“CATL, the world’s biggest battery maker, has vowed to “spare no effort” to electrify parts of the global shipping fleet as it tries to replicate its success with electric vehicles on the high seas.

The Chinese group, which controls 37 per cent of the market for EV batteries and 22 per cent for energy storage systems in power grids and data centres, has deployed batteries on about 900 ships, mostly smaller craft operating close to the Chinese coastline, at ports or in rivers…

Batteries, which are best suited to nearshore operations, are among a suite of alternatives to highly polluting heavy-fuel oil. Chinese companies are also exploring commercialisation of clean fuels such as green methanol, ammonia and hydrogen.”

From Financial Times.

“A warming climate could expose a Pennsylvania-sized chunk of ice-free land in Antarctica by 2300, which could drastically reshape Antarctic geopolitics as well as the continent’s geography.

A study published in Nature Climate Change is the first to incorporate glacial isostatic adjustment — how land beneath heavy ice sheets uplifts after the ice retreats — into projections of ice-free land emergence in Antarctica. The results reveal that climate change could expose potentially valuable mineral resources that may spur renegotiations of the international treaties that currently govern Antarctica…

Within the area that Lucas and the research team projected would be ice-free by 2300 lie known or suspected deposits of copper, gold, silver, iron, and platinum — critical minerals used in manufacturing and valuable metals in and of themselves. In particular, the study found the largest land emergence in Antarctica is likely to occur over territories claimed by Argentina, Chile, and the United Kingdom and contains a range of mineral deposits, including copper, gold, silver, and iron.”

From Live Science.

“Today, nearly all data centers are designed around AC utility power. The electrical path includes multiple conversions before power reaches the compute load. Power typically enters the data center as medium-voltage AC (1 to 35 kilovolts), is stepped down to low-voltage AC (480 or 415 volts) using a transformer, converted to DC inside an uninterruptible power supply (UPS) for battery storage, converted back to AC, and converted again to low-voltage DC (typically 54 V DC) at the server, supplying the DC power computing chips actually require…

That setup worked well enough for the amounts of power required by traditional data centers. Traditional data center computational racks draw on the order of 10 kW each. For AI, that is starting to approach 1 megawatt. At that scale, the energy losses, current levels, and copper requirements of AC-to-DC conversions become increasingly difficult to justify. Every conversion incurs some power loss. On top of that, as the amount of power that needs to be delivered grows, the sheer size of the convertors, as well as the connector requirements of copper busbars, becomes untenable. According to an Nvidia blog, a 1-MW rack could require as much as 200 kilograms of copper busbar. For a 1-gigawatt data center, it could amount to 200,000 kg of copper.

By converting 13.8-kV AC grid power directly to 800 V DC at the data center perimeter, most intermediate conversion steps are eliminated. This reduces the number of fans and power-supply units, and leads to higher system reliability, lower heat dissipation, improved energy efficiency, and a smaller equipment footprint…

Switching from 415-V AC to 800-V DC in electrical distribution enables 85 percent more power to be transmitted through the same conductor size. This happens because higher voltage reduces current demand, lowering resistive losses and making power transfer more efficient. Thinner conductors can handle the same load, reducing copper requirements by 45 percent, a 5 percent improvement in efficiency, and 30 percent lower total cost of ownership for gigawatt-scale facilities.

A handful of vendors are trying to get ahead of the game. Vertiv’s 800-V DC ecosystem that integrates with Nvidia Vera Rubin Ultra Kyber platforms will be commercially available in the second half of 2026. Eaton, too, is well advanced in its 800-V DC systems innovation courtesy of a medium-voltage solid-state transformer (SST) that will sit at the heart of DC power distribution system. Meanwhile Delta, has released 800-V DC in-row 660-kW power racks with a total of 480 kW of embedded battery backup units. And, SolarEdge is hard at work on a 99%-efficient SST that will be paired with a native DC UPS and a DC power distribution layer.”

From IEEE Spectrum.

“A line of electric vehicles (EVs) plugged into rechargers as their drivers wait patiently for their batteries to be topped up has become a familiar sight at many service stations. Though some of the latest EVs can recharge in 20 minutes, many take much longer. Yet some EV drivers could soon be back on the road much more quickly. Companies are developing ultra-fast charging systems which can refill a battery almost as fast as a fossil-fuel car can be filled up. Rapid recharging could dispel one of the last remaining obstacles to widespread EV adoption.

One such system will be unveiled in Paris on April 8th by BYD, a Chinese firm that is the world’s biggest EV maker. It consists of a powerful 1,500kW drive-through charger, which looks like a large overhead gantry from which recharging cables descend. When plugged into a Denza Z9GT, BYD’s new premium model, the car’s 122kWh ‘Blade Battery’ can be boosted from 10% capacity to 70% in five minutes. A full charge takes nine minutes.”

From The Economist.