Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has exacerbated a number of fault lines already present within the global energy supply chain. This is especially true in Europe, where many countries were reliant on the superstate's natural resources, and are now hastily looking to cut ties before the supply is shut off. This has revealed the fragility of Europe’s energy market, and caused it to drive up demand and prices for consumers all over the globe.

In the UK, things are becoming increasingly dire and energy prices are skyrocketing. Bad planning on the infrastructure side and the cancellation of several major domestic energy efficiency programs are exacerbating the problem. It’s clear that real, useful action on the national level isn’t coming any time soon. So, I wondered, what would happen if I, personally, simply tried to break up with natural gas on my own? It’s relatively straightforward but, as it turns out, it comes at a cost that only one percenters will be able to bear. 

Dan Cooper: Energy consumer

I live in a four-bedroom, end-terraced house that’s around 150 years old and I’ve tried, as best as I can, to renovate it in an eco-friendly way. Since we bought it almost a decade ago, my wife and I have insulated most of the rooms, installed a new gas central heating system and hot water cylinder. We are, like nearly 20 million other households in the UK, reliant on natural gas to supply our home heating, hot water and cooking. And in the period between January 8th and April 7th, 2022, I was billed on the following usage:

Essentially, I paid around $1,300 for my natural gas and electricity in the first quarter of 2022. That figure is likely to rise significantly, as the UK’s mandatory price cap on energy rose by more than 50 percent in April. A further price rise is scheduled for October, with the figure set at £2,800 per year, even though wholesale energy prices are no longer increasing. It’s likely that my energy bill for the first quarter of 2023 will be nearly twice what I’ve just paid. In 2020, the UK reported that 3.16 million households were unable to pay for their energy costs; that figure is likely to leap by 2023.

In the US, the EIA says that monthly utility bills rose to a national average of $122 in 2021, with Hawaii ($178 per month) and Utah ($82 per month) the most expensive and cheapest state to buy energy in. The average price per kWh is around 13.7 cents, which is less than half the comparable price in the UK as it currently stands. For natural gas, the average natural gas price for residential customers was $10.84 per thousand cubic feet in 2020.

The gas problem

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Much of Europe is reliant on natural gas, a significant proportion of which was supplied by Russia. Despite a rapid decline in domestic production, Europe sought to make natural gas the bedrock of its energy policy in the medium term. A 2013 policy paper written by Sami Andoura and Clémentine d’Oultremont outlined the reasons why officials were banking on it. “An economically attractive option for investors, a potential backup source for renewables and the cleanest fossil fuel, natural gas is expected to play an important role in the European transition towards a low-carbon economy by 2050.” This is despite the fact that “European energy resources are being depleted, and energy demand is growing.”

In 2007, then EU Energy Commissioner Andris Piebalgs said that the bloc is “dependent on imports for over one half of our energy use.” He added that energy security is a “European security issue,” and that the bloc was vulnerable to disruption. “In 10 years, from 1995 to 2005, natural gas consumption in the EU countries has increased from 369 billion to 510 billion m3 [of gas] year,” he said. He added that the EU’s own production capacity and reserves peaked in the year 2000.

The EU’s plan was to pivot toward Liquified Natural Gas (LNG), methane which has been filtered and cooled to a liquid for easier transportation. It enables energy supplies from further afield to be brought over to Europe to satisfy the continent’s need for natural gas. But the invasion of Ukraine by Russia has meant that this transition has now needed to be accelerated as leaders swear off Russian-sourced gas and oil. And while the plan is to push more investment into renewables, LNG imports are expected to fill much of the gap for now.

Except, and this is crucial, many of the policy decisions made during this period seem to be in the belief that nothing bad would, or could, disrupt supply. Here in the UK, wholesale gas prices have risen five times since the start of 2021 but there’s very little infrastructure available to mitigate price fluctuations. 

The Rough Field is a region in the North Sea situated 18 miles off the coast of Yorkshire, and was previously a source of natural gas for the UK. In 1985, however, it was converted into a natural gas storage facility with a capacity of 3.31 billion cubic meters. This one facility was able to fulfill the country’s energy needs for a little more than a week at a time and was considered a key asset to maintaining the UK’s energy security.

