Tuesday, 18 February 2025 / Edition 46

I went to Florida last weekend, and of course we had to stop by the Kennedy Space Center ONE DAY after Space-X launched one of their rockets. Super sad face, but I’m perking myself up by staying on top of some cool innovations in fusion as well as a combination I personally love: sun and water. Let’s get to it!

Sarah Compton

Editor, Enspired

When Hydro Met Solar

Bombermoon/Shutterstock.com

Like anything, solar power has its pros and cons. One con is the land use: If land is being used for solar panels, there’s not much else for which it can be used.

One way to mitigate that downside is to put solar panels over water, but for that to happen:

• The water can’t be too cold. It’s not a mullet with business in the front and a party in the back: Steady temps are needed throughout.

• The water can’t be used for shipping, since the wakes from boats can damage mooring lines or negatively impact float infrastructure.

• Reservoirs can’t be too shallow or have steeply sloping bottoms that make securing the panels difficult.

New study alert: With those must-haves in mind, Evan Rosenlieb and Marie Rivers, geospatial scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), and Aaron Levine, a senior legal and regulatory analyst at NREL, crunched some numbers and found that federal reservoirs could host enough floating solar panels to generate up to 1,476 terawatt hours—enough energy to power approximately 100 million homes per year.

A couple caveats:

• That energy estimation is technically potential energy

• It’s known that not all “available” space can be developed, but developing even a fraction of that could go a long way.

• Water evaporation and heating have been a concern with climate change, but the panels keep the water cool and protect from evaporation.

Why it matters: There seems to be an opportunity to put these solar arrays over hydropower reservoirs to get hydro and solar power from the same area. Woot!

Concerns: I do have some concerns, however, and my biggest one revolves around environmental impact(s).

Solar panels can be made of some scientifically cool, but ecologically nasty stuff. What protections are in place for the water quality of these reservoirs?

There are a lot of logistics to figure out here, and our geoscience expertise will surely come in handy for the research needed to make this work.

You can find more info here.

A Message From AAPG Academy and AWS for Energy and Utilities

Join AAPG Academy and Amazon Web Services for Energy and Utilities for a free upcoming webinar on 27 February at 9am CST to learn more about how cutting-edge AI applications are empowering geoscientists to drive critical business decisions. 

Entitled From Data to Discovery: AI's Game-Changing Role in Geoscience, the webinar will showcase a presentation from expert speaker Chris Hanton, product lead-energy data insights AI and HPC application at AWS. Hanton will discuss how industry leaders are:

• Using AI to transform complex data into actionable insights
• Streamline workflows
• Solve real-world challenges

Fusion Reactor Design Continues to Evolve

Koni_film/Shutterstock.com

You all know I enjoy some fusion: there was a great place in Tuscaloosa that was Asian and Mexican fusion…so good.

OK. That’s not the kind of fusion I mean here, but there are certainly plenty of breakthroughs in the energy fusion space to keep me busy.

The latest one involves louvers (and no, that’s not a fancy misspelling of lovers).

So, what is it? Most of us know a louver as those things over the vents in our house that control the temperature in the room via regulating air flow.

Folks at Commonweath Fusion Systems (CFS) are developing a tokamak called SPARC and found that louvers might come in handy.

What the company did:

• CFS teamed up with researchers at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) to develop simulation capabilities that will address design issues for SPARC.

• One such design issue is how to allow a power-producing fusion plasma to reach a temperature at its center that is hotter than the core of the sun, while maintaining a temperature at the plasma edge that is cool enough to avoid vaporizing the fusion device.

• Louvers were found to create local conditions that reduced the plasma edge temperatures by allowing the hot plasma to “detach” from the walls of the device, spreading out the heat.

• To predict the actuators’ ability to control the plasma, ORNL developed new methods to run a major simulation code, SOLPS-ITER, in a dynamic, time-dependent manner, focused on the actuator design.

• The SOLPS-ITER code models plasma and neutral transport in the boundary region of fusion devices and has been used to design plasma-facing components for many tokamaks, including the multinational ITER device under construction in France.

Trend alert: If you’re not watching what’s happening with fusion and nuclear, you should be. Big Tech is making big investments in nuclear fusion in the hopes it will power the data centers needed for AI-driven tech. These moves could take some of the world’s biggest companies off the regulated grid, raising questions around monopoly issues and compliance.

On the plus side, companies are innovating rapidly around this clean and reliable source of energy and its design components, and it’s exciting to see where that might take us!

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✉️ To get in touch with Sarah or suggest a topic for Enspired, send an email to editorial@aapg.org.