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A variety of climate-friendly strategies will be on show, along with the athletes
The National Speed Skating Oval (known as “The Ice Ribbon”) in Beijing will host speed skaters during the upcoming games. Ice here is formed using climate-friendly refrigeration. The facility also boasts outside architectural glass that includes photovoltaic elements, allowing the structure to generate electricity during the day.
About 160 kilometers northwest of Beijing, the city of Zhangjiakou with its rugged terrain boasts some of the richest wind and solar resources in China. Renewables account for nearly half of the city’s electricity output with less than a third of its full solar and wind potential of 70 gigawatts installed so far.
That makes it an ideal cohost with Beijing for the 2022 Winter Olympic and Paralympic Games, which China plans to make the greenest yet. The plan is to power all 26 venues fully with renewables, marking a first in the games’ history.
The Beijing 2022 Organising Committee aims to make the games carbon neutral, or as close as possible—a benchmark for the International Olympic Committee’s mission to make the Olympics carbon positive by 2024.
Besides being a symbol for President Xi Jinping’s ambitious goal of China being carbon neutral by 2060, the 2022 games should drive sustainable development in the region. The event has already helped Beijing clean up its skies and environment, and has fired up local energy-technology markets. It will also be a global stage to showcase new energy-efficiency, alternate-transport, and refrigeration technologies.
The Olympics will account for only a small fraction of the country’s annual electricity consumption. Powering them with clean energy sources won’t be difficult given China’s plentiful renewable capacity, says Michael Davidson, an engineering-systems and global-policy expert at the University of California, San Diego.
But Davidson also points out that insufficient infrastructure to manage intermittent renewables and electricity-dispatch practices that don’t prioritize them mean that much of China’s green-power capacity is often not put to use. And because the game venues are connected to a grid that is powered by a variety of sources, asserting that all the electricity used at the games is 100 percent from clean energy sources is “complicated,” he says. Nonetheless, the games will be important in raising the profile of green energy. “The hope is that this process will put into place some institutions that could help leverage a much broader-scale move to green.”
The Games will offer a global stage to showcase new energy-efficiency, alternate-transport, and refrigeration technologies.
Case in point: The flexible DC grid put into place in Zhiangjiakou in 2020 will let 22.5 billion kilowatt-hours of wind and solar energy flow from Zhiangjiakou to Beijing every year. By the time the Paralympics end in March, the game venues are expected to have consumed about 400 million kWh of electricity. If all of it is indeed provided by renewables, that should reduce carbon emissions by 320,000 tonnes, according to sports outlet Inside the Games. After the athletes go home, the flexible DC grid will continue to clean up around 10 percent of the capital’s immense electricity consumption.
Green transport infrastructure being built to shuttle athletes and spectators between venues will also be part of the games’ lasting legacy. A clean energy–powered high-speed railway that takes 47 minutes to travel between Beijing and Zhangjiakou was inaugurated in 2019. More than 85 percent of public-transport vehicles at the Olympics will be powered by batteries, hydrogen fuel cells, or natural gas, according to state media.
In August, officials at the Chinese capital revealed a five-year hydrogen-energy plan, with goals to build 37 fueling stations and have about 3,000 fuel-cell vehicles on the road by 2023, for which the Olympics should also be a stepping-stone. Already, hydrogen fueling stations built by China’s petrochemical giant Sinopec, Pennsylvania-based Air Products, and French company Air Liquide have cropped up in Beijing, Zhiangjiakou, and the Yanqing competition zone located in between.
In Yanqing alone, 212 fuel-cell buses made by Beijing-based Beiqi Foton Motor Co. will shuttle spectators around. Even the iconic Olympic torch will burn hydrogen for its flame.
Even the iconic Olympic torch will burn hydrogen for its flame.
The 2022 event will also put a limelight on climate-friendly refrigeration. The immense 12,000-square-meter speed-skating oval in downtown Beijing—8 times the size of a hockey rink—will be the first in the world to use carbon dioxide for making ice.
“We’ve built skating rinks with carbon dioxide direct cooling but never a speed-skating oval,” says Wayne Dilk of Toronto-based refrigeration company CIMCO Refrigeration, which has built most of the National Hockey League arenas in North America and designed and provided consulting services for the Olympics’ icy venues.
