Check out the interior of the self-driving car in Spielberg’s Minority Report that whisks Tom Cruise’s character toward jail: There are only two seats.

Perhaps taking a page from that sleekly designed sci-fi, Lucid Motors revealed the Lunar, a hyperefficient robotaxi concept, at its recent Investor Day in New York City. With its two side-by-side seats, compact size, and a cabin freed from a steering wheel, pedals, and garrulous cabbie, the Lunar defies more than a century of taxi tradition.

Lucid, which has partnered with Uber to deploy up to 20,000 of its seven-passenger Gravity SUVs as robotaxis, says that as many as 90 percent of taxi trips involve one or two passengers. Since passengers almost never sit up front in a human-driven taxi, having two rows of seats in this energy-saving model makes little sense, says Zach Walker, Lucid’s chief of advanced product creation. “People already view the front seat of a taxi as a no-go land,” he declares.

The Lunar is a scaled-down version of Lucid’s forthcoming midsize Cosmos and Earth SUV’s. Walker explains that for the project his team was freed for a “technical moonshot” that could make this car among the world’s most energy-efficient production EVs. That kind of efficiency could be critical for a fledgling robotaxi business that seeks to squeeze every kilowatt and penny from cars that could might be cruising up to 20 hours a day, seven days a week.

The Cosmos, a Tesla Model Y competitor, is no slouch, at up to 7.24 kilometers (4.5 miles) of driving range for every kilowatt-hour of battery energy, thanks to its new Atlas power train and a class-best 0.22 coefficient of drag. The Lunar advances the company’s goal of “radical efficiency” by further shrinking its battery size, to about 55 kilowatt-hours, down from 69 kWh in the Cosmos. Walker says the Lunar could deliver up to 9.7 kilometers (6 miles) of driving range for every kilowatt-hour of battery—nearly double the efficiency of a typical four-seat electric SUV. A quick calculation suggests that would be enough to travel more than 500 kilometers (310 miles) on a charge, despite the Lunar’s relatively pint-size battery.

Downsizing Can Be a Virtuous Circle

Downsizing batteries is a design tactic expounded by Lucid founder and former CEO Peter Rawlinson. He believed it sets off a virtuous circle or “convergent series” of efficiency gains, allowing less nonactive battery-pack material, supporting structures, and downsized brakes and suspension components. In other words, each weight reduction means that slightly less battery can deliver the same driving range. Up to a point, anyway.

Sam Abuelsamid, an engineer and vice-president of market research for Telemetry, agrees the weight of a power train or battery can lead to a virtuous—or vicious—circle in engineering. “A Hummer EV is the worst example on the electric side, carrying almost 3,000 pounds of battery, but also all the structure (and associated components) to support it,” he notes.

Taxis have traditionally been big, lumbering, and fuel-thirsty. Consider the iconic yellow cabs that Checker Motors built in Michigan from 1922 to 1982, or London’s tall-roofed hackney cabs, originally designed to provide head room for men’s top hats and bowlers. But today, Abuelsamid says, two-passenger robotaxis make obvious sense for urban areas where they are most likely to proliferate.

“They have a smaller footprint, use less energy, and reduce congestion in cities,” Abuelsamid says. “You just wouldn’t want them for your entire fleet.”

Efficiency gains can pay special dividends in robotaxis, which some industry leaders envision logging up to 100,000 miles a year. For every 1 kWh reduction in battery size, Walker calculates, that robotaxi workhorse would save up to $1,000 a year in operating costs. Lucid says the Lunar could reduce operating costs by 40 percent versus larger robotaxis retrofitted from passenger cars, such as Waymo’s Jaguar iPace models.

Regarding charging, the larger Cosmos can already add 200 miles of range in 14 minutes on a DC fast charger. With its superior per-kilometer efficiency, the Lunar could likely add 200 miles in closer to 10 minutes, reducing service downtime that’s another critical calculation for taxi operators.

At Investor Day in New York City, Lucid’s interim CEO March Winterhoff and Uber President Andrew Macdonald sat inside a Lunar concept car, which was shown with no doors—the better to flaunt its 36-inch display screen and spacious cabin. The Lunar integrates a large array of sensors to create a bird’s-eye view of its environment, including lidar, cameras, and radar. It’s powered by Nvidia’s new Drive Thor system-on-a-chip, designed to support Level-4 or Level-5 autonomy with 1,000 teraflops of compute performance for critical inference processing.

Dispensing With the Giggle Factor

Where Lucid’s Air and Gravity models are known for blistering acceleration and sporty handling, a utilitarian robotaxi has no need for “the giggle factor,” as Walker dubs it. That creates more opportunities for savings, and passenger comfort. A chassis can be optimized for a comfy ride and low NVH (noise, vibration, and harshness). Meanwhile, driver pedals, a steering wheel and complex linkages, and electrified assists are all eliminated. Dynamic steering, beefed-up body control or massive wheels and tires to boost cornering? No need. After all, there’s no human driver to experience those sensations. And a taxi passenger’s worst nightmare is a driver who thinks he’s Max Verstappen.

Of course, robotaxis bring their own set of tech challenges. According to Walker, a current robotaxi might use up to 24 kWh of energy over 20 hours to sense its environment and operate safely. Most of that goes to processors and onboard sensors, with lidar an especial energy hog.

Though the Lunar remains a concept for now, it’s no sci-fi fantasy. The Lunar was designed to use the same components front and rear as other midsize Lucids, differing only in its downsized battery and center passenger section. No complex, costly reengineering is required, and the Lunar could share a production line with those showroom SUVs. For all those reasons, Walker says the Lunar is fundamentally sound and ready to scale. All Lucid needs are customers.

“We still have our day jobs, but this was like our midnight project that we were all obsessed with making,” Walker says. “We think the [robotaxi] industry is primed for a really cool takeoff.”

Kentucky’s bourbon industry produces vast quantities of waste grain that is costly to transport and process. Researchers have now found a way to turn that by-product into high-performance energy-storage materials with potential applications in electric vehicles and large-scale grid storage.

More than 95 percent of all bourbon whiskey is made in Kentucky. For each barrel of bourbon, the industry also produces between six and 10 times as much “stillage”—a slurry of spent grain and water. This is normally sold to farmers as a livestock feed or soil additive, but it needs to be dried out first to reduce the weight and make it easier to process.

This is a major burden on distilleries, says Josiel Barrios Cossio, a graduate student in the University of Kentucky’s chemistry department. It either requires a lot of time and space to dry the stillage out via evaporation, or an expensive heating process. He and his colleagues have demonstrated that they can instead directly convert the wet stillage into useful carbon materials that can be used to make electrodes for batteries and supercapacitors.

RELATED: 4 Weird Things You Can Turn Into a Supercapacitor

In research presented at the spring meeting of the American Chemical Society in Atlanta today, Barrios Cossio showed that the carbon materials could be used to create supercapacitors that match or exceed the energy density of commercial devices, and hybrid lithium-ion supercapacitors that can store up to 25 times as much energy as conventional designs. While the work is just a proof-of-concept, Barrios Cossio says, it could ultimately allow distilleries to turn a waste stream into a source of profit.

“And it’s a win-win scenario, because we can potentially have a more renewable and abundant biomass source, or feedstock, to produce these materials that are every day more in demand from the car industry and renewable energy applications,” he says.

Innovative Energy-Storage Solutions

Barrios Cossio first conceived of the idea while taking part in a research traineeship run by the U.S. National Science Foundation aimed at finding solutions to problems related to water, energy, and food systems. After visiting several distilleries and seeing the scale of the waste produced, as well as the challenges these businesses face in disposing of it, he began thinking of ways to put the stillage to more productive use.

He discovered a group at the Friedrich Schiller University Jena, in Jena, Germany, that had developed a process for converting waste grain from beer breweries into electrode materials for energy-storage devices. Barrios Cossio then spent a summer internship at the lab to learn about their techniques.

After returning to the United States, Barrios Cossio contacted several distilleries to source some stillage to experiment with and soon got a response from the Wilderness Trail Distillery in Danville, Kentucky. “I asked them, ‘Can I take a gallon of stillage?’” he says. “They replied to me some days later saying, ‘Yeah, you are welcome to take it. I would prefer that you take 10,000 gallons and get rid of the stillage from that day.’”

University of Kentucky researchers developed supercapacitor electrodes using bourbon distillery waste that can store more energy per kilogram than commercial devices.Josiel Barrios Cossio

To turn the stillage into useful materials, the researchers relied on a process called hydrothermal carbonization. This involves heating the wet slurry at high pressure to create a fine black carbon powder called hydrochar. One benefit of the process, says Barrios Cossio, is that the high water content of the stillage helps generate the pressure required to power the conversion.

The resulting hydrochar was then used to create two different high-value carbon materials. In one experiment, the team combined the hydrochar with potassium hydroxide and heated the mixture to around 800 °C, creating a material called activated carbon. This material is extremely porous, which means it can have a surface area higher than 1,000 square meters per gram, says Barrios Cossio. That makes it ideal for creating high-capacity supercapacitors, which store energy as charged ions on the surface of the electrode material.

The team showed that a coin-sized double-layer capacitor built using their hydrochar-derived electrodes could store up to 48 watt hours per kilogram—on par with commercially available supercapacitors.

The team also showed that they could create “hard carbon” by heating their hydrochar in a furnace at 200 °C. This material has a similar structure to graphite, which is made up of orderly stacks of single-atom-thick graphene sheets. Unlike graphite, however, in hard carbon the sheets are arranged more haphazardly. This leads to many small pores and defects, which are ideal for storing alkali metal ions, such as lithium and sodium, commonly used in batteries.

Barrios Cossio used their hydrochar-derived hard carbon to create a batterylike electrode infused with lithium ions, and then combined this with an electrode made of activated carbon to produce a hybrid supercapacitor. The device represents a balance between the high-energy capacity of batteries and the fast discharging speeds of capacitors, which Barrios Cossio says could be particularly useful for applications like electric vehicles and grid stabilization.

At present, the devices are just a proof-of-concept. Barrios Cossio admits that scaling up the process to industrial levels will require considerable refinement. The team is also currently conducting a techno-economic analysis to assess whether the approach is commercially viable. But project supervisor Marcelo Guzman, a professor of chemistry at the University of Kentucky, says it could be a promising and sustainable way to meet the growing demand for energy storage.

“Kentucky is a state that has been investing since 2019 heavily in trying to develop an industry for batteries for cars,” he says. “There has been billions of dollars going into that sector, so there is going to be a big need for material supply. We think we came on board with that problem at the right time, in the right place, and we could have materials that could be really interesting to the battery industry.”

Last week’s Nvidia GTC conference highlighted new chip architectures to power AI. But as the chips become faster and more powerful, the remainder of data center infrastructure is playing catch-up. The power-delivery community is responding: Announcements from Delta, Eaton, Schneider Electric, and Vertiv showcased new designs for the AI era. Complex and inefficient AC-to-DC power conversions are gradually being replaced by DC configurations, at least in hyperscale data centers.

“While AC distribution remains deeply entrenched, advances in power electronics and the rising demands of AI infrastructure are accelerating interest in DC architectures,” says Chris Thompson, vice president of advanced technology and global microgrids at Vertiv.

AC-to-DC Conversion Challenges

Today, nearly all data centers are designed around AC utility power. The electrical path includes multiple conversions before power reaches the compute load. Power typically enters the data center as medium-voltage AC (1 to 35 kilovolts), is stepped down to low-voltage AC (480 or 415 volts) using a transformer, converted to DC inside an uninterruptible power supply (UPS) for battery storage, converted back to AC, and converted again to low-voltage DC (typically 54 V DC) at the server, supplying the DC power computing chips actually require.