However, Centrica, the private company spun out of the former state-owned British Gas, opted to close the field in 2017. It cited safety fears and the high cost of repair as justification for the move, saying that alternative sources of gas – in the form of LNG – were available. At the time, one gas trader told Bloomberg that the closure would “boost winter prices” and “create seasonal swings in wholesale energy costs.” He added that the UK would now be “competing with Asia for winter gas cargoes,” raising prices and increasing reliance on these shipments. 

And, unsurprisingly, the ramifications of this decision were felt in the summer of 2017 when a pair of LNG tankers from Qatar changed course. The vessels were going to the UK, and when they shifted direction, Bloomberg reported that prices started to shift upward almost instantly. 

Analysis from TransitionZero, reported by The Guardian, says that the costs associated with natural gas are now so high that it’s no longer worth investing in as a “transition fuel.” It says that the cost to switch from coal to gas is around $235 per ton of CO2, compared to just $62 for renewables as well as the necessary battery storage.

Swearing off gas

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In order to break up with gas in my own home, I’ll need to swap out my stovetop (not so hard) and my whole central heating system (pretty hard). The former I can likely achieve for a few hundred dollars, plus or minus the cost of installation. (Some units just plug in to a standard wall socket, so I may be able to do much of the work myself if I’m feeling up to the task.) Of course, getting a professional to unpick the gas pipeline that connects to my stovetop is going to be harder. 

Unfortunately, replacing a 35kW condensing gas boiler (I have the Worcester Bosch Greenstar 35CDi) is going to be a lot harder. The obvious choice is an Air Source Heat Pump (ASHP), or even a geothermal Ground Source Heat Pump (GSHP), both of which are more environmentally-friendly. After all, both are more energy-efficient than a gas boiler, and both run on electricity which is theoretically cleaner.

More generally, the UK’s Energy Saving Trust, a Government-backed body with a mission to advocate for energy efficiency, says that the average Briton should expect to pay between £7,000 and £13,000 to install an ASHP. Much of that figure is dependent on how much of your home’s existing hardware you’ll need to replace. A GSHP is even more expensive, with the price starting at £14,000 and rising to closer to £20,000 depending on both your home’s existing plumbing and the need to dig a bore hole outside. 

In my case, heat pump specialists told me that, give or take whatever nasties were found during installation, I could expect to pay up to £27,000 ($33,493). This included a new ASHP, radiators, hot water and buffer cylinders, pumps, piping, controllers, parts and labor. Mercifully, the UK is launching a scheme to offer a £5,000 ($6,200) discount on any new heat pump installations. But that still means that I’m paying north of £20,000 (and ripping out a lot of existing materials with plenty of life left in them) to make the switch. 

In the US, there’s plenty of difference on a state level, but at the federal level, you can get a tax credit on the purchase of a qualifying GSHP. A system installed before January 1st, 2023, will earn a 26 percent credit, while a unit running before January 1st, 2024, will be eligible for a 22 percent credit. Purchasers of a qualifying ASHP, meanwhile, were entitled to a $300 tax credit until the end of 2021. 

The contractors also provided me with a calculation of my potential energy savings over the following seven years. It turns out that I’d actually be spending £76 more on fuel per month, and £532 over the whole period. On one hand, if I had the cash to spare, it’s a small price to pay to dramatically reduce my personal carbon emissions. On the other, I was hoping that the initial investment would help me reduce costs overall, but that's not the case while the cost of gas is (ostensibly) cheaper than electricity. (This will, of course, change as energy prices surge in 2023, however, but I can only look at the data as it presently stands.)

An aside: To be honest with you all, I was fully aware that the economic case for installing a heat pump was always going to be a shaky one. When speaking to industry figures last year, they said that the conversation around “payback” isn’t shared when installing standard gas boilers. It doesn’t help that, at present, levies on energy mean that natural gas is subsidized more than energy, disincentivizing people making the switch. The rise of electric cars, too, has meant that demand for power is going to increase sharply as more people switch, forcing greater investment in generation. What’s required just as urgent is a series of measures to promote energy efficiency to reduce overall demand for both gas and electricity. 

