traditionally provided by large spinning machines that help cushion the grid against sudden changes. By design, VSMs can offer similar or even better characteristics of inertia.
Until now, much of the expert discourse has focused primarily on energy generation. But that’s only half of the equation—the other half is demand: how different loads consume the electricity. Their behavior also plays a crucial role in maintaining grid stability, in particular when generation is powered by intermittent renewable energy sources.
There are many different loads, including motors, internet devices, and lighting, among others. They are physically different but technically have one thing in common: They will all have a rectifier at the front end because motor applications are more efficient with a motor drive, which consists of a rectifier; and internet devices and LED lights consume DC electricity, which needs rectifiers at the front end as well. Like inverters, these rectifiers can also be controlled as VSMs, with the only difference being the direction of the power flow. Rectifiers consume electricity, while inverters supply electricity.
As a result, most generation and consumption facilities in a future grid can be equipped and unified with the same synchronization mechanism to maintain grid stability in a synchronized-and-democratized (SYNDEM) manner. Yes, you read that correctly. Even devices that use electricity—like motors, computers, and LED lights—can play a similar active role in regulating the grid by autonomously adjusting their power demand according to instantaneous grid conditions. A less critical load can adapt its power demand by a larger percentage as needed, even up to 100 percent. In comparison, a more critical load can adjust its power demand at a smaller percentage or maintain its power demand. As a result, the power balance in a SYNDEM grid no longer depends predominantly on adjusting the supply but on dynamically adjusting both the supply and the demand, making it easier to maintain grid stability with intermittent renewable energy sources.
For many loads, it is often not a problem to adjust their demand by 5-10 percent for a short period. Cumulatively, this offers significant support for the grid. Due to the rapid response of VSM, the support provided by such loads is equivalent to inertia and/or spinning reserve—extra power from synchronized generators not at full load. This can reduce the need for large spinning reserves that are currently necessary in power systems and reduce the effort to coordinate generation facilities. It also mitigates the impact of dwindling inertia caused by the retirement of conventional large generating facilities.
In a SYNDEM grid, all active grid players, regardless of size, whether conventional or renewable, supplying or consuming, would follow the same SYNDEM rule of law and play the same equal role in maintaining grid stability, democratizing power systems, and paving the way for autonomous operation. It is worth highlighting that the autonomous operation can be achieved without relying on communication networks or human intervention, lowering costs and improving security.
The SYNDEM architecture takes VSMs to new heights, addressing all three systemic challenges mentioned above: democratization, compatibility, and scalability. With this architecture, you can stack grids at different scales, much like building blocks. Each home grid can be operated on its own, multiple home grids can be connected to form a neighborhood grid, and multiple neighborhood grids can be connected to create a community grid, and so on. Moreover, such a grid can be decomposed into smaller grids when needed and can reconnect to form a single grid, all autonomously, without changing codes or issuing commands.
The holistic theory is established, the enabling technologies are in place, and the governing standard is approved. However, the full realization of VSMs within the SYNDEM architecture depends on joint ventures and global deployment. This isn’t a task for any one group alone. We must act together. Whether you’re a policymaker, innovator, investor, or simply someone who cares about keeping the lights on, you can play a role. Join us to make power systems worldwide stable, reliable, sustainable, and, eventually, fully autonomous.
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Real-world examples from multi-terminal HVDC links to traveling wave protection
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In Menifee, Calif., six newly built homes are testing a first for North America: electric vehicles that can power houses through the Combined Charging System (CCS) high-power DC charging standard. Each home uses a host Kia EV9 electric vehicle connected to a Wallbox Quasar 2 bidirectional charger, allowing the car’s 100-kilowatt-hour (kWh) battery to run essential circuits during blackouts or periods when electricity prices are high. The setup is the first residential vehicle-to-home (V2H) system in the United States that uses the CCS standard. The CCS is the charging system commonly used in European and North American residential and public charging facilities.
Since July, the homes’ smart electrical panels have automatically managed two-way power flow—charging vehicles from the grid or rooftop solar, then reversing the flow of energy when needed. The system isolates each home from the grid during an outage, preventing any current from flowing into external power lines and endangering utility crews and nearby equipment.
