Atoms, Not Bits: How Arctura Embraces Hard Tech for Climate Change Mitigation
by Neal Fine
December 20, 2023
Atoms, not Bits
In the face of the escalating climate crisis, there is an urgent need to innovate and invest in the physical world of atoms while guarding against a lurch towards the digital realm. While the recent explosion of new digital innovations powered by AI will continue to transform the way we live and work, addressing the existential threat of climate change demands that we invest in capital-intensive technologies that must be built to transition the world away from fossil fuels.
A significant amount of capital is needed to develop new hard tech solutions like long-term grid energy storage, floating offshore wind, advanced grid metering, electric industrial processes, distributed energy systems, demand response systems, and much, much more. These innovations will require hardware and will rely on new electrical processes, materials, and manufacturing methods that are only now being developed. Talent and capital are needed immediately to accelerate the development of these new technologies. In turn, many of these will lead to large market opportunities as the new green economy takes hold.
At Arctura, we embrace the “atoms, not bits” philosophy. Our technologies and products are designed to address the frictions that hinder the grid’s transition to renewables.
Mitigating Lightning Damage
For example, we are reducing the maintenance costs associated with blade damage caused by lightning that costs the wind industry over 100 million dollars annually. Wind turbines get struck by lightning often in their lifetime. Most wind turbines come equipped with lightning protection systems consisting of metal disk receptors embedded in the skin of each blade and heavy-duty metal down conductors connecting those receptors to ground. During a storm, electrical arcs called upward leaders emerge from the receptors and reach up towards the sky. When the lightning protection system works well, an upward leader emanating from a receptor connects with a downward leader from the cloud, passing the enormous electrical energy safely to ground. Occasionally, however, a leader emerges directly from the down conductor or other metal component inside the blade and “wins the race” to connect with the downward leader ahead of the upward leaders from the receptor. When that happens, the lightning punctures through the blade skin which can result in delaminations, split trailing edges, and sometimes even complete blade failures. The average repair costs the wind farm owner tens of thousands of dollars in addition to significant revenue losses while the turbine sits stationary. For especially lightning-prone wind farms, it is not uncommon for 10% of the fleet to require lightning repairs every year.
Arctura’s ArcGuide® coating is a polyurethane-based topcoat that includes a proprietary formulation of conductive elements. The coating itself does not conduct the charge from the lightning; rather, it modifies the electric field in the air adjacent to the coating and, when applied to the skin of the blade near the receptors, allows the leaders that form at the receptors to grow faster and longer than the leaders that form inside the blade. As a result, the ArcGuide® coating makes it more likely that the lightning will attach at the receptors and less likely that it will damage the blade. Systematic trials have shown that the ArcGuide® coating can reduce lightning punctures by nearly 75%. Since the energy passes through the air, the coating does not suffer damage during the strike and should remain effective after many years and many strikes. A more complete description of how it works, how it has been tested in the laboratory and on wind farms, and how it can be ordered can be found on our website. The product, which promises to significantly reduce maintenance costs for wind farms, is one example of our commitment to using the physical sciences to improve renewable energy.
Decarbonizing Nitric Acid and Reducing Curtailment Risk
Another example is Arctura’s Green Nitric Acid technology. Nitric acid is a valuable industrial chemical widely used to make nitrogen fertilizers, explosives, and other common products such as nylon and polyurethane. Today, the world produces about 65 million tons of nitric acid every year, emitting about 108 million tons of greenhouse gases in the process. As we transition to a low-carbon economy, it is imperative that we replace current production methods with an efficient and carbon-free approach. At Arctura, we have developed an electric process to synthesize nitric acid that not only eliminates CO2 as a byproduct, but also has the potential to reduce the energy cost by up to 40% compared to the conventional process. When powered by renewables, greenhouse gas emissions are completely eliminated from the process.
At the heart of our nitric acid plant is a low-temperature plasma system that takes air as a feed gas, fixes nitrogen in the form of NO2 and then combines the output with water to create nitric acid, all at atmospheric conditions. Unlike conventional methods, the plasma system does not require high temperatures or pressures. The power provided to the system can be quickly ramped up or down to balance grid demand without any significant efficiency penalty. This makes the process well-suited for powering by renewables, which are inherently subject to intermittency and variability. In fact, integrating this technology with low-cost, renewable assets (a pairing often referred to as “Power-to-X”) will help to balance grid demand during off-peak periods and reduce asset curtailment, providing an additional revenue stream to renewable plant owner/operators as well as an important service to the grid. By partnering with renewable energy suppliers, we aim to negotiate low-cost, long-term power purchase agreements (PPAs) and pass the savings in energy costs on to our customers in the nitric acid marketplace. Those PPAs will be supported by long-term fixed-price deals with our customers, who today must contend with volatile prices caused in part by using natural gas as a feedstock in the current industrial process.
How do These Technologies Relate to One Another?
We are often asked what connects the seemingly disparate technologies underlying the ArcGuide® coating and Green Nitric Acid. There are two connections: the first is that the concepts solve persistent problems faced by the renewable energy industry. The ArcGuide® coating addresses the growing costs of owning and operating wind farms by lessening the impact of one of the key drivers of those costs: lightning damage to wind turbine blades. Green Nitric Acid is offered not just to clean up a dirty sector of the chemical industry, but to do it in a way that reduces the risk of curtailment for wind and solar farms. The happy marriage between our Green Nitric Acid plants and renewable energy plants offers benefits to both. The second connection is technical: we are experts in low-temperature plasma physics and chemistry; both technologies could only have been conceived by people with our expertise and experience.
These are just two examples of the renewable energy hard technologies we are working on at Arctura.
As the Earth's average global temperatures continue to rise at an alarming rate, the imperative is clear: embracing hard tech innovations is not just an option but a necessity in the fight against climate change. The innovation and investment communities should avoid getting drawn into another tech bubble that is focused only on digital solutions. The time to prioritize atoms over bits is now, as we stand at the crossroads between a livable future and a runaway climate.