Energy efficiency

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The UK has had an on-again, off-again relationship with climate change mitigation measures, which has helped sow the seeds of this latest crisis. The country, with low winter temperatures, relies almost exclusively on natural gas to heat its homes, its largest energy-consuming sector. As I reported last year, around 85 percent of UK homes are heated by burning natural gas in domestic boilers. 

Work to reduce the UK’s extraordinary demand for natural gas was sabotaged by government in 2013. In 2009, under the previous Labour government, a series of levies on energy companies were introduced under the Community Energy Saving Programme. These levies were added to domestic energy bills, with the proceeds funding works to install wall or roof insulation, as well as energy-efficient heating systems and heating controllers for people on low incomes. The idea was to reduce demand for gas by making homes, and the systems that heated them, far more efficient since most of the UK’s housing stock was insufficiently insulated when built. 

But in 2013, then-Conservative-Prime Minister David Cameron was reportedly quoted as saying that he wanted to reduce the cost of domestic energy bills by getting “rid of all the green crap.” At the time, The Guardian reported that while the wording was not corroborated by government officials, the sentiment was. Essentially, that meant scrapping the levies, which at the time GreenBusinessWatch said was around eight percent of the total cost of domestic energy. Cameron’s administration also scrapped a plan to build zero-carbon homes, and effectively banned the construction of onshore windfarms which would have helped reduce the cost of domestic electricity generation. 

In 2021, the UK’s Committee on Climate Change examined the fallout from this decision, saying that Cameron’s decision kneecapped efforts to reduce demand for natural gas. As Carbon Brief highlighted at the start of 2022, in 2012, there were nearly 2.5 million energy efficiency improvements installed. By 2013, that figure had fallen to just 292,593. The drop off, the Committee on Climate Change believes, has caused insulation installations to fall to “only a third of the rate needed by 2021” to meet the national targets for curbing climate emissions. 

Carbon Brief’s report suggests that the financial savings missed by the elimination of these small levies – the “green crap,” – has cost UK households around £2.5 billion. In recent years, a pressure group – Insulate Britain – has undertaken protests at major traffic intersections to help highlight the need for a new retrofit program to be launched. The current government’s response to their pleas has been to call for tougher criminal penalties for protesters including a jail term of up to six months.

Carbon Brief

Making my own power

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Looking back through my energy bills over the last few years, my household’s annual electricity consumption is around 4,500kWh per year. A heat pump would likely add a further 6,000kWh to my energy bill, not to mention any additional cost for switching to all-electric cooking. It would be sensible to see if I could generate some, or all, of my own energy at home using solar panels to help reduce the potential bill costs. 

The Energy Saving Trust says that the average homeowner can expect to pay £6,500 for a 4.2kWp system on the roof of their home. Environmental factors such as the country you live in and orientation of your property mean you can’t be certain how much power you’ll get out of a specific solar panel, but we can make educated guesses. For instance, the UK’s Renewable Energy Hub says you can expect to get around 850kW per year out of a 1kW system. For a theoretical 5kWp system in my location, the Energy Saving Trust thinks I’ll be able to generate around 4,581kWh per year. 

Sadly, I live in an area where, even though my roof is brand new and strong enough to take panels, they aren’t allowed. This is because it is an area of “architectural or historic interest where the character and appearance [of the area] needs to be protected or improved.” Consequently, I needed to explore work to ground-mount solar panels in my back garden, which gets plenty of sunlight. 

While I expected grounded panel installations to be much cheaper, they apparently aren’t. Two contractors I spoke to said that while their average roof-based installation is between £5,000 and £7,000, a 6kWp system on the ground would cost closer to £20,000. It would be, in fact, cheaper to build a sturdy shed in the bit of back yard I had my eye on and install a solar system on top of there, compared to just getting the mounting set up on the ground. That’s likely to spool out the cost even further, and that’s before we get to the point of talking about battery storage. 

