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Learn more - CREATE AN ACCOUNTSIGN IN JOIN IEEESIGN IN Close Access Thousands of Articles -- Completely Free Create an account and get exclusive content and features: Save articles, download collections, and talk to tech insiders -- all free! For full access and benefits, join IEEE as a paying member. CREATE AN ACCOUNTSIGN IN EnergyTopicTypeNews AltaRock Energy Melts Rock With Millimeter Waves for Geothermal Wells The Seattle-based company received an ARPA-E grant to test and scale its technology Maria Gallucci 19 Feb 2020 3 min read Paul Woskov of MIT holds water-cooling lines leading to a test chamber, and a sample of rock with a hole made by a beam from a gyrotron. Feel the Heat: Paul Woskov of MIT holds water-cooling lines leading to a test chamber, and a sample of rock with a hole made by a beam from a gyrotron. Photo: Paul Rivenberg/MIT renewablesenvironmentgeothermal energygeothermalARPA-Epowermillimeter wavesstartupsenergy A vast supply of heat lies beneath our feet. Yet today's drilling methods can barely push through dense rocks and high-pressure conditions to reach it. A new generation of "enhanced" drilling systems aims to obliterate those barriers and unlock unprecedented supplies of geothermal energy. AltaRock Energy is leading an effort to melt and vaporize rocks with millimeter waves. Instead of grinding away with mechanical drills, scientists use a gyrotron--a specialized high-frequency microwave-beam generator--to open holes in slabs of hard rock. The goal is to penetrate rock at faster speeds, to greater depths, and at a lower cost than conventional drills do. The Seattle-based company recently received a US $3.9 million grant from the U.S. Department of Energy's Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E). The three-year initiative will enable scientists to demonstrate the technology at increasingly larger scales, from burning through hand-size samples to room-size slabs. Project partners say they hope to start drilling in real-world test sites before the grant period ends in September 2022. AltaRock estimates that just 0.1 percent of the planet's heat content could supply humanity's total energy needs for 2 million years. Earth's core, at a scorching 6,000 degC, radiates heat through layers of magma, continental crust, and sedimentary rock. At extreme depths, that heat is available in constant supply anywhere on the planet. But most geothermal projects don't reach deeper than 3 kilometers, owing to technical or financial restrictions. Many wells tap heat from geysers or hot springs close to the surface. That's one reason why, despite its potential, geothermal energy accounts for only about 0.2 percent of global power capacity, according to the International Renewable Energy Association. "Today we have an access problem," says Carlos Araque, CEO of Quaise, an affiliate of AltaRock. "The promise is that, if we could drill 10 to 20 km deep, we'd basically have access to an infinite source of energy." The ARPA-E initiative uses technology first developed by Paul Woskov, a senior research engineer at MIT's Plasma Science and Fusion Center. Since 2008, Woskov and his colleagues have used a 10-kilowatt gyrotron to produce millimeter waves at frequencies between 30 and 300 gigahertz. Elsewhere, millimeter waves are used for many purposes, including 5G wireless networks, airport security, and astronomy. While producing those waves requires only milliwatts of power, it takes several megawatts to drill through rocks. To start, MIT researchers place a piece of rock in a test chamber, then blast it with high-powered, high-frequency beams. A metallic waveguide directs the beams to form holes. Compressed gas is injected to prevent plasma from breaking down and bursting into flames, which would hamper the process. In trials, millimeter waves have bored holes through granite, basalt, sandstone, and limestone. The ARPA-E grant will allow the MIT team to develop their process using megawatt-size gyrotrons at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, in Tennessee. "We're trying to bring forward a disruption in technology to open up the way for deep geothermal energy," Araque says. Other enhanced geothermal systems now under way use mechanical methods to extract energy from deeper wells and hotter sources. In Iceland, engineers are drilling 5 km deep into magma reservoirs, boring down between two tectonic plates. Demonstration projects in Australia, Japan, Mexico, and the U.S. West--including one by AltaRock --involve drilling artificial fractures into continental rocks. Engineers then inject water or liquid biomass into the fractures and pump it to the surface. When the liquid surpasses 374 degC and 22,100 kilopascals of pressure, it becomes a "supercritical" fluid, meaning it can transfer energy more efficiently and flow more easily than water from a typical well. However, such efforts can trigger seismic activity, and projects in Switzerland and South Korea were shut down after earthquakes rattled surrounding cities. Such risks aren't expected for millimeter-wave drilling. Araque