“The double conversion process ensures the output AC is clean, stable, and suitable for data center servers,” says Luiz Fernando Huet de Bacellar, vice president of engineering and technology at Eaton.

That setup worked well enough for the amounts of power required by traditional data centers. Traditional data center computational racks draw on the order of 10 kW each. For AI, that is starting to approach 1 megawatt. At that scale, the energy losses, current levels, and copper requirements of AC-to-DC conversions become increasingly difficult to justify. Every conversion incurs some power loss. On top of that, as the amount of power that needs to be delivered grows, the sheer size of the convertors, as well as the connector requirements of copper busbars, becomes untenable. According to an Nvidia blog, a 1-MW rack could require as much as 200 kilograms of copper busbar. For a 1-gigawatt data center, it could amount to 200,000 kg of copper.

Benefits of High-Voltage DC Power

By converting 13.8-kV AC grid power directly to 800 V DC at the data center perimeter, most intermediate conversion steps are eliminated. This reduces the number of fans and power-supply units, and leads to higher system reliability, lower heat dissipation, improved energy efficiency, and a smaller equipment footprint.

“Each power conversion between the electric grid or power source and the silicon chips inside the servers causes some energy loss,” says Bacellar.

Switching from 415-V AC to 800-V DC in electrical distribution enables 85 percent more power to be transmitted through the same conductor size. This happens because higher voltage reduces current demand, lowering resistive losses and making power transfer more efficient. Thinner conductors can handle the same load, reducing copper requirements by 45 percent, a 5 percent improvement in efficiency, and 30 percent lower total cost of ownership for gigawatt-scale facilities.

“In a high-voltage DC architecture, power from the grid is converted from medium-voltage AC to roughly 800-V DC and then distributed throughout the facility on a DC bus,” said Vertiv’s Thompson. “At the rack, compact DC-to-DC converters step that voltage down for GPUs and CPUs.”

A report from technology advisory group Omdia claims that higher voltage DC data centers have already appeared in China. In the Americas, the Mt. Diablo Initiative (a collaboration among Meta, Microsoft, and the Open Compute Project) is a 400-V DC rack power distribution experiment.

Innovations in DC Power Systems

A handful of vendors are trying to get ahead of the game. Vertiv’s 800-V DC ecosystem that integrates with Nvidia Vera Rubin Ultra Kyber platforms will be commercially available in the second half of 2026. Eaton, too, is well advanced in its 800-V DC systems innovation courtesy of a medium-voltage solid-state transformer (SST) that will sit at the heart of DC power distribution system. Meanwhile Delta, has released 800-V DC in-row 660-kW power racks with a total of 480 kW of embedded battery backup units. And, SolarEdge is hard at work on a 99%-efficient SST that will be paired with a native DC UPS and a DC power distribution layer.

But much of the industry is far behind. Patrick Hughes, senior vice president of strategy, technical, and industry affairs for the National Electrical Manufacturers Association, says most innovation is happening at the 400-V DC level, though some are preparing 800-V DC. He believes the industry needs a complete, coordinated ecosystem, including power electronics, protection, connectors, sensing, and service‑safe components that scale together rather than in isolation. That, in turn, requires retooling manufacturing capacity for DC‑specific equipment, expanding semiconductor and materials supply, and clear, long‑term demand commitments that justify major capital investment across the value chain.

“Many are taking a cautious approach, offering limited or adapted solutions while waiting for clearer standards, safety frameworks, and customer commitments,” said Hughes. “Building the supply chain will hinge on stabilizing standards and safety frameworks so suppliers can design, certify, manufacture, and install equipment with confidence.”

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As electronics demand higher energy density, one component has proved challenging to shrink: the capacitor. Making a smaller capacitor usually requires thinning the dielectric layer or electrode surface area, which has often resulted in a reduction of power. A new polymer material could help change that.

In a study published 18 February in Nature, a Pennsylvania State University–led team reported a capacitor crafted from a polymer blend that can operate at temperatures up to 250 °C while storing roughly four times as much energy as conventional polymer capacitors. Today’s advanced polymer capacitors typically function only up to about 100 °C, meaning engineers often rely on bulky cooling systems in high-power electronics. The research team has filed a patent for the polymer capacitors and plans to bring them to market.

Capacitors deliver rapid bursts of energy and stabilize voltage in circuits, making them essential in applications ranging from electric vehicles and aerospace electronics to power-grid infrastructure and AI data centers. Yet while transistors have steadily shrunk with advances in semiconductor manufacturing, passive components such as capacitors and inductors have not scaled at the same pace.

“Capacitors can account for 30 to 40 percent of the volume in some power electronics systems,” says Qiming Zhang, an electrical engineering researcher at Penn State and study author, explaining why it’s important to make smaller capacitors.

A Plastics Blend More Powerful Than Its Parts

The research team combined two commercially available engineered plastics: polyetherimide (PEI), originally developed by General Electric and widely used in industrial equipment, and PBPDA, known for strong heat resistance and electrical insulation. When processed together under controlled conditions, the polymers self-assemble into nanoscale structures that form thin dielectric films inside capacitors. Those structures help suppress electrical leakage while allowing the material to polarize strongly in an electric field, allowing greater energy storage.

The resulting material exhibits an unusually high dielectric constant—a measure of how much electrical energy a material can store. Most polymer dielectrics have values around four, but the blended polymer dielectric in the new work had a value of 13.5.

“If you look at the literature up to now, no one has reached this level of dielectric constant in this type of polymer system,” Zhang says. “Putting two commonly used polymers together and seeing this kind of performance was a surprise to many people.”

Because the material can remain operational even at elevated temperatures—such as those from extreme environmental heat or hot spots in densely built components—capacitors built from this polymer could potentially store the same amount of energy in a smaller package.

“With this material, you can make the same device using about [one-fourth as much] material,” Zhang says. “Because the polymers themselves are inexpensive, the cost does not increase. At the same time, the component can become smaller and lighter.”

How the Polymer Mix Improves Capacitors

The researchers’ finding is “a big advancement,” says Alamgir Karim, a polymer research director at the University of Houston who was not involved in the Penn State development. “Normally when you mix polymers, you don’t expect the dielectric constant to increase.”

Karim says the effect likely arises from nanoscale interfaces created when the polymers partially separate. “At about a 50–50 mixture, the polymers don’t fully mix and instead create a very large interfacial area,” he says. “Those interfaces may be where the unusual electrical behavior comes from.”

If the material can be produced at scale, it could help address a key bottleneck in high-power electronics. Higher-temperature capacitors could reduce cooling requirements and allow engineers to pack more power into smaller systems—an advantage for aerospace platforms, electric vehicles, the electric grid, and other high-temperature environments.

But translating the concept from laboratory methods to commercial manufacturing may present challenges, says Zongliang Xie, a postdoctoral researcher at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, in California. The Penn State team is now producing small dielectric films, but industrial capacitor manufacturing typically requires continuous rolls of material that can extend for kilometers.

“Industry generally prefers extrusion-based processing because it’s easier and cheaper to control,” Xie says. “Scaling to produce great lengths of film while maintaining the same structure and performance could complicate matters. There’s potential, but it’s also challenging.”

Still, researchers say the discovery demonstrates that new performance limits may still be unlocked using familiar materials. “Developing the material is only the first step,” Zhang says. “But it shows people that this barrier can be broken.”

In the fictional nation of Beryllia, the 2026 World Chalice Games were set to begin as the country faced an unrelenting heat wave. The grid, already under strain from the circumstances, was dealt a further blow when a coordinated set of attacks including vandalism, drone, and ballistic attacks by an adversary, Crimsonia, crippled the grid’s physical infrastructure.

This scenario, inspired by the upcoming 2026 World Cup and the 2028 Olympic Games in Los Angeles, was an exercise in studying how utilities can prevent and mitigate, among other dangers, physical attacks on power grids. Called GridEx, the exercise was hosted by the Electricity Information Sharing and Analysis Center (E-ISAC) from 18 to 20 November 2025, and was described in a report released on 2 March. GridEx has been held every two years since 2011.

“We know that threat actors look to exploit certain circumstances,” says Michael Ball, CEO of E-ISAC, which is a program of the North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC), about designing the Beryllia scenario. “The Chalice Games became a good example of how we could build a scenario around a threat actor.”

Physical attacks on the grid are rising in the U.S., and GridEx attendance was up in November as utilities grapple with how to prevent and mitigate attacks. Participation in the exercise was at its highest level since 2019, according to the new report. Given the number of organizations present, GridEx estimates that more than 28,000 individual players participated, including utility workers and government partners, an all-time high since the exercise began.

Rising Physical Threats to Power Grids

The U.S. and Canadian grids face growing security issues from physical threats, including vandalism, assault of utility workers, intrusion of property, and theft of components, like copper wiring. NERC’s 2025 E-ISAC end-of-year report cites more than 3,500 physical security breaches that calendar year, about 3 percent of which disrupted electricity. That’s up from 2,800 events cited in the 2023 report (3 percent of those also resulted in electricity disruptions). Yet despite a number of recent high-profile attacks in the United States, physical attacks on the grid are happening worldwide.

“They’re not uniquely a U.S. thing,” says Danielle Russo, executive director of the Center for Grid Security at Securing America’s Future Energy, a nonpartisan organization focused on advancing national energy security. Russo says that while attacks are common in places like Ukraine, they’re not limited to wartime scenarios. “Other countries that are not experiencing direct conflict are experiencing increasing amounts of physical attacks on their energy infrastructure,” she says. Take Germany for example: On 3 January, an arson attack by left-wing activists in Berlin caused a five-day blackout affecting 45,000 households. That came after a suspected arson attack on two pylons in September 2025 left 50,000 Berlin households without power. Some German officials cite domestic extremism and fears of Russian sabotage in recent years as reasons for heightened security concerns over critical infrastructure.

Henrik Beuster, spokesman for grid operator Stromnetz Berlin, stands in front of the Lichterfelde power plant on 7 January after a suspected attack disrupted power supply in the area. Britta Pedersen/Picture Alliance/Getty Images

The uptick in attacks on the U.S. grid has been anchored by a number of incidents in recent years. In December 2025, an engineer in San Jose, Calif., was sentenced to 10 years in prison for bombing electric transformers in 2022 and 2023. A Tennessee man was arrested in November 2024 for attempting to attack a Nashville substation using a drone armed with explosives. And in 2023, a neo-Nazi leader was among two arrested in a plot to attack five substations around Baltimore with firearms, part of an increasing trend in white supremacist groups planning to attack the U.S. energy sector.

“Since [E-ISAC] started publishing data back in 2016, we’ve seen a large and consistent increase in the number of reported physical security incidents per year,” says Michael Coe, the vice president of physical and cyber security programs at the American Public Power Association, a trade group that works with E-ISAC to plan GridEx. While not all data is publicly available, Coe says there’s been a “tenfold” increase over the past decade in the number of reported physical attacks on the grid.

Drone Attacks: A Grid Security Challenge

During the fictional World Chalice Games scenario, drone attacks destroyed Beryllia’s substation equipment, highlighting a threat that’s gained traction as more drones enter the airspace.

“The question we get all the time is, how do you tell if it’s a bad actor, or if it’s a 12-year-old kid that got the drone for their birthday?” says Erika Willis, the program manager for the substations team at the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI).

