Sustainable Technology
It’s the start of a new year, a great time to think about the future and our role in it. Will we be smart enough to develop sustainable technologies and wise enough to deploy them? Let’s take a tour of technologies that show real promise for sustainability in 2024 and beyond.
Artificial intelligence computer algorithms allow machines to recognize patterns and make decisions, so machines can do things that used to require a person. While some AI requires lots of processing, which in turn requires lots of energy, on balance, “smart” appliances like smart thermostats can save energy and resources by making good decisions quickly.
Besides improving efficiency, AI systems are also being used for material discovery. A recent Nature paper described an autonomous system that can predict chemical reactions to produce novel materials and synthesize and analyze the products without human intervention. As lab robotics systems become commercialized, they can help improve a wide range of products, such as batteries, much more quickly than before.
The last few years have already seen expensive and toxic materials, such as cobalt, eliminated from many high-performance battery packs. The search through the huge number of possible electrode and electrolyte materials is now being super-fueled by AI to find affordable, safe, and powerful combinations. 2024 will see the market release of electric vehicles based on sodium-ion batteries, and EVs can become more affordable because they will no longer require lithium. With battery technology exploring many different chemistry types, the transition to clean energy can proceed simultaneously along many pathways.
We can do more with better materials besides building batteries. Concern over hazardous chemicals like PFAS has resulted in clothing manufacturers committing to green chemistry, using less toxic chemicals to provide stain resistance and other desired qualities. As with the search for better battery materials, advances in AI are supercharging our progress in green chemistry, too. Computer systems can predict which molecules will provide the required performance but still be biodegradable. Then, these predictions can be rigorously tested to ensure the theoretical behaviors are real before new chemicals are used in industry.
The combination of green chemistry, computer vision, and robotics could one day create a version of plastic packaging that can actually be recycled. Despite our best efforts, we have yet to develop practical ways to recycle plastic after it has been used in a consumer product. It might be wiser to phase out the existing resins that have proven unsuitable for use in a circular economy and phase in new resins designed to be fully recyclable from the beginning. We can also continue to improve our successful metal, glass, and cardboard recycling programs by deploying more robots with better capabilities to move more material faster and more efficiently.
One technology that will finally start to really shine in 2024 is solar power. Next year, the United States will generate more electricity from solar power than hydropower– the first of many power-generating technologies that solar power will overtake. It wouldn’t be surprising if solar surpasses every other form of electricity generation in the next decade. The world’s massive capacity to manufacture and deploy solar panels is behind this meteoric rise, with no hard constraint on further expansion of this resource capacity.
And, speaking of resources, the final frontier is space. It’s always sunny above the troposphere, the thin layer of the atmosphere where weather happens. Today, satellites can harvest abundant solar power to provide computation and communication for people on Earth. In a few years, solar-powered bases on the moon and beyond could provide data backup, AI training, and other cloud-based services to improve life on our home planet.
While we face many serious and growing problems that threaten our ability to survive on Earth, we can take some hope in the fact that we are also developing a growing toolkit of solutions. If we don’t like our direction, let’s change course by applying our expanding knowledge and technologies to chart a course for a sustainable future.
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