Tuesday, 15 July, 2025 / Edition 67

They say necessity is the mother of inventions, and I think the world could learn a lot from Pakistani farmers who are innovating out of necessity by combining traditional power sources with new(er) power sources. 

There are also some cool—well, I guess not so cool since they moved it out of cryogenic conditions—innovations going on with quantum materials that could alleviate the pain we’ve all felt when we’re trying to load data or run complicated models. Let’s dig in!

Sarah Compton

Editor, Enspired

When Reliability Means Going Off-Grid

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Although large-scale solar deployments exist and are growing, I generally see solar shining in smaller scale applications.

Small, but mighty: Solar panels on homes and individual pieces of electronics have slowly coalesced to become an underappreciated, and perhaps unaccounted for, piece of our global energy pie.

In the United States, reliability and the cost of plugging into the grid are aspects of power we rarely think about. We plug our homes into the grid, pay for our use, and go about our day, though a small (but growing) cadre of intrepid citizens prioritize generating their own energy.

Driving the news: In developing countries, citizens are getting their hands on tech to power their homes and farms more reliably and cost effectively, and they have the unboxing TikToks to prove it.

Background:

• Rolling blackouts are common in Pakistan, and people can experience a combination of higher prices with lower reliability, driving them to find alternative solutions.

• In Pakistan, it’s estimated that an additional 75 percent of the country’s total installed grid capacity arrived via solar panels during the last five years.

What’s new: Most of the solar power is not for utility-scale solar farms: It’s going on roofs, barns, and over irrigation canals or dead farming fields.

Pump it up: In rural areas of Pakistan, where agriculture rules the day, but rains do not, Pakistani groundwater pumps are also being converted to solar.

Supplement not supplant: None of this means these folks are eliminating diesel generators: They are supplementing those diesel systems with solar to drive down fuel costs and improve efficiency.

Why it matters:

• Here, we see individuals outpacing “the man.” Necessity is driving innovation, rather than government subsidies or policy shifts.

• It’s an embodiment of a concept most of us intuitively know and acutely feel: Removing energy sources is unlikely to be an option for quite a while and, in the meantime, finding great pairings is the answer.

Here come the geos: Materials for solar panels and batteries will be key here, and the mineral exploration world is opening up. Rightfully so, as conditions in many rare earth mines are not ones that would give any OSHA inspector warm fuzzies. Perhaps us geoscientists are due for a little moment ourselves.

To learn more about the fascinating developments of solar use in Pakistan, check out this podcast.

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The Heat and Switch

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There’s always been a trade-off between any model’s accuracy and the time it takes to run such a model, but those days might be over.

Enter, quantum…controlled states, that is.

The standard laws of physics don’t apply to two things: a child getting ready for school who moves slower than you’d ever think possible, and quantum materials.

Finding the limit: For decades, we’ve used silicon semiconductors to connect conductive and insulating materials inside computers (so your machine can have high processing power without overheating).

These materials have done the job pretty well, but we’re reaching their physical limits, which means the clock speeds of our processors might be reaching a peak.

Driving the news: Quantum mechanics control the behavior of quantum materials, and by controlling the temperature of a layered quantum material called 1T-TaS2, researchers were able to instantly shift between conduction and insulation.

• Previous work on what researchers call “thermal quenching,” had switched 1T-TaS2 between conductor and insulator successfully, but at cryogenic temperatures and only for seconds at a time.

• Recently, however, one team has been able to achieve such a switch for months at a time and at temperatures that won’t require us all to dress like we’re working in an ice core lab.

Why it matters: Their thermal quenching technique could make our machines up to 1,000 times faster by enabling fine and precise control of electronic states in quantum materials.

What they’re saying: “One of the grand challenges is, how do you control material properties at will?” says Gregory Fiete, one of the researchers, and a professor at Northeastern University. “What we're shooting for is the highest level of control over material properties. We want it to do something very fast, with a very certain outcome, because that's the sort of thing that can be then exploited in a device.”

For more information on the speedy breakthrough, read here.

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