One strategy to track and alert utilities to potential threats such as drones is called sensor fusion. The system includes a pan-tilt-zoom camera capable of 360-degree motion mounted on top of a tripod or pole with four installed radars. The radars combine with the camera for a dual system that can track drones even if they’re obstructed from view, says Willis. For instance, if a nearby drone flies behind a tree, hidden from the camera, the radars will still pick up on it. The technology is currently being tested at EPRI’s labs in Charlotte, N.C., and Lenox, Mass.

EPRI is also exploring how robotics and AI can improve security systems, Willis says. One approach involves integrating AI analysis into robotic technology already surveilling substation perimeters. Using AI can improve detection of break-ins and damage to fencing around substations, Willis says. “As opposed to a human having to go through 200 images of a fence, you can have the AI overlays do some of those algorithms…. If the robot has done the inspection of the substation 100 times, it can then relay to you that there’s an anomaly,” Willis says.

Prisma Photonics deploys fiber sensing technology that uses reflected optical signals to detect perturbations from vehicles and other sources near underground fiber cable.Prisma Photonics

Already, a number of utilities in the United States are using AI integrations in their security and monitoring processes. That’s thanks in part to Tel Aviv–based Prisma Photonics, a software company that launched in 2017 and has since deployed its fiber-sensing technology across thousands of miles of transmission infrastructure in the U.S., Canada, Europe, and Israel. A file-cabinet-size unit plugs into a substation and sends light pulses down existing fiber optic cables 30 miles in each direction. As the pulses travel down the cables, a tiny fraction of the light is reflected back to the substation unit. An AI model processes the results and can classify events based on patterns in the optical signal as a result of perturbations happening around the fiber cable.

“If we identify an event that we don’t have a classification for, and we get a feedback from a customer saying, ‘Oh, this was a car crash,’ then we can classify that in the model to say this is actually what happened,” says Tiffany Menhorn, Prisma Photonics’ vice president of North America.

As preparations get underway for the ninth GridEx, in 2027, Ball says participation in the exercises alone isn’t enough to bolster grid security. Instead, he wants utilities to take what they learn from the training and apply it in their own operations. “It’s the action of doing it, versus our statistic of saying, ‘Here’s what our growth was.’ That growth should relate to the readiness and capability of the industry.”

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When the Trump administration last year sought to freeze construction of offshore wind farms by citing concerns about interference with military radar and sonar, the implication was that these were new issues. But for more than a decade, the United States, Taiwan, and many European countries have successfully mitigated wind turbines’ security impacts. Some European countries are even integrating wind farms with national defense schemes.

“It’s not a choice of whether we go for wind farms or security. We need both,” says Ben Bekkering, a retired vice admiral in the Netherlands and current partner of the International Military Council on Climate and Security.

It’s a fact that offshore wind farms can degrade radar surveillance systems and subsea sensors designed to detect military incursions. But it’s a problem with real-world solutions, say Bekkering and other defense experts contacted by IEEE Spectrum. Those solutions include next-generation radar technology, radar-absorbing coatings for wind turbine blades, and multi-mode sensor suites that turn offshore wind farm security equipment into forward eyes and ears for defense agencies.

How Do Wind Farms Interfere With Radar?

Wind turbines interfere with radar because they’re large objects that reflect radar signals. Their spinning blades can introduce false positives on radar screens by inducing a wavelength-shifting Doppler effect that gets flagged as a flying object. Turbines can also obscure aircraft, missiles, and drones by scattering radar signals or by blinding older line-of-sight radars to objects behind them, according to a 2024 U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) report.

“Real-world examples from NATO and EU Member States show measurable degradation in radar performance, communication clarity, and situational awareness,” states a 2025 presentation from the €2 million (US $2.3 million) offshore wind Symbiosis Project, led by the Brussels-based European Defence Agency.

However, “measurable” doesn’t always mean major. U.S. agencies that monitor radar have continued to operate “without significant impacts” from wind turbines thanks to field tests, technology development, and mitigation measures taken by U.S. agencies since 2012, according to the DOE. “It is true that they have an impact, but it’s not that big,” says Tue Lippert, a former Danish special forces commander and CEO of Copenhagen-based security consultancy Heimdal Critical Infrastructure.

To date, impacts have been managed through upgrades to radar systems, such as software algorithms that identify a turbine’s radar signature and thus reduce false positives. Careful wind farm siting helps too. During the most recent designation of Atlantic wind zones in the U.S., for example, the Biden administration reduced the geographic area for a proposed zone off the Maryland coast by 79 percent to minimize defense impacts.

Radar impacts can be managed even better by upgrading hardware, say experts. Newer solid-state, phased-array radars are better at distinguishing turbines from other objects than conventional mechanical radars. Phased arrays shift the timing of hundreds or thousands of individual radio waves, creating interference patterns to steer the radar beams. The result is a higher-resolution signal that offers better tracking of multiple objects and better visibility behind objects in its path. “Most modern radars can actually see through wind farms,” says Lippert.

One of the Trump administration’s first moves in its overhaul of civilian air traffic was a $438 million order for phased-array radar systems and other equipment from Collins Aerospace, which touts wind farm mitigation as one of its product’s key features.

Saab’s compact Giraffe 1X combined surface-and-air-defense radar was installed in 2021 on an offshore wind farm near England.Saab

Can Wind Farms Aid Military Surveillance?

Another radar mitigation option is “infill” radar, which fills in coverage gaps. This involves installing additional radar hardware on land to provide new angles of view through a wind farm or putting radar systems on the offshore turbines to extend the radar field of view.

In fact, wind farms are increasingly being tapped to extend military surveillance capabilities. “You’re changing the battlefield, but it’s a change to your advantage if you use it as a tactical lever,” says Lippert.

In 2021, Linköping, Sweden–based defense contractor Saab and Danish wind developer Ørsted demonstrated that air defense radar can be placed on a wind farm. Saab conducted a two-month test of its compact Giraffe 1X combined surface-and-air-defense radar on Ørsted’s Hornsea 1 wind farm, located 120 kilometers east of England’s Yorkshire coast. The installation extended situational awareness “beyond the radar horizon of the ground-based long-range radars,” claims Saab. The U.K. Ministry of Defence ordered 11 of Saab’s systems.

Putting surface radar on turbines is something many offshore wind operators do already to track their crew vessels and to detect unauthorized ships within their arrays. Sharing those signals, or even sharing the equipment, can give national defense forces an expanded view of ships moving within and around the turbines. It can also improve detection of low altitude cruises missiles, says Bekkering, which can evade air defense radars.

Sharing signals and equipment is part of a growing trend in Europe toward “dual use” of offshore infrastructure. Expanded dual-use sensing is already being implemented in Belgium, the Netherlands, and Poland, and was among the recommendations from Europe’s Symbiosis Project.

Baltic Power

In fact, Poland mandates inclusion of defense-relevant equipment on all offshore wind farms. Their first project carries radar and other sensors specified by Poland’s Ministry of Defense. The wind farm will start operating in the Baltic later this year, roughly 200 km south of Kaliningrad, a Russian exclave.

The U.K. is experimenting too. Last year, West Sussex–based LiveLink Aerospace demonstrated purpose-built, dual-use sensors atop wind turbines offshore from Aberdeen. The compact equipment combines a suite of sensors including electro-optical sensors, thermal and visible light cameras, and detectors for radio frequency and acoustic signals.

In the past, wind farm operators tended to resist cooperating with defense projects, fearing that would turn their installations into military targets. And militaries were also reluctant to share, because they are used to having full control over equipment.

But Russia’s increasingly aggressive posture has shifted thinking, say security experts. Russia’s attacks on Ukraine’s power grid show that “everything is a target,” says Tobhias Wikström, CEO for Luleå, Sweden–based Parachute Consulting and a former lieutenant colonel in Sweden’s air force. Recent sabotage of offshore gas pipelines and power cables is also reinforcing the sense that offshore wind operators and defense agencies need to collaborate.

Why Is Sweden Restricting Offshore Wind?

Contrary to Poland and the U.K., Sweden is the one European country that, like the U.S. under Trump’s second administration, has used national security to justify a broad restriction on offshore wind development. In 2024, Sweden rejected 13 projects along its Baltic coast, which faces Kaliningrad, citing anticipated degradation in its ability to detect incoming missiles.

Saab’s CEO rejected the government’s argument, telling a Swedish newspaper that the firm’s radar “can handle” wind farms. Wikström at Parachute Consulting also questions the government’s claim, noting that Sweden’s entry into NATO in 2024 gives its military access to Finnish, German, and Polish air defense radars, among others, that together provide an unobstructed view of the Baltic. “You will always have radars in other locations that will cross-monitor and see what’s behind those wind turbines,” says Wikström.

Politics are likely at play, says Wikström, noting that some of the coalition government’s parties are staunchly pro-nuclear. But he says a deeper problem is that the military experts who evaluate proposed wind projects, as he did before retiring in 2021, lack time and guidance.

By banning offshore wind projects instead of embracing them, Sweden and the U.S. may be missing out on opportunities for training in that environment, says Lippert, who regularly serves with U.S. forces as a reserves liaison officer with Denmark’s Greenland-based Joint Arctic Command. As he puts it: “The Chinese and Taiwanese coasts are plastered with offshore wind. If the U.S. Navy and Air Force are not used to fighting in littoral environments filled with wind farms, then they’re at a huge disadvantage when war comes.”

As data-center developers frantically seek to secure power for their operations, one startup is proposing a novel solution: Build them into floating offshore wind turbines.

San Francisco–based offshore wind-power developer Aikido Technologies today announced its plans to start housing data centers in the underwater tanks that keep its turbine platforms afloat. The turbines will supply the power for the servers, and onboard batteries and grid connection will provide backup.

The company’s first prototype, a 100-kilowatt unit, is scheduled to launch in the North Sea off the coast of Norway by the end of this year. A 15-to-18-megawatt project off the coast of the United Kingdom may follow in 2028.

Aikido is one of several companies planning data centers in unusual places—underwater, on floating buoys, in coal mines and now on offshore wind turbines. The creativity stems from the forces of several trends: rapidly rising energy demand from data centers, the need for domestic renewable power production, and limited real estate.

The North Sea serves as an ideal first spot for floating, wind-powered data centers because European policymakers and companies are looking to regain domestic control over energy production. They’re also looking to host an AI economy on servers within the continent’s boundaries. Floating wind platforms keep the compute out of sight while tapping the stronger, more consistent air streams that blow over deep waters, where traditional, seabed-mounted turbine monopiles can’t go.

“A lot of energy in the clean-energy space is focused on powering AI data centers quickly, reliably, and cleanly in a way that does not upset neighbors and remains safe, fast, and cheap,” says Ramez Naam, an independent clean-energy investor who does not have a stake in Aikido. “Aikido has that, and a smart team,” he says.

Floating Wind-Power Designs Evolve

Aikido’s design builds on many iterations tested by the growing floating wind industry. When Norwegian energy giant Equinor finished construction on the world’s first floating wind farm in 2017, it kept the turbines upright with ballasted steel columns extending 78 meters into the water—a design called a spar platform. This gave it a dense mass like the keel of a boat. Since then, the floating wind industry has largely coalesced around a semisubmersible design based on oil and gas platforms. Semisubmersibles don’t go as deep as spar platforms; instead, they extend buoyancy horizontally. Anchors, chains, and ropes keep the platform floating within a certain radius.