The bill

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For this rather nifty thought experiment, the cost for me to be able to walk away from natural gas entirely would be north of £30,000 ($37,000). Given that the average UK salary is roughly £38,000, it’s a sum that is beyond the reach of most people without taking out a hefty loan. This is, fundamentally, why the need for government action is so urgent, since it is certainly beyond the ability of most people to achieve this change on their own. 

In fact, it’s going to require significant movement from central government not just in the UK but elsewhere to really shake our love-hate relationship with natural gas. Unfortunately, given that it’s cheap, cleaner than coal and the energy lobby has plenty of muscle behind it, that’s not likely to happen soon. And so we’re stuck in a trap – it’s too expensive to do it ourselves (although that’ll certainly be an interesting experiment to undertake) and there’s no help coming, despite the energy crisis that’s unfurling around us.

Roughly 25 percent (23.4 percent to be exact) of the Earth’s sea floor has been mapped, thanks to an international initiative known as Seabed 2030. Relying largely on voluntary contributions of bathymetric data (or ocean topography) by governments, companies and research institutions, the project is part of a larger UN-led initiative called The Ocean Decade. Seabed 2030 hopes to map 100 percent of the ocean floor by 2030, which researchers say will be possible thanks to advances in technology and corralling already available data. Over the past year alone, Seabed 2030 has added measurements for around 3.8 million square miles (roughly the size of Europe) primarily through newly opened archives, rather than active mapping efforts.

Scientists believe collecting more bathymetric data will help further our understanding of climate change and ocean preservation efforts. Ocean floor mapping also helps in the detection of tsunamis and other natural disasters. “A complete map of the ocean floor is the missing tool that will enable us to tackle some of the most pressing environmental challenges of our time, including climate change and marine pollution. It will enable us to safeguard the planet’s future,” said Mitsuyuki Unno, executive director of The Nippon Foundation in a press release. 

As the BBC notes, much of the data used in Seabed 2030 already existed. The group largely relies on contributions from governments and companies, though some of these entities are still reluctant to completely open up their archives for fear of spilling national or trade secrets. 

All the data that Seabed 2030 is collecting will be available to the public online on the GEBCO (General Bathymetric Chart of the Oceans) global grid. Prior to Seabed 2030, very little directly measured ocean floor data was available for public use. Most bathymetric measurements are estimated using satellite altimeter readings, which give a very rough idea of the shape of the sea floor surface. Some scientists believe a global effort to locate the crash of Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 would have been better informed by newer, more precise methods to chart the ocean floor.

Last year, hurricanes hammered the Southern and Eastern US coasts at the cost of more than 160 lives and $70 billion in damages. Thanks to climate change, it's only going to get worse. In order to quickly and accurately predict these increasingly severe weather patterns, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) announced Tuesday that it has effectively tripled its supercomputing (and therefore weather modelling) capacity with the addition of two high-performance computing (HPC) systems built by General Dynamics.

“This is a big day for NOAA and the state of weather forecasting,” Ken Graham, director of NOAA’s National Weather Service, said in a press statement. “Researchers are developing new ensemble-based forecast models at record speed, and now we have the computing power needed to implement many of these substantial advancements to improve weather and climate prediction.”

General Dynamics was awarded the $505 million contract back in 2020 and delivered the two computers, dubbed Dogwood and Cactus, to their respective locations in Manassas, Virginia, and Phoenix, Arizona. They'll replace a pair of older Cray and IBM systems in Reston, Virginia, and Orlando, Florida.

Each HPC operates at 12.1 petaflops or, "a quadrillion calculations per second with 26 petabytes of storage," Dave Michaud, Director, National Weather Service Office of Central Processing, said during a press call Tuesday morning. That's "three times the computing capacity and double the storage capacity compared to our previous systems... These systems are amongst the fastest in the world today, currently ranked at number 49 and 50." Combined with its other supercomputers in West Virginia, Tennessee, Mississippi and Colorado, the NOAA wields a full 42 petaflops of capacity. 

With this extra computational horsepower, the NOAA will be able to create higher-resolution models with more realistic physics — and generate more of them with a higher degree of model certainty, Brian Gross, Director, NOAA’s Environmental Modeling Center, explained during the call. This should result in more accurate forecasts and longer lead times for storm warnings.