says that while beams could spill outside their boreholes, any damage would be confined deep below ground. Maria Richards, coordinator at Southern Methodist University's Geothermal Laboratory, in Dallas, says that one advantage of using millimeter waves is that the drilling can occur almost anywhere--including alongside existing power plants. At shuttered coal facilities, deep geothermal wells could produce steam to drive the existing turbines. The Texas laboratory previously explored using geothermal power to help natural-gas plants operate more efficiently. "In the end, it was too expensive. But if we could have drilled deeper and gotten higher temperatures, a project like ours would've been more profitable," Richards says. She notes that millimeter-wave beams could also reach high-pressure offshore oil and gas reservoirs that are too dangerous for mechanical drills to tap. This article appears in the March 2020 print issue as "AltaRock Melts Rock For Geothermal Wells." renewablesenvironmentgeothermal energygeothermalARPA-Epowermillimeter wavesstartupsenergy Maria Gallucci Maria Gallucci is a clean-energy reporter with Canary Media. The Conversation (0) An electrical tower against a cloudy sky The InstituteTopicArticleTypeHistory of Technology How Microwave Radar Brought Direct Phone Calls to Millions 3h 4 min read An airplane just before landing in the early morning. Runway lights can be seen in the foreground. TelecommunicationsTopicTypeNews How 5G's Rollout Rattled Hundreds of Pilots 6h 5 min read The words Alice has five more balls than Bob, who has two balls after he gives four to Charlie. How many balls does Alice have? in blue and distorted Artificial IntelligenceTopicTypeComputingNews AI Language Models Are Struggling to "Get" Math 12 Oct 2022 4 min read Related Stories EnergyTopicNewsType Geothermal May Beat Batteries for Energy Storage Consumer ElectronicsTopicTypeSensorsCareersProfile This Idea Wasn't All Wet: The Sensing Water-Saving Showerhead Debuts EnergyTopicMagazineTypeOpinionOctober 2022 Taming the Climate Is Far Harder Than Getting People to the Moon EnergyTopicMagazineTypeFeatureTransportationAugust 2022 This Dutch City Is Road-Testing Vehicle-to-Grid Tech Utrecht leads the world in using EVs for grid storage Michael Dumiak 27 Jun 2022 10 min read This photograph shows a car with the words "We Drive Solar" on the door, connected to a charging station. A windmill can be seen in the background. The Dutch city of Utrecht is embracing vehicle-to-grid technology, an example of which is shown here--an EV connected to a bidirectional charger. The historic Rijn en Zon windmill provides a fitting background for this scene. We Drive Solar Hundreds of charging stations for electric vehicles dot Utrecht's urban landscape in the Netherlands like little electric mushrooms. Unlike those you may have grown accustomed to seeing, many of these stations don't just charge electric cars--they can also send power from vehicle batteries to the local utility grid for use by homes and businesses. Debates over the feasibility and value of such vehicle-to-grid technology go back decades. Those arguments are not yet settled. But big automakers like Volkswagen, Nissan, and Hyundai have moved to produce the kinds of cars that can use such bidirectional chargers--alongside similar vehicle-to-home technology, whereby your car can power your house, say, during a blackout, as promoted by Ford with its new F-150 Lightning. Given the rapid uptake of electric vehicles, many people are thinking hard about how to make the best use of all that rolling battery power. Utrecht, a largely bicycle-propelled city of 350,000 just south of Amsterdam, has become a proving ground for the bidirectional-charging techniques that have the rapt interest of automakers, engineers, city managers, and power utilities the world over. This initiative is taking place in an environment where everyday citizens want to travel without causing emissions and are increasingly aware of the value of renewables and energy security. "We wanted to change," says Eelco Eerenberg, one of Utrecht's deputy mayors and alderman for development, education, and public health. And part of the change involves extending the city's EV-charging network. "We want to predict where we need to build the next electric charging station." So it's a good moment to consider where vehicle-to-grid concepts first emerged and to see in Utrecht how far they've come. It's been 25 years since University of Delaware energy and environmental expert Willett Kempton and Green Mountain College energy economist Steve Letendre outlined what they saw as a "dawning interaction between electric-drive vehicles and the electric supply system." This duo, alongside Timothy Lipman of the University of California, Berkeley, and Alec Brooks of AC Propulsion, laid the foundation for vehicle-to-grid power. The inverter converts alternating current to direct current when charging the vehicle and back the other way when sending power into the grid. This is good for the grid. It's yet to be shown clearly why that's good for the driver. Their initial