Aikido is taking the semisubmersible approach. Its football-field-size platform holds the turbine in the center, and three legs extend tripod-like outward, like a Christmas-tree stand. At the end of each leg is a ballast that reaches 20 meters deep. This holds tanks largely filled with fresh water to maintain the platform’s buoyancy in the salty ocean.

The data centers will go in the upper part of each ballast tank. There’s room for a 3- to 4-MW data hall in each tank, giving the platform a combined compute of 10 to 12 MW. Below the data halls is an open chamber used as a safety barrier, and below that sit the freshwater tanks. The water is piped up to the data center for liquid cooling of the servers. The warmed water is then funneled back down the ballast into the tank. There, proximity to the cold ocean water cools it again as the heat is conducted out through the tank’s steel walls.

“We have this power from the wind. We have free cooling. We think we can be quite cost competitive compared to conventional data-center solutions,” says Aikido CEO Sam Kanner. “This crunch in the next five years is an opportunity for us to prove this out and supply AI compute where it’s needed.”

One challenge, he says, is that liquid cooling can’t cover all the data center’s needs. For example, heat generated from Ethernet switches that connect the GPUs can’t be liquid-cooled with commercially available technology. So Aikido installed an air-conditioning method for that.

Another challenge is the marine environment, which is “pretty brutal to engineer around because there’s the increased salinity, there’s debris, and there’s various kinds of corrosion and fouling of metal piping that you wouldn’t have in a freshwater environment,” says Daniel King, a research fellow at the Foundation for American Innovation in Washington who focuses on AI infrastructure.

Offshore Data Centers Face Challenges

Aikido’s plan avoids the prickly not-in-my-backyard complaints that are dogging both onshore wind and data-center projects. It might also circumvent some inquiries into water usage and power demand too, or so Aikido’s thinking goes.

But it might not be that easy. “Instinctively many people reach for offshore or even orbital outer-space data centers as a way to circumvent the typical burdens of environmental reviews,” says King. “But there could be more or additional requirements around discharging heat and the effects that has on marine life that are different from the considerations of a terrestrial data center. It’s unclear to me whether this actually makes life easier or harder for a developer.”

Prefabricated data halls could be installed quayside, followed by final electrical and plumbing connections to commission the data center.Aikido

Aikido’s “design choice to use the fresh water in the ballast as a working fluid is a novel one” that, thanks to the closed-loop system, may “alleviate some of the engineering problems you see when a really high temperature fluid is pumping its heat directly into a marine environment,” King says.

Offshore sites are also vulnerable to sabotage, King notes. Since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, fleets of vessels directed by the Kremlin have reportedly started messing with offshore wind and communications infrastructure in northern Europe. Russian and Chinese boats have allegedly cut subsea cables in recent years.

But vandalism is a risk anywhere, including at conventional data centers, Aikido CEO Kanner notes. Unlike those on land, where the local police have jurisdiction, Aikido’s data centers would enjoy protection from national coast guards, which he suggests gives an added degree of security.

North Sea Hosts Clean Energy

Kanner first began thinking about offshore wind turbines as a place to build data centers after a chance phone call with a cryptocurrency billionaire. The financier wanted to know whether turbines in international waters could power servers generating digital tokens at a moment when crypto-mining faced increased scrutiny from regulators. The talks fizzled. But that encounter sparked Kanner’s curiosity about how to use power generated onboard floating turbines.

When ChatGPT emerged in 2022 and sparked a heated debate over how to power and cool such technology, the idea to put the data center in the floating turbine clicked for Kanner. The idea really congealed after he met with the chief executive of Portland, Ore.–based Panthalassa. The wave-energy company was proposing to enclose small, remote data centers in buoys attached to equipment that generates power from the surf. Panthalassa just completed its full-scale prototype tests off the coast of Washington state last summer.

At that point, Aikido had already designed a modular platform for floating wind turbines. Each platform consists of 13 major steel components that are snapped together with pin joints—like IKEA furniture. The platforms fold up in a flat configuration that takes up roughly half the space of other designs, allowing it to be transported by a wider range of ships, according to Aikido. From there, it was a matter of figuring out how to accommodate a data center in the unused space.

Aikido’s prototype will use a refurbished Vesta V-17 turbine. It will need onboard batteries for backup power and will also be connected to the grid for additional power during seasons with less wind. Aikido envisions eventually sprinkling its data centers among large arrays of offshore turbines to tap into that larger power infrastructure.

Between Russia’s threat to expand its war in Ukraine to EU countries and the Trump administration’s bid to pressure Denmark into ceding sovereignty of Greenland to Washington, Europe is scrambling to build up its own energy production and AI capabilities. The North Sea, increasingly, looks like a primary theater of that effort. In January, nearly a dozen European nations banded together in a pact to transform the North Sea into a “reservoir” of clean power from offshore wind.

This webinar looks at a Battery Electric Virtual Vehicle Model of a mid-size BEV, and uses Simulink and Simscape to facilitate design exploration, component refinement, and system-level optimization. The virtual vehicle comprises five subsystems: Electric powertrain, driveline, refrigerant cycle, coolant cycle, and passenger cabin. The model will be tested using different drive cycles, cooling, and heating scenarios. The results will be analyzed to determine the impact of the different design parameters on vehicle consumption.

The resulting virtual vehicle will be used to:

• Test different drive cycles and environmental conditions
• Perform sensitivity analysis
• Optimize model to improve thermal performance and consumption

Every time Russia attacks Ukraine’s power infrastructure, Ukrainian engineers risk their lives in the scramble to get electricity flowing again. It’s a dangerous job at best, and a lethal one at worst. It also requires creativity. Time pressure and equipment shortages make it nearly impossible to rebuild things exactly as they were, so engineers must redesign on the fly.

These dangerous, stressful conditions have led to more engineers being hurt or killed. The rate of injuries among Ukrainian workers in electricity generation, transmission, and distribution jumped nearly 50 percent after Russia’s full-scale invasion began four years ago, according to data provided by Antonina Nagorna, who leads the Department of Epidemiology and Physiology of Work at the Kundiiev Institute of Occupational Health, in Kiev. By her count at least 48 people had died on the job through the end of 2025, either while repairing damage or during the bombardment itself.

Transmission mastermind Oleksiy Brecht joined that grim count in January. Brecht, who was director for network operations and development at the Ukrainian grid operator Ukrenergo, died while coordinating work at Ukraine’s most attacked electrical switchyard, Kyivska, west of the capital. He was 47 years old.

Brecht’s life and death are a window into the realities of thousands of Ukrainian engineers who face conditions beyond what most engineers could imagine. “The war completely transformed the professional life of a top-manager engineer,” says Mariia Tsaturian, an energy analyst and chief communication officer at the think tank Ukraine Facility Platform, who previously worked with Brecht at Ukrenergo. “As for junior staff, their world was turned upside down entirely. A substation engineer working under shelling is something no one had ever seen or experienced before,” she says.

How Russia Attacks Ukraine’s Grid

Over the course of the war, Russia has increasingly focused on destroying Ukraine’s energy infrastructure. It sends attack drones almost daily during the winter there, when heat and electricity is needed most to survive the bitter cold. Every 10 days or so it barrages Ukraine’s power system with combinations of missiles and hundreds of drones, repeatedly mangling equipment and cutting off power. The cold imposed on Ukrainian homes is especially hard on former prisoners of war held in Russia, where cold is routinely employed as a form of torture.

In the first two years of the war, keeping the grid flowing was a 24/7 job. But Ukrenergo has adapted to the impossible since then, says Vitaliy Zaychenko, Ukrenergo’s CEO, who somehow found a moment to speak with IEEE Spectrum via video call. Now, “we are more prepared for each attack. We have well-trained teams. We have support from Europe,” he says.

But the risk involved in repairing the grid remains unnerving. Last month a crew from DTEK, Ukraine’s biggest private-sector energy firm, was traveling between locations when it was targeted by a Russian drone. They heard the drone coming and escaped before their bucket truck was destroyed. Russian forces have employed “double tap” attacks against DTEK’s crews, targeting their power infrastructure with a follow-up strike designed to kill first responders—a practice confirmed by the U.N.

When Russia began targeting power infrastructure in October 2022, Brecht’s job shifted from high-level direction of grid planning and maintenance to near-constant triage and real-time system reengineering. Most weeks, Brecht spent several days in the field, crisscrossing the country to coordinate work at smashed substations. Brecht would often be found on site figuring out how to restart power using whatever equipment was available. “It was a unique decision every time,” says Zaychenko.

Oleksiy Brecht died in January while overseeing repairs to a bombed-out substation near Kyiv. He called his employees at Ukrenergo “my fighters. They called him “our general.”Ukrenergo

Zaychenko noted Brecht’s “genius” for finding creative grid fixes, his passion and leadership skills, and his credibility with power brokers in Ukraine and abroad. Brecht scoured the globe sourcing critical replacement parts, including stockpiled or older equipment from international utilities. Transformers, which can take a year or more to source, are especially precious.

When the right equipment wasn’t forthcoming, Brecht figured out how to make do. For example, he would deploy transformers from Western Europe rated for 400 kilovolts to restart a 330-kV circuit. He would adapt transformers designed for 60-hertz alternating current for emergency use on Ukraine’s 50-Hz grid. “He would find a way,” says Zaychenko, who worked closely with Brecht for over 20 years.

Brecht’s assistant at Ukrenergo, Svitlana Dubas-Veremiienko, says he also contributed to the teams’ morale and confidence. She shared on Facebook that he smoked “like a locomotive” at the worst times, and yet exuded calm: “In his presence, chaos subsided,” she wrote. Brecht was not easy to intimidate. “He was someone who never feared anything or anyone,” adds Tsaturian.

Brecht’s work proved so essential that Ukrenergo’s former Deputy CEO Andrii Nemyrovskyi recalls telling Ukraine’s Ministry of Defense in 2022 that the military must protect two people: Zaychenko, because he ran grid operations, and Brecht because “system operations requires that the system exists.” Last week, President Zelenskyy posthumously named Brecht a “Hero of Ukraine” for “strengthening the energy security of Ukraine under martial law.”

Ukraine’s Power Infrastructure Under Fire

Brecht joined Ukrenergo in 2002 after earning his degree in power engineering from Igor Sikorsky Kyiv Polytechnic Institute. Over the next 20 years, he held leadership positions in dispatching and grid planning and development. He joined Ukrenergo’s management board in June 2022 and served as its interim leader in 2024.

Brecht’s contributions to Ukraine’s wartime survival began with several key upgrades to Ukrenergo’s technical capabilities ahead of the February 2022 invasion. He reintroduced “live line” techniques, providing training and equipment that enable crews to work on circuits while they continue to carry power to homes and to sustain critical needs.

Brecht also led preparations for Ukraine’s disconnection from the Russian grid and synchronization with Europe’s. When the invasion began, Ukraine’s Minister of Energy at the time, Herman Halushchenko, had argued that switching from Russia’s grid to Europe’s was too risky, according to Tsaturian and Nemyrovskyi. But Brecht insisted—correctly, as hindsight has shown—that synchronizing with Europe would provide crucial stability and backup power. At his urging, the switch was completed in daring fashion during the first weeks of the invasion.

(Halushchenko was dismissed last year following longstanding allegations of corruption and Russian influence in Ukraine’s energy sector that gave way to indictments in November 2025 that have rocked President Zelenskyy’s government. In January, Halushchenko was detained while attempting to leave the country and charged with money laundering.)

