A scenario-based framework researchers developed to model how counties across the Midwest might respond to several grid expansion strategies revealed that even the most expensive policies that take community health concerns and employment needs into account are only 0.7% more costly than typical, cost-minimizing approaches. 

Researchers determined this by examining five different policies that could guide the evolution of the energy grid, comparing factors like resulting costs, job creation and fossil fuel emissions. 

While each policy had important trade-offs, the analysis widely showed that supporting the development of renewable energy technologies, like wind and solar, can make it easier to address future  socioeconomic impacts for little to no cost. 

This discovery adds to a growing body of work debunking the idea that improving communities through clean energy projects is a task too expensive for taxpayers to support, said Daniel Gingerich, co-author of the study and an assistant professor in civil, environmental, and geodetic engineering and integrated systems engineering at The Ohio State University.

“We can create a power sector that addresses the goals that we have as a society, while keeping the cost to us as ratepayers negligible,” said Gingerich. “In actuality, it’s less than a 1% increase in the overall cost of the system.”

The study was recently published in the journal Energy Policy. 

As the U.S. experiences record-breaking electricity demand, which is projected to rise dramatically over the next few decades, many scientists have urged policymakers to modernize and decarbonize our current energy systems by shifting away from fossil fuel infrastructure. The issue is, according to the study, doing so could make some regions more vulnerable to economic shocks because even minimizing costs doesn’t always incentivize new infrastructure to move into those communities.   

Ohio, specifically its Appalachian regions, would benefit from minimizing power sources that release carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, said Gingerich. 

“We need a transitional electricity grid to better meet not just the amount of power that we will require in the future, but also the needs of the people that rely on energy as the lifeblood of their community,” he said. Without those considerations, many communities may be left behind or become much more resistant to next-generation grid changes, especially if people can’t envision how those advances will help create a better future for themselves and their families. 

Still, depending on the chosen policy, there are significant trade-offs communities must navigate, given that decisions that prioritize economic benefits may not be the best option to protect the environment, or vice versa. Although this can make it difficult to create a more just energy sector, policymakers can overcome these challenges by designing transition strategies that target a region’s past struggles, said Gingerich. 

For instance, one proposed energy transition pathway to expanding the electricity grid from 2022 to 2050 assumes that only counties with historic negative health effects would be prioritized for clean electricity-generating infrastructure. 

Alternatively, the most expensive of these options — only 0.6% costlier than it would be to expand the grid using the cheapest method possible — suggests that wind and solar only be added in counties with a large percentage of lost energy industry jobs. Over time, this would likely lead to about 233,500 more jobs in the clean energy sector, said Gingerich. 

“The decisions that we make now will have decades of consequences,” he said. “So to prevent wasted economic investments, we have to pick the right technologies to use in the right places.” 

Gingerich also notes that it isn’t only hotter temperatures that are driving changes in how we generate power. As large-scale electricity users like data centers and EV chargers come online, the grid will also need to evolve to accommodate their increased needs. Alternative renewable energy sources like wind and solar power could be the solution to that. 

More sophisticated iterations of the team’s model could also be useful in evaluating both the economic burden and environmental impacts of these additions to the grid and eventually help promote policies that champion a more equitable future for the energy sector. 

”While we don’t know what the future looks like or how costs for certain technologies may change over the years, we can plan for how communities should start thinking about new sources of economic activity,” said Gingerich.

The study was supported by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and is based on work developed under a U.S. National Science Foundation Traineeship program. Other Ohio State co-authors include Diego Hincapié-Ossa, Aashma Upreti, Jeffrey Bielicki and Kelsea Best.

Superconductivity, or the ability of certain materials to conduct electric currents without any energy loss when cooled below a critical temperature, is a property still not very well understood. While a major challenge, understanding more about its formation mechanisms could lead to better, more long-lasting materials as well as more powerful quantum devices. 

Led by Chun Ning (Jeanie) Lau, senior author of the study and a professor of physics at The Ohio State University, the research team constructed a special material called twisted bilayer graphene — a layer of carbon stacked onto another and rotated at a small angle. 

By attaching the material to a man-made synthetic diamond called strontium titanate, Lau and colleagues were able to see and control how strongly electrons — tiny subatomic particles — in the system interacted with each other. Electron interactions that control properties like magnetic states and chemical bonding come in pairs, and by adjusting the “settings” of these pairs, the team was able to switch the material’s superconductivity on and off. 

“Electrons normally repel each other, but in superconductors they form pairs; this pair formation is the key to a superconductor’s ability to conduct electricity without dissipation,” said Lau. “Our evidence suggests that electrons themselves, depending on their sensitivity to their nearby environment, are unexpectedly important for material changes.”

The researchers were surprised to find that when they increased their adjustments, superconductivity had decreased. This result is different from conventional superconductors, where, if repelling forces between electrons are suppressed, the pairing gets stronger, highlighting the unusual nature of new materials like twisted bilayer graphene to successfully direct electricity. 