Ice-rink technology typically relies on refrigerants siphoning heat away from brine circulated under the floors, Dilk explains. But CO2-based cooling systems, which are getting more popular mainly in Europe and North America for supermarkets, food-manufacturing plants, and ice rinks, use CO2 both as the refrigerant and for transporting heat away from under the floor where it is pumped in liquid form.
CO2 is a climate villain, of course, but conventional hydrofluorocarbon refrigerants are worse. The common R-22 form of Freon, for example, is about 1,800 times as potent as a greenhouse gas. CO2 cooling systems are also 30 percent more energy efficient than Freon, says Dilk. Plus, the CO2 system produces higher-temperature waste heat, which can be used for space heating and hot water. And while the system is more expensive to build because it runs at higher pressure, the temperature across the large surface stays within a range of only 0.5 °C, giving more uniform ice. Consistent temperature and ice quality generate better competitive racing times. The Beijing 2022 hockey arenas and sliding center for bobsled and luge use climate-friendly ammonia or Opteon as refrigerants. Besides being a key part of the greenest Winter Olympics, these state-of-the-art ice venues should seal the deal for another goal China has in 2022: to establish itself as a world-class winter sports and tourism destination.
This article appears in the January 2022 print issue as “China’s Green Winter Olympics .”
Prachi Patel is a freelance journalist based in Pittsburgh. She writes about energy, biotechnology, materials science, nanotechnology, and computing.
Hmm, everyone knows china has shut it's manufacturing down months early for them to get a "blue sky" olympic. Their attempt is all for show. Looking at the locale of their venue is kinda funny. https://www.nbcolympics.com/news/beijing-2022-winter-olympics-competition-venues
Cubic boron arsenide may in fact even be the best possible one
Charles Q. Choi is a science reporter who contributes regularly to IEEE Spectrum. He has written for Scientific American, The New York Times, Wired, and Science, among others.
Boron atoms [orange] join with arsenic atoms [black] to form a cubic crystal structure called cubic boron arsenide (c-BAs)—a challenging semiconductor to manufacture but also one with both high carrier mobility and high thermal conductivity.
Silicon is the foundation of the electronics industry. However, its performance as a semiconductor leaves much to be desired. Now scientists have discovered that an obscure material known as cubic boron arsenide (c-BAs) may perform much better than silicon. In fact, it may be the best semiconductor ever found, and potentially even the best possible one.
Silicon is one of the most abundant elements on earth. In its pure form, silicon is key to much of modern technology, from microchips to solar cells. However, its properties as a semiconductor are far from ideal.
“We demonstrated, for the first time, a new material with high carrier mobility and simultaneously high thermal conductivity.” —Zhifeng Ren, University of Houston
For one thing, silicon is not very good at conducting heat. As such, overheating and expensive cooling systems are common in computers. Furthermore, although silicon lets electrons race through its structure easily, it is much less obliging to the positively charged absences of electrons known as holes. These weaknesses reduce silicon’s overall efficiency as a semiconductor. (To be fair, most semiconductors offer high mobility only for either electrons or holes.)
In 2018, experiments revealed that c-BAs—a crystal grown from boron and arsenic, two relatively common mineral elements—conducted heat nearly 10 times as well as silicon. This is the best known thermal conductivity of any semiconductor, and the third-best known thermal conductivity of any material, behind diamond and isotopically enriched cubic boron nitride.
In addition, theoretical predictions suggested that c-BAs would also possess very high mobility for both electrons and holes. Now, in twostudies in the 22 July issue of the journal Science, experiments confirm cubic boron arsenide's high electron and hole mobility.
“We demonstrated, for the first time, a new material with high carrier mobility and simultaneously high thermal conductivity,” says Zhifeng Ren, a physicist and materials scientist at the University of Houston and a coauthor on both studies. “The findings point out a new direction for semiconductors that could revolutionize the semiconductor industry in the near future.”
Analyzing electron and hole mobility in c-BAs was challenging because the crystals the researchers had were small. In addition, the crystals were riddled with impurities that scattered the electrons and holes. By probing the crystals with laserpulses, the team of scientists (from the University of Houston as well as MIT, the University of Texas at Austin, and Boston College) found that electrons and electron holes had the highest mobility at locations on the lattice with the fewest impurities.
Electron and hole mobility is measured in units of square centimeters per volt-seconds (cm2/V•s). Silicon has an electron mobility of 1,400 cm2/V•s and a hole mobility of 450 cm2/V•s at room temperature. By contrast, according to the new findings, c-BAs has a mobility of 1,600 cm2/V•s for both electrons and holes moving together at room temperature.