DTEK workers conduct repairs on 26 January following a Russian attack in Kyiv.Danylo Antoniuk/Cover Images/AP

A Ukrainian Electrical Engineer’s Final Day

Brecht’s final act of service followed the mass destruction of January 19—a day when Kyiv’s high temperature was –10° C. That night, Russian forces targeted Ukraine’s energy infrastructure with 18 ballistic missiles, a hypersonic cruise missile, 15 conventional cruise missiles, and 339 drones.

The impact included catastrophic damage at the 750-kV Kyivska substation, which feeds electricity to the capital and ensures cooling power for two nuclear power plants.

Brecht was leading a team of about 100 people who were undoing the damage when he made a deadly choice. He picked up a section of busbar—solid conduits that connect circuits within substations. It had been blasted to the ground and, unbeknownst to Brecht, was carrying lethal voltage. It’s unclear whether its circuit was still connected, or if it had picked up voltage from another circuit.

Zaychenko says an investigation is ongoing to provide answers. “I don’t know why he touched this busbar. Maybe because of tiredness. Maybe something else,” he says. “He was trying to help the team to do this job quickly. It was a huge mistake and a huge loss for us.”

Charles Proteus Steinmetz was a towering figure in the early decades of electrical engineering, easily the intellectual equal of Thomas Edison and Nikola Tesla—men he considered his friends. One of Steinmetz’s most significant achievements was to quantify and characterize the phenomenon of magnetic hysteresis—the behavior of magnetism in materials—and then devise a simple law that allowed for predictable transformer and motor design. He also established a revolutionary framework for analyzing AC circuits, which is still taught today in power engineering. And from 1893, he served as chief consulting engineer at General Electric at a pivotal moment for the young company and for the U.S. effort to expand its power grid. For these and other accomplishments, he was well known in his time, even if he’s not exactly a household name today.

Steinmetz was also an evangelist for electric vehicles. In March 1920, he typed out his thoughts, comparing the pros and cons of EVs to the gasoline-propelled alternative. Among the advantages: low cost of maintenance, reliability, simplicity of operation, and lower cost of operation. The disadvantages: dependence on charging stations, limited range on a single charge, and lower speeds. More than a century later, his list remains remarkably pertinent.

Steinmetz could often be seen decked out in a suit and top hat, smoking his trademark BlackStone panatela cigar while riding around Schenectady, N.Y., in his 1914 Detroit Electric sedan. According to John Spinelli, emeritus professor of electrical and computer engineering at Union College, in Schenectady, sometimes both Steinmetz and his chauffeur sat in the backseat—you could control the car from both the front and the rear—so that it would appear to be a driverless car. With a top speed of 40 kilometers per hour (25 miles per hour), the car ran on 14 six-volt batteries and could go about 48 km between charges.

Steinmetz’s 1914 Detroit Electric car is now at Union College in Schenectady, N.Y., where Steinmetz had founded, chaired, and taught in the department of electrical engineering.Paul Buckowski/Union College

In 1971, the car was purchased by Union College, where Steinmetz had founded, chaired, and taught in the department of electrical engineering. The car had been discovered rotting in a field, so it needed some work. Over the next decade, faculty and engineering students restored it to its former glory. Still in running condition, it’s now on permanent display at the college.

Steinmetz’s Contributions to Electrical Engineering

Karl August Rudolf Steinmetz was born in 1865 in Breslau, Prussia (now known as Wrocław, Poland). He studied mathematics, physics, and the burgeoning field of electricity at the University of Breslau. He also joined a student socialist club and edited the party newspaper, The People’s Voice. He completed his doctoral studies, but before receiving his degree, Steinmetz fled to Switzerland in 1888, after his socialist writings came under the scrutiny of the Bismarck government.

Steinmetz immigrated to New York the following year, anglicized his first name, dropped his two middle names, and added Proteus, a nickname he had picked up at university (after the shape-shifting sea god of Greek mythology). Eventually, he became a U.S. citizen.

Charles Proteus Steinmetz solved a number of important problems that helped the power grid expand.Bettmann/Getty Images

In January 1892, Steinmetz burst onto the engineering scene when he read his paper “On the Law of Hysteresis” before the American Institute of Electrical Engineers, a forerunner of today’s IEEE. I can’t quite imagine sitting through the delivery of its 62 pages, but those assembled recognized its groundbreaking nature. The ideas Steinmetz outlined allowed engineers to calculate power losses in the magnetic components of electrical machinery during the design phase. Prior to this, the design process for transformers and electric motors was largely trial and error, and power losses could be measured only after the machine was built, which greatly added to the cost.

Steinmetz was not just an equations and theory guy, though. He loved working in the lab and building things. In 1893, General Electric acquired the small manufacturing firm of Eickemeyer & Osterheld, in Yonkers, N.Y., where Steinmetz had worked since shortly after his arrival in the United States. So Steinmetz began his new life as a corporate engineer, an interesting turn for the socialist. During his first few years with GE, he mostly designed generators and transformers. But he also created an informal position for himself as a consultant, giving expert opinions on various problems across divisions. He eventually formalized this role, becoming GE’s chief consulting engineer, and he maintained a relationship with the company for the rest of his life, even after joining the faculty of Union College in 1902.

By the time Steinmetz died in 1923 at the age of 58, he had been granted more than 200 patents and had made major contributions to various subfields in electrical engineering, including phasors and complex numbers (for steady-state AC analysis); electrical transients, switching surges, and surge protection (based on his research on lightning); industrial research (including how to run a corporate lab); and engineering methods (by writing textbooks that standardized practice).

Why Steinmetz Believed in Electric Cars

By 1914, Steinmetz was convinced that the future of transportation was electric. In June, he addressed the National Electric Light Association convention in Philadelphia with a bold prediction: “I have no doubt that in 10 years, more or less—rather less than more—we will see the field of the pleasure and business vehicle covered by such an electric car in large numbers. And I believe I underestimate when I say that 1,000,000 or more will be used.”

As we now know, Steinmetz was overly optimistic. At the time, there were about 1.2 million gasoline-powered cars in use in the United States, and only about 35,000 EVs. It would take until 2018 for the number of EVs (including plug-in hybrids) on U.S. roads to surpass a million. Worldwide, there are now about 60 million electric vehicles in use.

But Steinmetz had his reasons. He firmly believed that electric vehicles would flourish in urban areas, where most rides involved short distances at low speed. He also thought EVs would be a boon for power companies, which were eager to drum up more business, especially at night. With 1 million electric cars being charged about 5 kilowatt-hours on most nights, and at a rate of 5 cents per kilowatt-hour, Steinmetz predicted US $75 million (about $2.5 billion today) of new business for central power stations each year.

In 1971, Union College purchased Steinmetz’s car, which had been found rotting in a field, and faculty and students restored it to working condition.Special Collections & Archives/Schaffer Library/Union College

Steinmetz went to work to improve the electric car. He developed a double-rotor motor that was integrated into the rear axle, which did away with the need for a mechanical differential or drive shaft and drastically reduced the overall weight, which improved the mileage. Dey Electric Corp. incorporated Steinmetz’s design into its electric roadster and priced it under $1,000. Unfortunately, an internal combustion engine Ford Model T cost about half as much, and the Dey roadster flopped, ending production within a year.

Undeterred, Steinmetz formed the Steinmetz Electric Motor Car Corp. in 1920 with the initial goal of bringing to market an electric truck for deliveries and light industrial use. The first truck debuted on a cold February day in 1922 with a publicity stunt of climbing the steep Miller Avenue hill in Brooklyn, N.Y. According to a report in The New York Times, the vehicle went up the 14.5 percent grade between Jamaica Avenue and Highland Boulevard in 51 seconds. During a second climb, it stopped a number of times to show how easily it restarted. The truck had a range of 84 km (52 miles).

The company planned to manufacture 1,000 trucks per year and 300 lightweight delivery cars, plus a five-passenger coupe, but it made a total of only 48 vehicles. After Steinmetz died in 1923, the company soon ceased operation.

Steinmetz wasn’t only bullish on the electric car, but on electricity in general. A New York Times article recorded his belief that by 2023, we would work no more than 4 hours a day, 200 days a year because electricity would have eliminated the drudgery and unpleasantness of labor. He also predicted that electricity would bring about an end to urban pollution: “Every city would be a spotless town.” With an expansion of leisure time, people would be healthier, engaging in gardening (especially growing their own food) and pursuing educational interests to become “much more intelligent and self-expressive creature[s].”

Steinmetz’s Chosen Family

I decided to write about Steinmetz last year, after IEEE Spectrum published an essay I wrote about why engineering needs the humanities. The article contains this line: “In 1909, none other than Charles Proteus Steinmetz advocated for including the classics in engineering education.” I had been impressed to learn of Steinmetz’s recognition of the value of a liberal arts education. But my copy editor didn’t know who Steinmetz was or why he merited the qualifier “none other.” More people should know about this remarkable man, I decided. And so I went looking for a museum object associated with him, so I could include him in a Past Forward column.

Steinmetz [left] was easily the intellectual equal of Thomas Edison [right], whom he considered a friend.Corbis/Getty Images

The electric car is only one avenue into Steinmetz’s life. I could instead have looked into Steinmetz solids (the geometric shapes that form when two or three identical cylinders intersect at right angles), Steinmetz curves (the edges of a Steinmetz solid), or the Steinmetz equivalent circuit (a mathematical model that describes a transformer using resistors and inductors). But none of those concepts could be easily captured in a picture-worthy object. His love of his electric car, on the other hand, was a fun and fitting entry point for this most unusual engineer.

I also saw an opportunity to highlight how Steinmetz became a family man. Steinmetz had dwarfism—he stood just 122 centimeters tall—as well as kyphosis, a severe curvature of the spine, as did his father and grandfather. He didn’t wish to pass along those traits, and so he never married or had children of his own. But that didn’t mean he didn’t want a family.

In 1903, Steinmetz’s favorite lab assistant, Joseph LeRoy Hayden, told his boss that he was getting married. Steinmetz invited the couple to dinner, and then invited them to live in his large home. They agreed to this unusual living arrangement, with Corinne Rost Hayden running the household and cooking for her husband and Steinmetz. She forced the men to set aside their work for regular family meals.

Eventually, the Hayden family expanded, welcoming Joe, Midge, and Billy. Steinmetz legally adopted the elder Hayden, thereby gaining three grandchildren as well. Steinmetz, whom The New York Times had named a “modern Jove” who “hurls thunderbolts at will” (from a high-voltage lightning generator), delighted at entertaining the grandkids with wondrous tricks of electricity and chemistry.

In writing about the history of electrical engineering, I sometimes fall into the trap of focusing too much on the technology. But it’s just as important to recognize the people behind the technology—their personalities, their frailties, their feelings, their challenges. Steinmetz faced adversity for his political beliefs, for being an immigrant, and for his physical stature, yet none of that ever stopped him. In word and deed, he showed that he had a generous heart as mighty as his intellect.

Part of a continuing series looking at historical artifacts that embrace the boundless potential of technology.

An abridged version of this article appears in the March 2026 print issue as “Charles Proteus Steinmetz Loved His Electric Car.”

References

IEEE Power & Energy Magazine published Steinmetz’s pro/con list comparing electric cars to those with internal combustion engines in the September/October 2005 issue, along with a good biographical overview of Steinmetz by Carl Sulzberger.

Union College published a nice story about the restoration of Steinmetz’s electric car in 2014, when it received its permanent home on campus.