idea was that garaged vehicles would have a two-way computer-controlled connection to the electric grid, which could receive power from the vehicle as well as provide power to it. Kempton and Letendre's 1997 paper in the journal Transportation Research describes how battery power from EVs in people's homes would feed the grid during a utility emergency or blackout. With on-street chargers, you wouldn't even need the house. Bidirectional charging uses an inverter about the size of a breadbasket, located either in a dedicated charging box or onboard the car. The inverter converts alternating current to direct current when charging the vehicle and back the other way when sending power into the grid. This is good for the grid. It's yet to be shown clearly why that's good for the driver. This is a vexing question. Car owners can earn some money by giving a little energy back to the grid at opportune times, or can save on their power bills, or can indirectly subsidize operation of their cars this way. But from the time Kempton and Letendre outlined the concept, potential users also feared losing money, through battery wear and tear. That is, would cycling the battery more than necessary prematurely degrade the very heart of the car? Those lingering questions made it unclear whether vehicle-to-grid technologies would ever catch on. Market watchers have seen a parade of "just about there" moments for vehicle-to-grid technology. In the United States in 2011, the University of Delaware and the New Jersey-based utility NRG Energy signed a technology-license deal for the first commercial deployment of vehicle-to-grid technology. Their research partnership ran for four years. In recent years, there's been an uptick in these pilot projects across Europe and the United States, as well as in China, Japan, and South Korea. In the United Kingdom, experiments are now taking place in suburban homes, using outside wall-mounted chargers metered to give credit to vehicle owners on their utility bills in exchange for uploading battery juice during peak hours. Other trials include commercial auto fleets, a set of utility vans in Copenhagen, two electric school buses in Illinois, and five in New York. These pilot programs have remained just that, though--pilots. None evolved into a large-scale system. That could change soon. Concerns about battery wear and tear are abating. Last year, Heta Gandhi and Andrew White of the University of Rochestermodeled vehicle-to-grid economics and found battery-degradation costs to be minimal. Gandhi and White also noted that battery capital costs have gone down markedly over time, falling from well over US $1,000 per kilowatt-hour in 2010 to about $140 in 2020. As vehicle-to-grid technology becomes feasible, Utrecht is one of the first places to fully embrace it. The key force behind the changes taking place in this windswept Dutch city is not a global market trend or the maturity of the engineering solutions. It's having motivated people who are also in the right place at the right time. One is Robin Berg, who started a company called We Drive Solar from his Utrecht home in 2016. It has evolved into a car-sharing fleet operator with 225 electric vehicles of various makes and models--mostly Renault Zoes, but also Tesla Model 3s, Hyundai Konas, and Hyundai Ioniq 5s. Drawing in partners along the way, Berg has plotted ways to bring bidirectional charging to the We Drive Solar fleet. His company now has 27 vehicles with bidirectional capabilities, with another 150 expected to be added in coming months. This image shows three men in suits standing next to a charging station that is charging a blue electric car with the words \ u201cBidirectional Ecosystem\u201d written on the door.In 2019, Willem-Alexander, king of the Netherlands, presided over the installation of a bidirectional charging station in Utrecht. Here the king [middle] is shown with Robin Berg [left], founder of We Drive Solar, and Jerome Pannaud [right], Renault's general manager for Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg.Patrick van Katwijk/Getty Images Amassing that fleet wasn't easy. We Drive Solar's two bidirectional Renault Zoes are prototypes, which Berg obtained by partnering with the French automaker. Production Zoes capable of bidirectional charging have yet to come out. Last April, Hyundai delivered 25 bidirectionally capable long-range Ioniq 5s to We Drive Solar. These are production cars with modified software, which Hyundai is making in small numbers. It plans to introduce the technology as standard in an upcoming model. We Drive Solar's 1,500 subscribers don't have to worry about battery wear and tear--that's the company's problem, if it is one, and Berg doesn't think it is. "We never go to the edges of the battery," he says, meaning that the battery is never put into a charge state high or low enough to shorten its life materially. We Drive Solar is not a free-flowing, pick-up-by-app-and-drop-where-you-want service. Cars have dedicated parking spots. Subscribers reserve their vehicles, pick them up and drop them off in the same place, and drive them