ARPA-E Roadshow

Today, Rice hosted the ARPA-E Roadshow, a series of presentations by ARPA-E program officers, MC-ed by the director, Prof. Evelyn Wang.   It was all about the energy transition, and it was pretty fascinating, particularly hearing from leaders of startups who were making commercialization transitions as well as program officers describing highlights of their portfolios.  A few highlights:

• "Hardware is hard." - said by Rita Hansen, quoting a timeworn truth when talking about the challenge of actually building and deploying pathbreaking gadgets in the field.
• "Work for ARPA-E, and you get to design emojis!" - Halle Cheeseman, poking fun at the fact that every project has its own little icon-like logo.
• Carlos Araque of Quaise Energy was part of a panel and spoke about their plans to use enormously powerful microwave sources to drill holes 20 km deep, so that one can have ubiquitous geothermal energy.  (I'll admit, cool as this sounds, I just don't understand how they plan to get vaporized rock out of a many-km-deep bore hole.)
• Joe Zhou of Quidnet Energy was also on the panel (with Araque and Hansen) and spoke about their plan for underground fracking-type pumping to use compressed water for energy storage for solar/wind/etc.  It's more geographically portable than pumping water up a nearby mountain for energy storage, but sounds like it could have some nontrivial challenges.
• Hinetics plans to have an integrated cryocooler in their motors, so that they can use high-Tc superconducting wiring without the need for separate refrigeration or cryogens.  Sounds very clever.
• Veir has plans for compact, evaporative LN2 cooling of high-Tc transmission lines.  This would allow very high current transmission at low voltages, so that utilities could avoid the giant, ugly towers and use a lot less land/narrower rights-of-way.  
• Brimstone is making net-carbon-negative cement based on calcium silicate (instead of traditional calcium carbonate which liberates CO2 when it sets).  This seems like potentially a huge deal if it scales, since concrete accounts for 8% of global CO2 emissions annually.

All of this stuff is far away from what I do for research, but it was certainly thought-provoking, and it showcases how much cleverness there is out there to bring to bear on the challenge of reducing climate impact.