“This project is demonstrating that bidirectional charging with CCS can work in occupied homes,” says Scott Samuelsen, founding director of the Advanced Power and Energy Program (APEP) at the University of California, Irvine, which is monitoring the two-year trial. “It’s a step toward vehicles that not only move people but also strengthen the energy system.”
Menifee means a lot
For more than a decade, two-way charging has been available—but mostly restricted to Japan. Back in 2012 the Nissan’s LEAF-to-Home program proved the idea viable after the Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami, but that Nissan system relied on the CHAdeMO standard, little used outside of Japan. Most North American and European manufacturers chose CCS instead—a standard that, until recently, supported only one-way fast DC charging.
That distinction makes Menifee’s V2H-enabled neighborhood notable: It’s the first CCS-based V2H deployment in occupied homes, giving researchers real-world field data on a technology that’s been long trapped in pilot programs. The pairing of the Kia EV9 SUV with Wallbox’s commercially available Quasar 2 can deliver up to 12 kilowatts of power from the vehicle to the home.
It’s a step toward vehicles that not only move people, but also strengthen the energy system.” –Scott Samuelsen, UC Irvine
When electric vehicles first hit the market, CCS was designed for one job: to move power quickly from the grid to the car. The main goal was reliable, standardized, fast charging. That fact helps explain the difference between CCS public chargers (many of which are rated for 350 kW or more) and their CHAdeMO-based counterparts, which typically max out at 100 kW (but are capable of providing home backup or grid services).
Bidirectional operation wasn’t included in the original CCS standard for several reasons. Early automakers and utilities worried about safety risks, grid interference, and added hardware cost. So CCS’s original communication protocol linking EVs and charging stations—ISO 15118—didn’t even include an electronic handshake for power export. The 2022 update, ISO 15118-20, added secure two-way communication, enabling CCS vehicles to supply energy to buildings and the grid.
Wallbox’s Quasar 2 residential charger implements the update through an active-bridge converter circuit built with silicon-carbide transistors, achieving efficient bidirectional flow. Its 12-kW power rating can support typical critical loads in a house, such as heating and cooling, refrigeration, and networking, says Aleix Maixé Sas, a system electronics architect at Wallbox.
As the company’s name humbly suggests, Wallbox’s chargers look like plain old boxes—although they contain high-tech components.Wallbox
The Menifee blueprint
Each of the Menifee homes outfitted with a V2H system combines a rooftop solar array with a 13-kWh SunVault stationary battery from SunPower. During normal operation, solar energy powers daily household loads and charges the stationary battery. On abundantly sunny days, the solar panels can also top up the Kia EV9’s battery. When the grid fails—or when energy prices spike—the home isolates itself: Solar power and energy stored in the SunVault keep essential systems and appliances going, while the EV battery extends power if the outage persists.
This past summer, the UC Irvine researchers tracked how solar output, stationary storage, and vehicle power interacted under summer demand and wildfire-related grid stress. They found that “the vehicle adds a major resilience feature,” according to Samuelsen, who is the Menifee project manager. “It can relieve grid strain, increase renewable utilization, and lower costs by supplying power during peak-rate hours.”
Engineering the Two-Way Home
Home builders and the makers of electric vehicle service equipment such as Wallbox are not the only entities reconsidering how to meet the engineering demands V2H introduces. Utilities, too, must make changes to accommodate bidirectional power flow. Interconnection procedures and energy pricing structures are among the factors that must be redesigned or reconsidered.
A Glimpse of the Energy Future
Analysts expect double-digit annual growth in bidirectional-charging system sales through the late 2020s as costs fall and standards mature. In regions facing wildfire- or storm-related outages and steep time-of-use pricing curves, projects like Menifee’s are showing a clear path toward the use of cars as huge and flexible energy reserves.
When EV batteries can supply energy for homes as easily as they do for propulsion, the boundary between transportation and energy will begin to disappear—and with it, old concepts regarding who’s an energy supplier and who’s a customer.
This article was originally published by Canary Media.
Eavor, an advanced-geothermal startup, says it has significantly reduced drilling times and improved technologies at its nearly online project in Germany—milestones that should help it drive down the costs of harnessing clean energy from the ground.