“If you could transmit electricity without energy loss, that would be hugely important for technologies used in our everyday life,” said Lau. “Despite the fundamental questions that still need answers, this work basically provides a path toward a new type of physics mechanism.”

Such a discovery could help scientists develop materials that superconduct at higher temperatures – even room temperature, a “holy grail” in the field that, if achieved, could transform their current understanding of electronics, power transmission, and communications.

The study was published April 7 in the journal Nature Physics.

Overall, these results reveal a simpler way to control the conditions needed to create and control the atomic power behind superconductivity. For instance, because many high-temperature superconductors have limitations that cap their productivity, using the environment to drive their abilities could boost their power as well as allow scientists to build more efficient electronics. 

These potential applications are not far off, according to Xueshi Gao, lead author of the study and a current PhD student in physics at Ohio State: He believes his team’s findings will soon be useful to many different types of systems and experiments across the field. 

“The mechanism of superconductivity in the twisted bilayer graphene system we used is still not well understood,” said Gao. “But our result can shed light on and help people to better understand the concept when applying it to future work.”

Still, the team emphasizes that the model is only an initial step toward understanding unexplored electronic interactions, and next steps will involve testing other types of interactions and investigating the various complex physics questions that their work opens up. 

“We’re showing capabilities that we haven’t shown before, so many people in the field are getting really excited about this result,” said Lau. 

Other Ohio State co-authors include Aatmaj Rajesh, Emilio Codecido, Daria Sharifi, Zheneng Zhang, Youwei Liu and Marc Bockrath, as well as Alejandro Jimeno-Pozo, Pierre Pantaleon and Paco Guinea from Imdea Nanoscience in Spain, and Kenji Watanabe and Takashi Taniguchi from the National Institute for Materials Science in Japan. This work was supported by the Department of Energy and the National Science Foundation. 

Carbon dioxide (CO₂) is a greenhouse gas that accounts for a large part of Earth’s warming climate, and is produced by power plants, factories and various forms of transportation. Typical carbon capture systems aimed at reducing its presence in the atmosphere work to lower carbon dioxide emissions by isolating CO₂ from other gases and converting it to useful products. However, this process is difficult to implement on an industrial scale due to the massive amount of energy required for these systems to operate. 

Now, using a special nickel-based catalyst, researchers have figured out a way to save much of this precious energy by turning captured carbon dioxide directly into methane, said Tomaz Neves-Garcia, lead author of the study and a current postdoctoral researcher in chemistry and biochemistry at The Ohio State University.

By employing nickel atoms laid out on an electrified surface, the team was able to directly convert carbamate, the captured form of carbon dioxide, to methane. They found that nickel atoms, a cheap and widely available catalyst, were extremely good at making this conversion.

“We are going from a molecule that has low energy and producing from it a fuel that has high energy,” said Neves-Garcia. “What makes this so interesting is that others capture, recover and then convert carbon dioxide in steps, while we save energy by doing these steps simultaneously.” 

Most importantly, streamlining the carbon capture process helps reframe what scientists know about the carbon cycle, and is a vital step to setting up more complex strategies for faster and more efficient climate mitigation technologies. 

“We need to focus on spending the lowest energy possible for carbon capture and conversion,” said Neves-Garcia. “So instead of performing all the capture and conversion steps independently, we can combine it in a single step, bypassing wasteful energy processes.”   

The paper was recently published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society. 

Although many carbon capture methods are still in their early stages, with researchers from an array of fields working to improve them, the field is a promising one, said Neves-Garcia. 

Converting CO₂ into a fuel using renewable electricity has the potential to close the carbon cycle. For example, when methane is burned to generate energy, it emits carbon dioxide, which, if captured and converted back to methane, could lead to a continuous cycle of energy production without adding to Earth’s global warming burden.  

The study also represents the first time that researchers discovered they could use electrochemistry to achieve carbamate conversion to methane. Although many attempts have been made to convert captured CO₂ into useful products, until now most researchers have only shown the ability to produce carbon monoxide.  

“Methane can be a really interesting product, but the most important thing is that this opens a path to develop more processes to convert captured CO₂  into other products,” he said. 

Moving forward, the team expects to keep exploring other chemical clean energy alternatives to help inspire the creation of a variety of sustainable carbon capture routes. 

“Everything always goes back to energy, and there’s a lot of excitement and effort invested in the future of this field to save more of it,” said Neves-Garcia. 

Other co-authors include Quansong Zhu and L. Robert Baker from Ohio State, Liane M. Rossi from the University of Sao Paulo, Mahmudul Hasan and Robert E. Warburton from Case Western Reserve University, Jing Li and Hailiang Wang from Yale University, as well as Zhan Jiang and Yongye Liang from the Southern University of Science and Technology.