There are many biographies of Steinmetz, one published as early as 1924, but I am particularly fond of Steinmetz: Engineer and Socialist by Ronald Kline (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992).

Gilbert King’s 2011 article “Charles Proteus Steinmetz, the Wizard of Schenectady” for Smithsonian magazine describes Steinmetz’s chosen family and includes several fun anecdotes not mentioned above.

As electric vehicles roll off assembly lines, a bottleneck sits upstream: lithium refinement. Turning raw lithium into the compounds needed for batteries is expensive, messy, and energy intensive, but Mangrove Lithium, a Vancouver-based startup, has a better way. The company has developed an electrochemical refining process that converts lithium feedstocks into battery-grade lithium hydroxide.

Converting raw lithium to lithium hydroxide typically requires roasting spodumene—a mineral from which lithium is derived—at high temperatures, and then leaching it with acid to convert it to lithium sulfate. That compound then needs to be converted to lithium hydroxide. “It’s a thermochemical reaction that uses heavy amounts of reagent chemicals, and generates a sodium sulfate waste stream,” says Ryan Day, Mangrove Lithium’s director of operations.

Further tightening the bottleneck, the majority of the world’s lithium—60 to 70 percent—is now refined in China, and export restrictions and geopolitical tensions have disrupted supply chains in recent years. Shipping raw lithium overseas to be refined also adds to batteries’ total carbon footprint. A new model for lithium refining could reshape not just the economics of electric vehicles but also the geography and environmental footprint of the global battery supply chain.

Mangrove’s demo plant in British Columbia is scheduled to start production in the second half of 2026.

How Does Mangrove’s Refinement Work?

Mangrove replaces the conventional, resource-intensive reaction with a process that uses electricity, water, and oxygen. In an electrochemical cell, they flow brine through an electrolyzer, which consists of a metal box with three compartments between the cathode and anode. The compartments are separated by ion exchange membranes, semipermeable barriers that allow only certain ions to pass. Lithium sulfate flows through the central compartment, and the cell’s electric field splits the salt apart. “Lithium, which is a positive ion, will move across a membrane toward the cathode,” says Day. There, “we are reacting oxygen and water to create hydroxide ions, which join with the lithium from the salt to make lithium hydroxide.”

Meanwhile, on the opposite side of the cell, the sulfate—a negative ion—moves toward the anode, where water is being split to produce protons and oxygen gas. The protons combine with sulfate ions to make sulfuric acid.

“You run that process continuously, and over time you’re generating lithium hydroxide, which you can send to a crystallizer,” Day says. “There’s no significant waste product, and all you’re feeding in is brine, water, oxygen, and electricity.” The sulfuric acid is recovered and can be circulated back upstream to leach more brine from the raw feed material.

In general, keeping the ion exchange membrane intact is one of the biggest challenges for scaling this type of process, says Feifei Shi, assistant professor of energy engineering at Penn State. Shi, who researches electrochemical-based refinement methods, notes that the approach can more easily activate the necessary reactions, but faces limitations for large-scale applications.

The electrochemical process separates out lithium by passing it through three compartments separated by semipermeable barriers. Mangrove Lithium

Mangrove’s Oxygen-Based Cathode

Mangrove’s key innovation and what enables the process is an oxygen-based cathode. “Driving the reaction requires detailed engineering,” says Day. The company designed an electrode that lets a gas and a liquid react together, using just enough water to make the oxygen reaction work—without adding so much that it floods the system and creates hydrogen gas instead.

The electrodes are made with a proprietary process that combines several dedicated layers that allow for a balanced flow of water and oxygen to access the active catalyst sites. This design favors the oxygen-reduction reaction for over 99.5 percent of the total cathode activity. It also reduces the amount of electricity needed to drive the process, because “oxygen reduction requires less voltage than water reduction,” Day says. Demand for battery minerals is surging beyond just lithium, with automakers competing for supplies of nickel, cobalt, graphite, and manganese. Simultaneously, utilities are deploying grid-scale batteries that use the same materials in even larger volumes. Refining capacity—not just mining—could become the critical choke point in this buildout, because battery makers require highly specified, ultrapure compounds.

While Mangrove is initially targeting lithium, their electrochemical architecture is not inherently lithium-specific, and could be adapted to other battery materials that face similar purification bottlenecks. Nickel and cobalt sulfate production, for example, still rely on multistep precipitation and solvent-extraction processes that generate significant waste and require large reagent inputs. “It would work immediately in application to other alkali-metal salts,” Day says.

Mangrove’s demo plant in British Columbia will make 1,000 tonnes per year of lithium hydroxide. If the company can scale its technology as it hopes, it could begin to reshape not just the battery supply chain but also the geopolitics of the energy transition.

A new type of hydroelectric energy system that doesn’t use water was cause for the champagne to flow in January when engineers at RheEnergise in the United Kingdom succeeded in driving a pilot project to a peak power of 500 kilowatts. The system is a fresh take on pumped-storage hydroelectricity (PSH) power, a century-old technology first implemented in Switzerland in 1907 that has since been adopted globally and grown into a major form of energy storage. In 2023, pumped storage provided nearly 200 gigawatts in global installed capacity—over 90 percent of the world’s long-duration energy storage. Hence its nickname: the world’s biggest battery.

PSH works by pumping water up to a higher reservoir during periods of excess electricity from renewables or when demand from the grid is low, and letting the water flow back down under gravity through turbines to a lower reservoir when demand is high. The simplicity of the concept makes PSH efficient, cost-effective, long-lasting, and reliable with relatively low running costs once constructed.

“Pumped hydro is very mature,” says Tamas Bertenyi, a cofounder and chief technology officer of RheEnergise. “In terms of long-duration storage—let’s say 8 to 10 hours—it’s incredibly low cost. So there’s probably a hydro industry in most countries of the world.”

But PSH also has its downsides. Besides high upfront costs and long construction times, Bertenyi says the biggest disadvantage is its lack of scalability. “You need a suitable mountain, and you need to have a river running along the bottom. You also need an alpine valley you can dam up, and there are just not a lot of sites where you can do that.”

To make PSH scalable, RheEnergise has revamped the technology by constructing a closed-loop system and replacing water with a proprietary fluid it calls High-Density Fluid, which has 2.5 times the density of water. “It is so dense that if you threw a block of concrete into a pool of the fluid, it would float,” says Bertenyi.

In developing the fluid, RheEnergise worked with the University of Exeter in England, where Richard Cochrane (now deceased), a cofounder of the company, was a professor of renewable energy systems. The researchers sought to engineer a mineral-rich fluid that is not only much denser than water but has a manageable viscosity, is environmentally benign, and causes minimal abrasion or corrosion. That took “a lot of engineering and a lot of science,” says Bertenyi, because it raised two contradictory challenges: Have a low enough viscosity to flow like water but be dense enough to not go anywhere in the case of an accident.

How does RheEnergise’s High-Density Fluid work?

To reduce the fluid’s risk to the environment (from spills or entering the food chain), it’s formulated as a suspension mixture that suspends the particulate minerals, rather than dissolving them as a solution might. The fluid’s high density solved this problem: In the event of spillage, the particles will simply dry and settle, and not seep deep into soil or groundwater, according to Bertenyi.

RheEnergise formulated a dense yet low-viscosity fluid in its effort to make pumped-storage hydroelectricity possible in more places.RheEnergise

At the same time, the fluid—which is actually 80 percent solid particulates by mass—needed to have a viscosity as low as water to flow through pipes and turbines. Thus, the fluid was engineered to have a thick viscosity when it’s not moving, but have a decreased viscosity when pumped through a PSH system: a shear-thinning non-Newtonian behavior.

“Given the system can generate the same energy output from gentler slopes and lower elevations than traditional pumped hydro, it makes far more sites viable worldwide—including low hills and urban fringe areas—not just mountainous regions,” says George Aggidis, a professor emeritus of energy engineering at Lancaster University in the U.K. “And its long-duration storage makes it suitable for balancing generation by renewables, a gap where batteries alone can be expensive.”

The pilot project consists of a higher reservoir constructed at a height of 80 meters, with fiberglass pipes 2.5 meters in diameter feeding a shared chamber; while the lower reservoir is a simple concrete construction, “basically a large swimming pool,” says Bertenyi. Both reservoirs are buried underground and connected by a steel pipe to form a closed loop, leaving just the powerhouse containing the turbine, pump, fluid-management system, and the electrical control system visible.

“We expect our commercial projects to use two or four 5-megawatt turbines, so 10 to 20 MW is the sweet spot,” says Bertenyi. Having achieved peak power with its pilot project, he says the company is working with partners to bring the technology to commercialization, including turbine manufacturers that will produce modular turbines engineered to work with its fluid. The company aims to deliver its first fully commercial system by the end of 2028. Potential customers include independent power producers, utility companies, and energy-project developers.

But RheEnergise can expect to face some challenges along the way. Besides being capital intensive, “larger scale deployment will require substantial civil works, permit requirements, and engineering coordination,” says Aggidis. “This is more complex than plug-and-play battery systems.”

Then there’s the competition. Aggidis points to sodium-ion and flow batteries, which are modular, fast to install and rapidly decreasing in cost. Other emerging technologies include compressed-air energy storage, hydrogen storage, and thermal storage that are also seeking to get a foothold in the rapidly expanding energy-storage market.

This post was updated on 25 February 2026 to clarify that RheEnergise’s name for its proprietary fluid is High-Density Fluid. High-Density Hydro, which was originally used, is the name of the company’s overall system.

The first time she tried to seduce me,
(atoms falling in a vacuum)
she asked about blackberries—
(every mass exerts some gravity)

Did I know their season, where they grow?
(galvanometers, gravimeters)
I could answer both easily—
(tools to measure small attractions)

down the dirt road in September.
(devices that report, don’t interfere)
She eagerly went there with me,
(variations in readings occur)

We ate more berries than we kept.
(electron exchange may explain this)
The sweet dark juice painted our lips.
(equilibrium then entropy)

Data centers for AI are turning the world of power generation on its head. There isn’t enough power capacity on the grid to even come close to how much energy is needed for the number being built. And traditional transmission and distribution networks aren’t efficient enough to take full advantage of all the power available. According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA), annual transmission and distribution losses average about 5 percent. The rate is much higher in some other parts of the world. Hence, hyperscalers such as Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure are investigating every avenue to gain more power and raise efficiency.

Microsoft, for example, is extolling the potential virtues of high-temperature superconductors (HTS) as a replacement for copper wiring. According to the company, HTS can improve energy efficiency by reducing transmission losses, increasing the resiliency of electrical grids, and limiting the impact of data centers on communities by reducing the amount of space required to move power.

“Because superconductors take up less space to move large amounts of power, they could help us build cleaner, more compact systems,” Alastair Speirs, the general manager of global infrastructure at Microsoft wrote in a blog post.

Superconductors Revolutionize Power Efficiency

Copper is a good conductor, but current encounters resistance as it moves along the line. This generates heat, lowers efficiency, and restricts how much current can be moved. HTS largely eliminates this resistance factor, as it’s made of superconducting materials that are cooled to cryogenic temperatures. (Despite the name, high-temperature superconductors still rely on frigid temperatures—albeit significantly warmer than those required by traditional superconductors.)

The resulting cables are smaller and lighter than copper wiring, don’t lower voltage as they transmit current, and don’t produce heat. This fits nicely into the needs of AI data centers that are trying to cram massive electrical loads into a tiny footprint. Fewer substations would also be needed. According to Speirs, next-gen superconducting transmission lines deliver capacity that is an order of magnitude higher than conventional lines at the same voltage level.