"The new supercomputers will also allow significant upgrades to specific modeling systems in the coming years," Gross said. "This includes a new hurricane forecast model named the Hurricane Analysis and Forecast System, which is slated to be in operation at the start of the 2023 hurricane season," and will replace the existing H4 hurricane weather research and forecasting model.

While the NOAA hasn't yet confirmed in absolute terms how much of an improvement the new supercomputers will grant to the agency's weather modelling efforts, Ken Graham, the Director of National Weather Service, is convinced of their value. 

"To translate what these new supercomputers will mean for for the average American," he said during the press call, "we are currently developing models that will be able to provide additional lead time in the outbreak of severe weather events and more accurately track the intensity forecasts for hurricanes, both in the ocean and that are expected to hit landfall, and we want to have longer lead times [before they do]."

EV startup Lightyear debuted its first solar-powered vehicle this week, a sleek sedan called the Lightyear 0. The company gave us a peek at a production prototype of Lightyear 0 in 2019, and at first glance, not much has changed. The car is essentially an unconventional hybrid equipped with both a conventional 60-kilowatt-hour EV battery pack and solar panels on its roof, hood and hatch. The solar panels on the Lightyear 0 will charge automatically whenever the car is exposed to the sun — it doesn’t matter if it’s parked or driving.

The Lightyear 0 isn’t as much solar-powered as solar-assisted. In order to drive for long distances, the vehicle has to tap into its battery reserve. The car’s solar panels can provide 44 miles of range per day in a sunny climate, whereas its EV range is 388 miles. But for drivers with exceptionally short commutes or those who need their vehicle infrequently, the Lightyear 0 could allow them to no longer spend money on gas or charging. The company claims that those with a daily commute of 22 miles can drive the Lightyear 0 for two straight months in the Netherlands summer without needing to charge. Drivers in sunnier climates can go for longer. Lightyear claims that the sun can provide the Lightyear 0 with anywhere between 3,700 to 6,800 miles of range annually.

It’s important to note that Lightyear 0 owners will need to drive for a significantly long time in order to justify the vehicle's purchase as a cost-saving measure. The Lightyear 0 will cost €250,000 (which amounts to roughly $263,262 USD), and the company only plans on making 946 units. But a more reasonably-priced vehicle is on the way. Lightyear recently also unveiled a prototype of a $33,000 solar-powered car, which is scheduled to go into production by 2025.

New York lawmakers have passed a bill that would temporarily ban new bitcoin mining operations. Early on Friday, state senators voted 36-27 to pass the legislation. It's now bound for the desk of Governor Kathy Hochul, who will sign it into law or veto the bill. The law would come into effect immediately after it's signed.

An attempt to enact similar legislation last year hit a wall when the New York State Senate passed it but Assembly members did not. The latest bill passed the Assembly in April.

The legislation seeks to establish a two-year moratorium on licenses for cryptocurrency mining operations that use power-hungry proof-of-work authentication methods for validating blockchain transactions. Right now, bitcoin and ethereum (the two largest cryptocurrencies) fall under that category, though the latter is shifting to a different setup.

The moratorium only covers mining operations that run on carbon-based power sources. Any that harness entirely renewable energy sources or an alternative to proof of work that requires less power won't be affected. Existing operations and those already going through a permit renewal process won't be impacted either.

While the moratorium is in place, New York will carry out a study into the environmental impact of proof-of-work authentication methods, per the bill. As CNBC notes, New York has ambitious climate goals that require the state's greenhouse gas emissions to be reduced by 85 percent by 2050 under the Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act.

New York became a hotbed for crypto mining operations in part due to its plentiful hydroelectricity, low electricity prices and cooler climate than other areas of the US (which means less energy is needed to cool mining hardware). 

Some mining companies have threatened to leave New York due to regulatory uncertainty and set up shop in more crypto-friendly states. Even so, crypto proponents have suggested that, given New York's status as a legislative leader, other states could follow suit with similar regulations. 

Meanwhile, the Biden administration is working on a policy regarding bitcoin mining. The White House is looking into the impact of such technology on greenhouse gas emissions.