wherever they like. On the day I visited Berg, two of his cars were headed as far as the Swiss Alps, and one was going to Norway. Berg wants his customers to view particular cars (and the associated parking spots) as theirs and to use the same vehicle regularly, gaining a sense of ownership for something they don't own at all. That Berg took the plunge into EV ride-sharing and, in particular, into power-networking technology like bidirectional charging, isn't surprising. In the early 2000s, he started a local service provider called LomboXnet, installing line-of-sight Wi-Fi antennas on a church steeple and on the rooftop of one of the tallest hotels in town. When Internet traffic began to crowd his radio-based network, he rolled out fiber-optic cable. In 2007, Berg landed a contract to install rooftop solar at a local school, with the idea to set up a microgrid. He now manages 10,000 schoolhouse rooftop panels across the city. A collection of power meters lines his hallway closet, and they monitor solar energy flowing, in part, to his company's electric-car batteries--hence the company name, We Drive Solar. Berg did not learn about bidirectional charging through Kempton or any of the other early champions of vehicle-to-grid technology. He heard about it because of the Fukushima nuclear-plant disaster a decade ago. He owned a Nissan Leaf at the time, and he read about how these cars supplied emergency power in the Fukushima region. "Okay, this is interesting technology," Berg recalls thinking. "Is there a way to scale it up here?" Nissan agreed to ship him a bidirectional charger, and Berg called Utrecht city planners, saying he wanted to install a cable for it. That led to more contacts, including at the company managing the local low-voltage grid, Stedin. After he installed his charger, Stedin engineers wanted to know why his meter sometimes ran backward. Later, Irene ten Dam at the Utrecht regional development agency got wind of his experiment and was intrigued, becoming an advocate for bidirectional charging. Berg and the people working for the city who liked what he was doing attracted further partners, including Stedin, software developers, and a charging-station manufacturer. By 2019, Willem-Alexander, king of the Netherlands, was presiding over the installation of a bidirectional charging station in Utrecht. "With both the city and the grid operator, the great thing is, they are always looking for ways to scale up," Berg says. They don't just want to do a project and do a report on it, he says. They really want to get to the next step. Those next steps are taking place at a quickening pace. Utrecht now has 800 bidirectional chargers designed and manufactured by the Dutch engineering firm NieuweWeme. The city will soon need many more. The number of charging stations in Utrecht has risen sharply over the past decade. "People are buying more and more electric cars," says Eerenberg, the alderman. City officials noticed a surge in such purchases in recent years, only to hear complaints from Utrechters that they then had to go through a long application process to have a charger installed where they could use it. Eerenberg, a computer scientist by training, is still working to unwind these knots. He realizes that the city has to go faster if it is to meet the Dutch government's mandate for all new cars to be zero-emission in eight years. The amount of energy being used to charge EVs in Utrecht has skyrocketed in recent years. Although similar mandates to put more zero-emission vehicles on the road in New York and California failed in the past, the pressure for vehicle electrification is higher now. And Utrecht city officials want to get ahead of demand for greener transportation solutions. This is a city that just built a central underground parking garage for 12,500 bicycles and spent years digging up a freeway that ran through the center of town, replacing it with a canal in the name of clean air and healthy urban living. A driving force in shaping these changes is Matthijs Kok, the city's energy-transition manager. He took me on a tour--by bicycle, naturally--of Utrecht's new green infrastructure, pointing to some recent additions, like a stationary battery designed to store solar energy from the many panels slated for installation at a local public housing development. This map of Utrecht shows the city's EV-charging infrastructure. Orange dots are the locations of existing charging stations; red dots denote charging stations under development. Green dots are possible sites for future charging stations. "This is why we all do it," Kok says, stepping away from his propped-up bike and pointing to a brick shed that houses a 400-kilowatt transformer. These transformers are the final link in the chain that runs from the power-generating plant to high-tension wires to medium-voltage substations to low-voltage transformers to people's kitchens. There are thousands of these transformers in a typical city. But if too many electric cars in one area need charging, transformers like this can easily become overloaded. Bidirectional charging promises to ease such