Microsoft is working with partners on the advancement of this technology including being a part of a US $75 million Series B funding round into Veir, a superconducting power technology developer. Veir’s conductors use HTS tape, most commonly based on a class of materials known as rare-earth barium copper oxide (REBCO). REBCO is a ceramic superconducting layer deposited as a thin film on a metal substrate, then engineered into a rugged conductor that can be assembled into power cables.

“The key distinction from copper or aluminum is that, at operating temperature, the superconducting layer carries current with almost no electrical resistance, enabling very high current density in a much more compact form factor,” says Tim Heidel, Veir’s CEO and cofounder.

Liquid Nitrogen Cooling in Data Centers

Ruslan Nagimov, the principal infrastructure engineer for cloud operations and innovation at Microsoft, stands near the world’s first HTS-powered rack prototype.Microsoft

HTS cables still operate at cryogenic temperatures, so cooling must be integrated into the power-delivery system design. Veir maintains a low operating temperature using a closed-loop liquid-nitrogen system: The nitrogen circulates through the length of the cable, exits at the far end, is recooled, and then recirculated back to the start.

“Liquid nitrogen is a plentiful, low cost, safe material used in numerous critical commercial and industrial applications at enormous scale,” says Heidel. “We are leveraging the experience and standards for working with liquid nitrogen proven in other industries to design stable, data center solutions designed for continuous operation, with monitoring and controls that fit critical infrastructure expectations rather than lab conditions.”

HTS cable cooling can be done either within the data center or externally. Heidel favors the latter as that minimizes footprint and operational complexity indoors. Liquid nitrogen lines are fed into the facility to serve the superconductors. They deliver power to where it’s needed and the cooling system is managed like other facility subsystems.

Rare earth materials, cooling loops, cryogenic temperatures—all of this adds considerably to costs. Thus, HTS isn’t going to replace copper in the vast majority of applications. Heidel says the economics are most compelling where power delivery is constrained by space, weight, voltage drop, and heat.

“In those cases, the value shows up at the system level: smaller footprints, reduced resistive losses, and more flexibility in how you route power,” says Heidel. “As the technology scales, costs should improve through higher-volume HTS tape manufacturing and better yields, and also through standardization of the surrounding system hardware, installation practices, and operating playbooks that reduce design complexity and deployment risk.”

AI data centers are becoming the perfect proving ground for this approach. Hyperscalers are willing to spend to develop higher-efficiency systems. They can balance spending on development against the revenue they might make by delivering AI services broadly.

“HTS manufacturing has matured—particularly on the tape side—which improves cost and supply availability,” says Husam Alissa, Microsoft’s director of systems technology. “Our focus currently is on validating and derisking this technology with our partners with focus on systems design and integration.”

This story was updated on 26 February, 2026 to correct details of Microsoft’s investment into Veir.

In 2024, Google claimed that its data centers are 1.5 times more energy-efficient than the industry average. In 2025, Microsoft committed billions to nuclear power for AI workloads. The data center industry tracks power-usage effectiveness to three decimal places and optimizes water usage intensity with machine precision. We report direct emissions and energy emissions with religious fervor.

These are laudable advances, but these metrics account for only 30 percent of total emissions from the IT sector. The majority of the emissions are not directly from data centers or the energy they use, but from the end-user devices that actually access the data centers, emissions due to manufacturing the hardware, and software inefficiencies. We are frantically optimizing less than a third of the IT sector’s environmental impact, while the bulk of the problem goes unmeasured.

Incomplete regulatory frameworks are part of the problem. In Europe, the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD) now requires 11,700 companies to report emissions using these incomplete frameworks. The next phase of the directive, covering 40,000+ additional companies, was originally scheduled for 2026 (but is likely delayed to 2028). In the United States, the standards body responsible for IT sustainability metrics (ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 39) is conducting active revision of its standards through 2026, with a key plenary meeting in May 2026.

The time to act is now. If we don’t fix the measurement frameworks, we risk locking in incomplete data collection and optimizing a fraction of what matters for the next 5 to 10 years, before the next major standards revision.

The limited metrics

Walk into any modern data center, and you’ll see sustainability instrumentation everywhere. Power-usage efficiency (PUE) monitors track every watt. Water-usage efficiency (WUE) systems measure water consumption down to the gallon. Sophisticated monitoring captures everything from server utilization to cooling efficiency to renewable energy percentages.

But here’s what those measurements miss: End-user devices globally emit 1.5 to 2 times more carbon than all data centers combined, according to McKinsey’s 2022 report. The smartphones, laptops, and tablets we use to access those ultra-efficient data centers are the bigger problem.

Data center operations, as measured by power-usage efficiency, account for only 24 percent of the total emissions.

On the conservative end of the range from McKinsey’s report, devices emit 1.5 times as much as data centers. That means that data centers make up 40 percent of total IT emissions, while devices make up 60 percent.

On top of that, approximately 75 percent of device emissions occur not during use, but during manufacturing—this is so-called embodied carbon. For data centers, only 40 percent is embodied carbon, and 60 percent comes from operations (as measured by PUE).

Putting this together, data center operations, as measured by PUE, account for only 24 percent of the total emissions. Data center embodied carbon is 16 percent, device embodied carbon is 45 percent, and device operation is 15 percent.

Under the EU’s current CSRD framework, companies must report their emissions in three categories: direct emissions from owned sources, indirect emissions from purchased energy, and a third category for everything else.

This “everything else” category does include device emissions and embodied carbon. However, those emissions are reported as aggregate totals broken down by accounting category—capital goods, purchased goods and services, use of sold products—but not by product type. How much comes from end-user devices versus data center infrastructure, or employee laptops versus network equipment, remains murky, and therefore, unoptimized.

Embodied carbon and hardware reuse

Manufacturing a single smartphone generates approximately 50 kilograms CO₂ equivalent (CO₂e). For a laptop, it’s 200 kg CO₂e. With 1 billion smartphones replaced annually, that’s 50 million tonnes of CO₂e per year just from smartphone manufacturing, before anyone even turns them on. On average, smartphones are replaced every two years, laptops every three to four years, and printers every five years. Data center servers are replaced approximately every five years.

Extending smartphone life cycles to three years instead of two would reduce annual manufacturing emissions by 33 percent. At scale, this dwarfs data center optimization gains.

There are programs geared toward reusing old components that are still functional and integrating them into new servers. GreenSKUs and similar initiatives show that 8 percent reductions in embodied carbon are achievable. But these remain pilot programs, not systematic approaches. And critically, they’re measured only in the data center context, not across the entire IT stack.

Imagine applying the same circular economy principles to devices. With over 2 billion laptops in existence globally and two- to three-year replacement cycles, even modest lifespan extensions create massive emission reductions. Extending smartphone life cycles to three years instead of two would reduce annual manufacturing emissions by 33 percent. At scale, this dwarfs data center optimization gains.

Yet data center reuse gets measured, reported, and optimized. Device reuse doesn’t, because the frameworks don’t require it.

The invisible role of software

Leading load balancer infrastructure across IBM Cloud, I see how software architecture decisions ripple through energy consumption. Inefficient code doesn’t just slow things down—it drives up both data center power consumption and device battery drain.

For example, University of Waterloo researchers showed that they can reduce 30 percent of energy use in data centers by changing just 30 lines of code. From my perspective, this result is not an anomaly—it’s typical. Bad software architecture forces unnecessary data transfers, redundant computations, and excessive resource use. But unlike data center efficiency, there’s no commonly accepted metric for software efficiency.

This matters now more than ever. With AI workloads driving massive data center expansion—projected to consume 6.7 to 12 percent of total U.S. electricity by 2028, according to Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory—software efficiency becomes critical.

What needs to change

The solution isn’t to stop measuring data center efficiency. It’s to measure device sustainability with the same rigor. Specifically, standards bodies (particularly ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 39 WG4: Holistic Sustainability Metrics) should extend frameworks to include device life-cycle tracking, software efficiency metrics, and hardware reuse standards.

To track device life cycles, we need standardized reporting of device embodied carbon, broken out separately by device. One aggregate number in an “everything else” category is insufficient. We need specific device categories with manufacturing emissions and replacement cycles visible.

To include software efficiency, I advocate developing a PUE-equivalent for software, such as energy per transaction, per API call, or per user session. This needs to be a reportable metric under sustainability frameworks so companies can demonstrate software optimization gains.

To encourage hardware reuse, we need to systematize reuse metrics across the full IT stack—servers and devices. This includes tracking repair rates, developing large-scale refurbishment programs, and tracking component reuse with the same detail currently applied to data center hardware.

To put it all together, we need a unified IT emission-tracking dashboard. CSRD reporting should show device embodied carbon alongside data center operational emissions, making the full IT sustainability picture visible at a glance.

These aren’t radical changes—they’re extensions of measurement principles already proven in the data center context. The first step is acknowledging what we’re not measuring. The second is building the frameworks to measure it. And the third is demanding that companies report the complete picture—data centers and devices, servers and smartphones, infrastructure and software.

Because you can’t fix what you can’t see. And right now, we’re not seeing 70 percent of the problem.

As the Trump administration doubles down on its energy and AI dominance agenda, U.S. energy companies have found themselves navigating tricky communication strategies. Touting the clean, carbon-free nature of renewable energy no longer carries the clout it did under the Biden administration, and policy has shifted against certain forms of renewables. At the same time, energy companies are being called upon to meet rising power demands of data-center developers, many of which are prioritizing carbon-free options.

This has forced energy companies to shift the way they communicate: They must garner political favor while also positioning themselves as an answer to the coming onslaught of electricity demand.

The wind and solar industries are focusing on electricity affordability and the fact that wind farms and photovoltaics are the cheapest and fastest way to add new energy generation. Battery storage developers are aligning themselves with Trump’s domestic manufacturing push, scaling up efforts to shift supply chains to the United States as they battle uncertainty over tariffs.

Nuclear power companies are touting their ability to go small and modular—theoretically a faster way to get reactors running. Next-generation geothermal developers are staying the course but playing up the industry’s crossovers with oil and gas. Hydrogen, too, is being highlighted as similar to fossil fuels. And the offshore wind industry is mostly preoccupied with using the courts to fight the Trump administration’s repeated attempts to ban development.

It’s not that the renewable technologies themselves have changed, says Samuel Furfari, former European Commission senior energy official and current energy geopolitics professor at ESCP Business School in London. “Mr. Trump has made a communication revolution, not an energy revolution,” he says about the state of the industry in the United States and abroad.

Trump Declares His Energy Darlings

Trump’s affinity for fossil fuels and his disdain for certain renewables, such as wind, have constructed a new federal hierarchy of energy sources. On day one of his second term as U.S. president, Trump issued an executive order listing which energy resources his country should promote. The list mentions fossil fuels, geothermal, and nuclear but excludes solar, wind, and hydrogen.

Then, in July, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act slashed renewable energy incentives for wind and solar while extending the tax credits for geothermal through 2033. On 1 December, Trump’s Department of Energy renamed the National Renewable Energy Laboratory to the National Laboratory of the Rockies—a moniker to demote renewables and reflect the lab’s “expanding mission” under Trump. And in an eleventh-hour move, the Department of the Interior at the end of 2025 halted all offshore wind projects under construction, citing national security risks.

At first, the wind and solar industries attempted to fit into the Trump administration’s agenda by leaning into his energy dominance rhetoric, says clean energy consultant Lloyd Ritter in Washington D.C. But after the government gutted tax incentives for wind and solar, and concerns over high electricity bills became a top election issue, industry players prioritized messaging about affordability for consumers, Ritter says.