One of the myriad issues with hydrogen as a clean energy source is infrastructure, as it's very expensive to move around and store an extremely explosive gas. Toyota and its subsidiary Woven Planet believe they may have a solution with a new portable hydrogen cartridge prototype. The idea is that they can be filled up at a dedicated facility, transported where needed, then returned when you receive your next shipment. 

The cartridges would be relatively small at 16 inches long, 7 inches in diameter and about 11 pounds in weight. Toyota calls them "portable, affordable, and convenient energy that makes it possible to bring hydrogen to where people live, work, and play without the use of pipes.. [and] swappable for easy replacement and quick charging." 

They could be useful for "mobility [i.e. hydrogen cars], household applications, and many future possibilities we have yet to imagine," Toyota said. It didn't mention any specific uses, but it said that "one hydrogen cartridge is assumed to generate enough electricity to operate a typical household microwave for approximately 3-4 hours."

In its press release, Toyota acknowledges that most hydrogen is made from fossil fuels and so not exactly green. But it thinks that it'll be generated with low carbon emissions in the future, and that the cartridges could help with some of the infrastructure issues. 

Toyota plans to test that theory by conducting proof of concept trials in various places, including its "human-centered smart city of the future," Woven City in Susono City, Zhizuoka Prefecture in Japan. The company is also "working to build a comprehensive hydrogen-based supply chain aimed at expediting and simplifying production, transport, and daily usage," it said. 

Hydrogen is an impractical fuel for automobiles, mainly due to the expense and lack of places to refuel. It's more viable for things like trains and semi trucks, where electrification can be more of a challenge. It also holds promise for air transportation, as batteries are too heavy to be practical in that situation. However, Toyota seems to be pitching the cartridges for personal and home use, but it's not yet clear what you'd use them for. 

Atlassian co-founder Mike Cannon-Brookes just scored a major coup in his quest to end Australia's use of coal energy. The Wall Street Journalreports AGL Energy, Australia's worst emissions producer, has withdrawn plans to 'demerge' its retail power and generation units (thus keeping coal power plants running longer) after Cannon-Brookes bought over 11 percent of the company's stock. The breakup plan is unlikely to pass a shareholder vote after the tech executive's move, AGL said.

Both the chairman and CEO of AGL are stepping down as a result of the failed demerger. The board of directors is also conducting a review of the company's strategy, and plans broader changes to the board as well as overall management. The directors want to deliver the best value in light of "Australia's energy transition," the company added.

Cannon-Brookes hopes AGL can shut down the coal plants about 10 years sooner than the company's 2045 goal. He originally tried to buy AGL outright with help from Canadian investment giant Brookfield Asset Management, but resorted to buying stock after the energy provider rejected the offers.

The Atlassian exec's renewable energy push began in 2017, when he learned of Tesla's proposal to end southern Australian blackouts using large-scale battery storage. He has long singled out AGL as a target. According to Cannon-Brookes, AGL represents about 8 percent of Australia's greenhouse gas emissions. That's more than every car in the country, and more than some entire developed countries.

The stock ploy won't guarantee that AGL shuts down its coal plants ahead of schedule. Still, it's a relatively unique effort in the tech world to accelerate the shift toward clean energy. Companies like Amazon, Apple, Google and others have generally focused on reducing their own emissions by either buying renewables or installing solar and wind power at their facilities — Atlassian's co-creator is trying to engineer change across an entire country.

Ford has begun deliveries of the F-150 Lightning. The first customer to get their hands on the electric pickup is Nicholas Schmidt, who lives in the automaker's home state of Michigan, around a two-hour drive from the F-150 Lightning plant in Dearborn. Ford started full production of the EV there last month.

The EV is replacing a gas-powered F-150, Schmidt told Bloomberg. Schmidt, who also owns a Tesla Model 3, said he had considered buying a Rivian R1T and also placed a reservation for a Tesla Cybertruck. He said whichever electric pickup he was able to order first would be the one he bought. After taking delivery of the F-150, Schmidt cancelled his Cybertruck reservation.

Ford said at the beginning of this month it would start delivering the F-150 Lightning "in the coming days." While it's not the first automaker to deliver an electric pickup in the US (Rivian started doing so last year), it beat Tesla to the punch.