problems. Kok works with others in city government to compile data and create maps, dividing the city into neighborhoods. Each one is annotated with data on population, types of households, vehicles, and other data. Together with a contracted data-science group, and with input from ordinary citizens, they developed a policy-driven algorithm to help pick the best locations for new charging stations. The city also included incentives for deploying bidirectional chargers in its 10-year contracts with vehicle charge-station operators. So, in these chargers went. Experts expect bidirectional charging to work particularly well for vehicles that are part of a fleet whose movements are predictable. In such cases, an operator can readily program when to charge and discharge a car's battery. We Drive Solar earns credit by sending battery power from its fleet to the local grid during times of peak demand and charges the cars' batteries back up during off-peak hours. If it does that well, drivers don't lose any range they might need when they pick up their cars. And these daily energy trades help to keep prices down for subscribers. Encouraging car-sharing schemes like We Drive Solar appeals to Utrecht officials because of the struggle with parking--a chronic ailment common to most growing cities. A huge construction site near the Utrecht city center will soon add 10,000 new apartments. Additional housing is welcome, but 10,000 additional cars would not be. Planners want the ratio to be more like one car for every 10 households--and the amount of dedicated public parking in the new neighborhoods will reflect that goal. This photograph shows four parked vehicles, each with the words \ u201cWe Drive Solar\u201d prominently displayed, and each plugged into a charge point.Some of the cars available from We Drive Solar, including these Hyundai Ioniq 5s, are capable of bidirectional charging.We Drive Solar Projections for the large-scale electrification of transportation in Europe are daunting. According to a Eurelectric/Deloitte report, there could be 50 million to 70 million electric vehicles in Europe by 2030, requiring several million new charging points, bidirectional or otherwise. Power-distribution grids will need hundreds of billions of euros in investment to support these new stations. The morning before Eerenberg sat down with me at city hall to explain Utrecht's charge-station planning algorithm, war broke out in Ukraine. Energy prices now strain many households to the breaking point. Gasoline has reached $6 a gallon (if not more) in some places in the United States. In Germany in mid-June, the driver of a modest VW Golf had to pay about EUR100 (more than $100) to fill the tank. In the U.K., utility bills shot up on average by more than 50 percent on the first of April. The war upended energy policies across the European continent and around the world, focusing people's attention on energy independence and security, and reinforcing policies already in motion, such as the creation of emission-free zones in city centers and the replacement of conventional cars with electric ones. How best to bring about the needed changes is often unclear, but modeling can help. Nico Brinkel, who is working on his doctorate in Wilfried van Sark's photovoltaics-integration lab at Utrecht University, focuses his models at the local level. In his calculations, he figures that, in and around Utrecht, low-voltage grid reinforcements cost about EUR17,000 per transformer and about EUR100,000 per kilometer of replacement cable. "If we are moving to a fully electrical system, if we're adding a lot of wind energy, a lot of solar, a lot of heat pumps, a lot of electric vehicles...," his voice trails off. "Our grid was not designed for this." But the electrical infrastructure will have to keep up. One of Brinkel's studies suggests that if a good fraction of the EV chargers are bidirectional, such costs could be spread out in a more manageable way. "Ideally, I think it would be best if all of the new chargers were bidirectional," he says. "The extra costs are not that high." Berg doesn't need convincing. He has been thinking about what bidirectional charging offers the whole of the Netherlands. He figures that 1.5 million EVs with bidirectional capabilities--in a country of 8 million cars--would balance the national grid. "You could do anything with renewable energy then," he says. Seeing that his country is starting with just hundreds of cars capable of bidirectional charging, 1.5 million is a big number. But one day, the Dutch might actually get there. This article appears in the August 2022 print issue as "A Road Test for Vehicle-to-Grid Tech." From Your Site Articles * Korean Island Plans for All Cars to Be Electric by 2030 - IEEE ... > * Ford, Volkswagen, and GM Explore EV-Powered Houses - IEEE ... > * Ford's 2021 F-150 Pickup Is a Mobile Power Station - IEEE Spectrum > Related Articles Around the Web * Vehicle-to-grid - Wikipedia > * Vehicle-to-grid technology is revving up | Greenbiz > * What Is Vehicle-to-Grid for Electric Vehicles? | EV Connect -- EV ... > Keep Reading |Show less