Moreover, one of the two new studies in Science found that electron mobility in c-BAs could reach as high as 3,000 cm2/V•s. This feat may be due to “hot electrons,” which preserve the energy generated by laser pulses used to excite the charge carriers longer than they do in most other materials.
So far, scientists have made c-BAs only in small, lab-scale batches that are not uniform. Still, Ren thinks it very likely that it can be made in a practical and economic way, since boron, arsenic, and the crystal fabrication technique are all inexpensive. He says that in order to maintain quality control, the crystals may be scaled to much larger sizes only “when the growth process is fully understood.”
In addition, says Ren, “my group has always believed that even higher thermal conductivity and higher mobility should be achieved when the crystal quality is further improved, so the near-term goal is to improve their growth for higher-quality crystals.”
That microhydraulic gripper you’ve always wanted, thanks to an ex-spider
Bugs have long taunted roboticists with how utterly incredible they are. Astonishingly mobile, amazingly efficient, super robust, and in some cases, literally dirt cheap. But making a robot that’s an insect equivalent is extremely hard—so hard that it’s frequently easier to just hijack living insects themselves and put them to work for us. You know what’s even easier than that, though?
Hijacking and repurposing dead bugs. Welcome to necrobotics.
Spiders are basically hydraulic (or pneumatic) grippers. Living spiders control their limbs by adjusting blood pressure on a limb-by-limb basis through an internal valve system. Higher pressure extends the limb, acting against an antagonistic flexor muscle that curls the limb when the blood pressure within is reduced. This, incidentally, is why spider legs all curl up when the spider shuffles off the mortal coil: There’s a lack of blood pressure to balance the force of the flexors.
This means that actuating all eight limbs of a spider that has joined the choir invisible is relatively straightforward. Simply stab it in the middle of that valve system, inject some air, and poof, all of the legs inflate and straighten.
This work, from researchers at the Preston Innovation Lab at Rice University, in Houston, is described in a paper just published in Advanced Science. In the paper, the team does a little bit of characterization of the performance of the deceased-spider gripper, and it’s impressive: It can lift 1.3 times its own weight, exert a peak gripping force of 0.35 millinewton, and can actuate at least 700 times before the limbs or the valve system start to degrade in any significant way. After 1,000 cycles, some cracks appear in the dead spider’s joins, likely because of dehydration. But the researchers think that by coating the spider in something like beeswax, they could likely forestall this breakdown a great deal. The demised-spider gripper is able to successfully pick up a variety of objects, likely because of a combination of the inherent compliance of the legs as well as hairlike microstructures on the legs that work kind of like a directional adhesive.
We are, unfortunately (although somewhat obviously), unable to say that no spiders were harmed over the course of this research. According to the paper, “the raw biotic material (i.e., the spider cadaver) was obtained by euthanizing a wolf spider through exposure to freezing temperature (approximately -4 °C) for a period of 5–7 days.” The researchers note that “there are currently no clear guidelines in the literature regarding ethical sourcing and humane euthanasia of spiders,” which is really something that should be figured out, considering how much we know about the cute-but-still-terrifying personalities some spiders have.
The wolf spider was a convenient choice because it exerts a gripping force approximately equal to its own weight, which raises the interesting question of what kind of performance could be expected from spiders of different sizes. Based on a scaling analysis, the researchers suggest that itty-bitty 10-milligram jumping spiders could exert a gripping force exceeding 200 percent of their body weight, while very much not itty-bitty 200-gram goliath spiders may only be able to grasp with a force that is 10 percent of their body weight. But that works out to 20 grams, which is still kind of terrifying. Goliath spiders are big.
For better or worse, insects seem likely to offer the most necrobotic potential, because fabricating pneumatics and joints and muscles at that scale can be very challenging, if not impossible. And spiders (as well as other spiderlike insects) in particular offer biodegradable, eco-friendly on-demand actuation with capabilities that the researchers hope to extend significantly. A capacitive proximity sensor could enable autonomy, for example, to “discreetly capture small biological creatures for sample collection in real-world scenarios.” Independent actuation of limbs could result in necrobotic locomotion. And the researchers are also planning to explore high-speed articulation with whip scorpions as well as true microscale manipulation with Patu digua spiders. I’ll let you google whip scorpion on your own because they kind of freak me out, but here’s a picture of a Patu digua, with a body measuring about a quarter of a millimeter:
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