It had a leg up on Tesla in this market anyway, as the F-150 has been the best-selling vehicle in the US for the last four decades. Case in point: it received nearly 45,000 pre-orders for the Lightning in just 48 hours. Given that the Cybertruck won't go on sale until next year, both Ford and Rivian have a shot at building up a significant share of the electric truck market long before Tesla gets the Cybertruck into the wild. 

Starting later this year, NVIDIA will begin selling a liquid-cooled version of its A100 GPU for data centers. The GPU maker is positioning the video card as a way for cloud computing companies to make their facilities more energy-efficient. It may seem unintuitive, but by adding a water block to the component, data centers can reduce their dependence on inefficient air- and water-based chillers.

In testing, NVIDIA claims a facility outfitted with its water-cooled A100 GPUs ran the same workload as an air-cooled data center while using about 30 percent less power. The new version of the A100 is also more space-efficient. Thanks to its water block design, it occupies a single PCIe slot instead of two like its air-cooled sibling.

In the consumer market, we’ve already seen companies like EVGA offer GPUs with built-in water blocks, and companies like EK sell aftermarket units you can install on your existing video card. We’re hopeful today’s announcement is a sign that NVIDIA plans to push water-cooled GPUs toward the mainstream. In the meantime, the company has begun sending out samples of the new A100 to enterprise customers. It also plans to introduce a water-cooled version of its H100 Tensor Core GPU sometime next year.

They may not be able to shout "Eureka!" like their human colleagues but AI/ML system have shown immense potential in the field of compound discovery — whether that's sifting through reams of data to find new therapeutic compounds or imagining new recipes using the ingredients' flavor profiles. Now a team from Meta AI, working with researchers at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, have created an AI that can devise and refine formulas for increasingly high-strength, low-carbon concrete.

Traditional methods for creating concrete, of which we produce billions of tons every year, are far from ecologically friendly. In fact, they generate an estimated 8 percent of the annual global carbon dioxide emission total. Advances have been made in recent years to reduce the concrete industry's carbon footprint (as well as in make the material more rugged, more resilient and even capable of charging EVs) but overall its production remains among the most carbon intensive in modern construction.

Reducing the amount of carbon that goes into concrete could be as simple as changing the ingredients that go into concrete. The material is made from four basic components: cement, aggregate, water and admixture (which act as doping agents). Cement is far and away the most carbon-intensive ingredient of the four so research has been made into reducing the amount of cement needed by supplementing it with lower-carbon materials like fly ash, slag, or ground glass. 

Similarly, aggregate materials like gravel, crushed stone, sand might be replaced with recycled concrete. The problem is that there are dozens of potential ingredient materials that could be used and the ratio of their amounts all interact to influence the structural profile of the resulting concrete. In short, there are a whole slew of possible combinations for researchers to test, select, and refine; and working through those myriad options sequentially, at human speed, is going to take forever. So the Meta folks trained an AI to do it, much faster.

Working with Prof. Lav Varshney, electrical and computer engineering department, and Prof. Nishant Garg, civil engineering department, both of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the team first trained the model using the Concrete Compressive Strength data set. This set includes more than 1,000 concrete formulas as well as their structural attributes, including seven-day and 28-day compressive strength data. The team determined the resulting concrete mixture's carbon footprint using the Cement Sustainability Initiative's Environmental Product Declaration (EPD) tool. 

Of the generated list of potential formulas, the research team then selected the five most promising options and iteratively refined them until they met or exceeded the 7- and 28-day strength metrics while dropping carbon requirements by at least 40 percent. The refinement process took mere weeks and ended up generating a concrete formula that exceeded all of those requirements while replacing as much as 50 percent of the required cement with fly ash and slag. Meta then teamed with concrete company Ozinga, the folks who recently built Meta's newest datacenter in Illinois, to further refine the formula and conduct real world testing. 

Looking ahead, the Meta team hopes to further improve the formula's 3- and 5-day strength profiles (basically ensuring it dries faster so the rest of the construction can move ahead sooner) and get a better understanding of how it cures under varying weather conditions like wind or high humidity.