Unprecedented energy demand is presenting challenges for North Carolina as leaders and residents seek to build climate resilience.
The good news: The region is full of people working on real-world solutions — and several of them connected with other technologists, leaders, journalists and community members at the latest RTP180 event.
Hosted at Frontier RTP in Research Triangle Park, the quarterly series features five speakers, who each get 5 minutes to present on a specific innovation topic, followed by an audience Q&A. The August edition focused on energy. Each speaker approached the subject from different points in the system: research, commercialization, deployment, consumer costs and policy.
Scaling commercial energy technologies
Sameer Parvathikar, senior director of sustainable energy solutions at nonprofit institute RTI International, framed the commercialization problem with three questions: Does a technology work? Does it work outside the lab? And, “Does somebody care? Does somebody want to buy it?”
Parvathikar leads the RTI Pilot Xcelerator, which helps emerging energy and industrial startups bridge the gap from invention to deployment, often called the “valley of death.”
For example, he said, the accelerator worked with Syzygy Plasmonics, a startup that uses light to drive chemical reactions that turn waste biogas into aviation fuel. Within two years of testing at RTI’s technology-agnostic pilot site in the Triangle, the cleantech company announced a commercial plant in Uruguay.
“The demand for energy is the highest it’s ever been,” Parvathikar said. “And what we need to do is … bring new innovations online and do that at a rapid pace.”
Coordination is key to rapid deployment, noted Meredith Biechele, a product development manager at EV charging company Kempower.
Kempower, which is headquartered in Finland and has its North American base in Durham, is building modular EV systems designed so individual components can be replaced with little downtime (Biechele compared the interchangeability to modern phone chargers).
But widespread EV adoption also depends on the infrastructure around the chargers working reliably, she said. Reducing “range anxiety” — the fear of losing battery power before finding a plug — requires both more chargers and better charging systems.
“The technology is ready,” Biechele said. “The vehicles are getting there, and we just need to put these in the ground, and we’ll see an electrified transportation revolution.”
More demand means more fights over cost
At the municipal level, the City of Raleigh is turning climate goals into community initiatives, according to Jessica Reid, a senior sustainability strategist for the city. Raleigh aims to reduce greenhouse gas emissions 80% by 2050.
To hit that target, the local government relies on a mix of tax funding, grants and public-private partnerships. Recent projects include outfitting the historic Dix Park Chapel with solar panels, launching a free electric lawn tool share for residents, and using wastewater to create renewable natural gas that powers roughly 70 GoRaleigh buses.
The city is also preparing to launch Electrify the Triangle, an initiative to expand access to energy-efficient appliances, heat pumps and battery storage. Additionally, Reid highlighted Raleigh’s use of System Vision, a program that certifies affordable housing projects as energy efficient and guarantees low energy bills for residents for at least two years.
One of the largest predicted drivers of energy demand is the rapid expansion of AI data centers. Only 20% of North Carolinians say they would support a data center being built in their community, WRAL News reporter Will Doran shared, citing a recent Elon University poll.
Many rural counties are attracting data centers because of available land, electricity and the promise of property tax revenues. But increasingly, local governments are pushing back. Several areas across the Triangle region, including Durham and Harnett counties, have moved to enact moratoriums on data centers to study their impacts on noise pollution, cooling systems and local electrical rates.
North Carolina is roughly in the middle nationally on electricity prices, according to Nick Montoni, senior program director for policy and markets at the North Carolina Clean Energy Technology Center, which recently tracked 342 actions across 46 states to reduce or manage electricity costs.
There’s a split emerging on how to approach the issue: States are debating whether to reduce charges for short-term bill relief or spend more on programs that could lower household costs over time.
That tension was evident in North Carolina’s approach, as Doran shared a quote from an interview with Governor Josh Stein:
“AI will be part of our future, and we want to keep innovation central to the state’s economic development strategy, but we cannot be blind to the impact these data centers are having on our state,” Stein told Doran. “They need to pay their way so that our residentials don’t have to bear the cost.”
The next RTP180 event explores dual-use defense technologies — innovations that originated in the military but crossed over into civilian life. RTP180: Beyond the Battlefield event is scheduled for Nov. 19.
Read the original article on the Technical.ly website.