In late October, the Canadian company released results from two years of drilling activity at its flagship operation in Geretsried, Germany, giving Canary Media an exclusive early look. Eavor said the data validates its initial efforts to deploy novel “closed-loop” geothermal systems in hotter and deeper locations than conventional projects can access.
“Much like wind and solar have come down the cost curve, much like unconventional shale [oil and gas] have come down the cost curve, we now have a technical proof-point that we’ve done that in Europe,” Jeanine Vany, a cofounder and executive vice president of corporate affairs at Eavor, said from the Geothermal Rising conference in Reno, Nevada.
Eavor is part of a fast-growing effort to expand geothermal energy projects beyond traditional hot spots like California’s Salton Sea region or Iceland’s lava fields. The company and other firms—including Fervo Energy, Sage Geosystems, and XGS Energy—are adapting tools and techniques from the oil and gas industry to be able to withstand the harsh conditions found deep underground.
The industry wants to produce abundant amounts of clean electricity and heat virtually anywhere in the world, and it could serve as an ideal, around-the-clock pairing to solar and wind power. But geothermal companies are only just starting to put their novel technologies to the test.
Eavor’s Geothermal Breakthrough in Germany
Eavor began drilling in Geretsried in July 2023, shortly after winning a $107 million grant from the European Union’s Innovation Fund. For its first “loop,” the company drilled two vertical wells reaching nearly 2.8 miles below the surface, then created a dozen horizontal wells—like tines of a fork—that each stretch 1.8 miles long. Once in place, the wells are connected underground and sealed off so that they operate like radiators: As water circulates within the system, it collects heat from the rocks and brings it to the surface.
Operations on the first of four loops are nearly complete, and the startup plans to begin construction on its second loop in March 2026. All told, the system will supply 8.2 megawatts of electricity to the regional grid and 64MW of district heating to nearby towns, operating flexibly to provide more heat during chilly winter months and produce more electricity in summer.
In its new paper, Eavor said it encountered significant challenges in drilling its first eight of 12 lateral wells, which took over 100 days to complete—a major expense in an industry where drilling rigs can cost about $100,000 a day to run. But the company said it improved its techniques and adapted its equipment in ways that reduced the drilling time for the remaining four wells by 50 percent.
For example, Eavor said it successfully deployed an insulated drill pipe technology, which can actively cool drilling tools even as they encounter increasingly hotter conditions underground and helps to increase drilling speed. The adjustments also enabled Eavor to triple the length of time its drill bit could run before wearing out, further reducing downtime during the operation.
On top of cutting drilling time and costs, these improvements should also pave a path to boosting Eavor’s thermal-energy output per loop by about 35 percent, Vany said.
Enhanced geothermal involves fracturing rocks and pumping down liquids to create artificial reservoirs. The hot rocks directly heat the liquids, which return to the surface to make steam. This approach is relatively more efficient at extracting heat from the ground, but it can also raise the risk of inducing earthquakes or affecting groundwater—though experts say that’s unlikely to happen in well-managed projects. In places that ban fracking, like Germany, closed-loop systems can still move forward.
But the closed-loop design has trade-offs of its own, said Jeff Tester, a professor of sustainable energy systems at Cornell University and the principal scientist for Cornell’s Earth Source Heat project. Namely, the pipes can limit the transfer of heat from the underground rocks to the fluids inside the pipe, which in turn limits how much energy a system can produce.
“While companies developing closed-loop systems can make them work, the main challenge they face is for fluid temperatures and flow rates to be high enough to pay off economically,” Tester said. “You can get energy out of the ground; it’s just, how much can you sustainably and affordably produce from a single closed-loop well connection?”
Vany said that Eavor’s modeling shows its technology is already in line with the “levelized cost of heat” in Europe, which estimates the average cost of providing a unit of heat over the lifetime of the project. That figure can fluctuate between $50 and $100 per megawatt-hour thermal in the region’s volatile energy market, she said.
“After we’ve drilled those first four loops, we will be at the bottom of the learning curve,” Vany added. “And that’s the purpose of the Geretsried project.”
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