“Electricity costs are now a thing in politics, and I don’t think that’s going to change anytime soon,” Ritter says. The cost concerns stem from estimates that electricity use in the United States is projected to increase 32 percent by 2030, mostly from data centers, according to the latest forecast from Grid Strategies.

The solar and storage industries are welcoming these demand projections. That’s because solar is still the “fastest and cheapest form of electronics to get onto the grid,” says Raina Hornaday, cofounder of Austin, Texas–based Caprock Renewables, a solar and storage developer. In her view, meeting the load demands of data centers is going to take care of the political backlash that solar and storage have endured under the Trump administration.

Hornaday sees a particular opening for batteries. “The R&D for battery storage is really the winner across the board, and we don’t consider battery storage renewable. It can utilize renewable energy electrons, but it doesn’t have to,” she says. “It can be power from the grid.”

Sage Geosystems harvests heat from underground water reservoirs. The company has recently shifted from talking about geothermal energy as clean to its ability to get electricity to the grid faster to accommodate data-center growth. Sage Geosystems

Geothermal Inherits Fortuitous Position

The communications framing for next-generation geothermal power has shifted too, despite it being a political favorite. Companies in this sector say they are continuing to emphasize geothermal as a baseload power source—something that can crank out electricity 24/7, like fossil fuels can. But projected increases in power demand have shifted other elements of the conversation.

The leading communication strategies now are less about geothermal’s carbon-free benefits and more about getting energy to the grid faster to address data-center growth, says Cindy Taff, CEO of Houston-based startup Sage Geosystems. Geothermal companies are also talking about how their use of drilling technology, know-how, and other synergies borrowed from the oil and gas industries can fast-track development.

“When we first started Sage four and a half years ago, we were talking about it being clean and renewable, but if you think about it, there’s now a little bit more allergic connotation with clean and renewable,” says Taff, who spent more than 35 years in well construction and project management at Shell before founding Sage.

Lessening the use of climate-focused language is something “the whole industry” is doing, adds Geoffrey Garrison, vice president of operations at Quaise Energy, headquartered in Houston. “I think you have to be cognizant of who’s listening and who has got their hands on the lever.… You tailor your message,” he says.

Other Trump administration priorities, like moving industry and manufacturing back to U.S. soil, are top of mind for geothermal companies, says Sarah Jewett, senior vice president of strategy at Fervo Energy, also in Houston. “We are thinking a lot more about localization of [the] supply chain, in large part due to this administration’s focus,” Jewett says.

In its pitches to investors, Fervo Energy includes talking points about how geothermal energy drilling uses technology from the oil and gas industry. Fervo Energy

Overall, Fervo’s messaging has remained “pretty consistent” between U.S. presidential administrations, Jewett says. In its pitch to investors, Fervo includes talking points about how next-generation geothermal uses drilling technology from the oil and gas industry. But clean energy isn’t completely missing from Fervo’s communications. “Some sides of the aisle like parts of it, and other parts of the aisle like other parts of it,” Jewett says.

Like geothermal, nuclear power has enjoyed support from both political parties in the United States. It too is now focusing on touting its ability to meet rising electricity demand, albeit through the restarting of decommissioned reactors, the building of massive new plants, and experimentation with advanced solutions such as small modular reactors and microreactors.

Countries Adopt ‘Energy Addition’ Tack

It’s not just U.S. companies that are shifting the message. In November at ADIPEC, the world’s largest annual energy conference, held in Abu Dhabi, widely adopted buzzwords such as “energy transition”—a term referring to the shift away from fossil fuels—were being swapped with “energy addition.”

That’s not solely a result in shifting political tides. The surge in energy demand may indeed necessitate more of an addition, rather than a complete transition. It’s a reasonable shift, given the “hockey stick” demand increase the industry is facing, says Taff at Sage. “Energy transition was, in my opinion, when [demand] uptick was very steady. But now that you’ve got the hockey stick, the use of ‘addition’…is much more applicable,” she says.

Abroad, Trump’s impact reverberates, Furfari says. “We were shy to mention fossil fuel. Mr. Trump does not care, and says, ‘No, we need fossil fuel.’ This is changing the world.”

More than 97 percent of the new cars Norwegians registered in November 2025 were electric, almost reaching the country’s goal of 100 percent. As a result, the government has begun removing some of the many carrots it used to encourage its successful EV transition. Cecilie Knibe Kroglund, state secretary in the country’s Ministry of Transport, reveals some of the challenges that come with success.

Cecilie Knibe Kroglund

Cecilie Knibe Kroglund is the state secretary in Norway’s Ministry of Transport.

What were the important early steps to promote the EV switch?

Kroglund: Battery-electric vehicles have had exemptions from the 25 percent value-added tax and from the CO₂- and weight-based registration tax that apply to combustion-engine vehicles. We used other tax incentives to encourage building charging stations on highways and in rural areas. Cities had the opportunity to exempt zero-emissions cars from toll roads. EV drivers also got reduced ferry fares, free parking, and access to bus lanes in many cities. The technology for the vehicles wasn’t that good at the start of the incentives program, but we had the taxes and incentives to make traditional passenger cars more expensive.

What were the biggest barriers, and how did policymakers overcome them?

Kroglund: Early on the technology was challenging. In summertime it was easy to fuel the EV, but in wintertime it’s double the use of energy. But the technology has improved a lot in the last five years.

The Norwegian tax exemptions on EVs were introduced before EVs came to market and were decisive in offsetting the early disadvantages of EVs compared to conventional cars, especially regarding comfort, vehicle size, and range. The rapid expansion of charging infrastructure along major corridors has also been important to overcome range anxiety.

How have private companies responded to government incentives?

Kroglund: I’m personally surprised that it went so well. This was a long-term commitment from the government, and the market has responded to that. Many Norwegian companies use EVs. The market for charging infrastructure is considered commercially viable and no longer needs financial support. However, we don’t see commercial-vehicle adoption going as fast as passenger vehicles, and we had the same goal. So we will have to review the goals, and we’ll have to review the incentives.

What unexpected new problems is Norway’s success creating?

Kroglund: The success of the passenger-vehicle policies mean EVs are in competition with public transport in the larger cities. Driving an EV remains much cheaper than driving a conventional car even without tax exemptions, and overall car use continues to rise. National, regional, and local governments must find different tools to promote walking, bicycling, and public transport because each city and region is different.

How applicable are these lessons to poorer or less well-administered countries and why?

Kroglund: We are different as countries. The geographies are different, and some countries have even bigger cities than our national population. This is not a policy for L.A., but what we see in Norway is that incentives work. However, tax incentives are only applicable in systems where effective taxation is established, which may not be the case in poorer countries. Other benefits, such as lower local emissions, only apply in places with lots of traffic.

The Norwegian experience shows that the economic incentives work, but it also shows that EVs work even in a country with cold weather.

This article appears in the February 2026 print issue as “Cecilie Knibe Kroglund.”

In 2018, Justin Kropp was working on a transmission circuit in Southern California when disaster struck. Grid operators had earlier shut down the 115-kilovolt circuit, but six high-voltage lines that shared the corridor were still operating, and some of their power snuck onto the deenergized wires he was working on. That rogue current shot to the ground through Kropp’s body and his elevated work platform, killing the 32-year-old father of two.

“It went in both of his hands and came out his stomach, where he was leaning against the platform rail,” says Justin’s father, Barry Kropp, who is himself a retired line worker. “Justin got hung up on the wire. When they finally got him on the ground, it was too late.”

Budapest-based Electrostatics makes conductive suits that protect line workers from unexpected current. Electrostatics

Justin’s accident was caused by induction: a hazard that occurs when an electric or magnetic field causes current to flow through equipment whose intended power supply has been cut off. Safety practices seek to prevent such induction shocks by grounding all conductive objects in a work zone, giving electricity alternative paths. But accidents happen. In Justin’s case, his platform unexpectedly swung into the line before it could be grounded.

Conductive Suits Protect Line Workers

Adding a layer of defense against induction injuries is the motivation behind Budapest-based Electrostatics’ specialized conductive jumpsuits, which are designed to protect against burns, cardiac fibrillation, and other ills. “If my boy had been wearing one, I know he’d be alive today,” says the elder Kropp, who purchased a line-worker safety training business after Justin’s death. The Mesa, Ariz.–based company, Electrical Safety Consulting International (ESCI), now distributes those suits.

Conductive socks that are connected to the trousers complete the protective suit. BME HVL

Eduardo Ramirez Bettoni, one of the developers of the suits, dug into induction risk after a series of major accidents in the United States in 2017 and 2018, including Justin Kropp’s. At the time, he was principal engineer for transmission and substation standards at Minneapolis-based Xcel Energy. In talking to Xcel line workers and fellow safety engineers, he sensed that the accident cluster might be the tip of an iceberg. And when he and two industry colleagues scoured data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, they found 81 induction accidents between 1985 and 2021 and 60 deaths, which they documented in a 2022 report.

“Unfortunately, it is really common. I would say there are hundreds of induction contacts every year in the United States alone,” says Ramirez Bettoni, who is now technical director of R&D for the Houston-based power-distribution equipment firm Powell Industries. He bets that such “contacts”—exposures to dangerous levels of induction—are increasing as grid operators boost grid capacity by squeezing additional circuits into transmission corridors.

Electrostatics’ suits are an enhancement of the standard protective gear that line workers wear when their tasks involve working close to or even touching energized live lines, or “bare-hands” work. Both are interwoven with conductive materials such as stainless steel threads, which form a Faraday cage that shields the wearer against the lines’ electric fields. But the standard suits have limited capacity to shunt current because usually they don’t need to. Like a bird on a wire, bare-hands workers are electrically floating, rather than grounded, so current largely bypasses them via the line itself.

Induction Safety Suit Design

Backed by a US $250,000 investment from Xcel in 2019, Electrostatics adapted its standard suits by adding low-resistance conductive straps that pass current around a worker’s body. “When I’m touching a conductor with one hand and the other hand is grounded, the current will flow through the straps to get out,” says Bálint Németh, Electrostatics’ CEO and director of the High Voltage Laboratory at Budapest University of Technology and Economics.

A strapping system links all the elements of the suit—the jacket, trousers, gloves, and socks—and guides current through a controlled path outside the body. BME HVL

The company began selling the suits in 2023, and they have since been adopted by over a dozen transmission operators in the United States and Europe, as well as other countries including Canada, Indonesia, and Turkey. They cost about $5,200 in the United States.

Electrostatics’ suits had to meet a crucial design threshold: keeping body exposure below the 6-milliampere “let-go” threshold, beyond which electrocuted workers become unable to remove themselves from a circuit. “If you lose control of your muscles, you’re going to hold onto the conductor until you pass out or possibly die,” says Ramirez Bettoni.

The gear, which includes the suit, gloves, and socks, protects against 100 amperes for 10 seconds and 50 A for 30 seconds. It also has insulation to protect against heat created by high current and flame retardants to protect against electric arcs.

Kropp, Németh, and Ramirez Bettoni are hoping that developing industry standards for induction safety gear, including ones published in October, will broaden their use. Meanwhile, the recently enacted Justin Kropp Safety Act in California, for which the elder Kropp lobbied, mandates automated defibrillators at power-line work sites.

This article was updated on 14 January 2026.

This article appears in the March 2026 print issue as “The Anti-Induction Suit.”