AM Demand Signals: Global Grid Resilience, Part 2

The nature of the AI boom seems no clearer despite its persistence, yet it persists. For one thing, as I’ve discussed before, people really seem to dislike data centers. American tech companies (and the US president) blame this state of affairs on Chinese propaganda, but it seems more closely related to the fact that the ongoing wave of data center investment has depleted resources intended for the general public and raised the price of the average consumer’s utility bills. Thus, Chinese propaganda is likely a factor, but that doesn’t mean tech giants didn’t give that propaganda an opening!

Another, more recent, thing is that the US AI wunderkinds have been calling for a “slowdown”, which Chinese companies have called a Cold War tactic, and this kind of ambiguity doesn’t help anyone who is trying to interpret which direction overall investment is headed in. Meanwhile, against the backdrop of Xi’s recent state visit to the US, the US and China claim to have set up an AI hotline “like the red phone between the Kremlin and the White House during the Cold War,” in the words of US Trade Representative Jamieson Greer.

If you step back from some of the Great Power nonsense, however, there are some more straightforward aspects of the investment landscape that present good opportunities. As the title of this post alludes to, at the beginning of this year I wrote about how, at Davos — which, notably, took place more than a month before the Iran War started — the theme of energy security was at the top of the agenda, and how this was a signal for AM companies to focus on grid resilience.

The World Economic Forum (WEF), the host of Davos, recently published an article on energy resilience, with the theme that stakeholders working to respond to “the next energy crisis” should adopt “a systems approach“. I didn’t really read the article, but that is because I’ve been writing some version of it for years, and I think the important takeaway in any case is that the WEF is continuing to tell society’s decision-makers that they must treat this issue seriously.

According to the WEF, resilience in this context requires “addressing three specific weaknesses”, the first two of which are relevant to AM companies. (The third, “legal authority”, is also relevant, but not really within the purview of the AM industry to deal with.) Here is what the article says about the first two weaknesses, “communication” and “visibility”:

“The first is communication. Industry is often the first to spot an emerging threat, not government, yet the channels for sharing that intelligence with the state remain fragmented in most markets. The second is visibility. Companies routinely map their direct suppliers but rarely see the software, firmware and hardware buried several tiers down their supply chains, which limits strategies such as friendshoring to partial effect at best.”

In the scope of its consistent hammering home of the overarching message, these lines suggest that WEF and its ilk are on the brink of pushing the sorts of public-private partnerships in the energy sector that currently prevail in defense, and that it expects that distributed manufacturing backed by digitized supply chains must be a part of any such push. If that development takes place, what applications should AM companies focus on?

A case study recently released by the University of Stuttgart helps explain why I think gas turbines are an ideal application in the current business environment. The project name is too absurdly long to repeat here, but it focuses on using AM to produce injection systems for gas turbines. As the article covering the case study explains, despite it being “no longer unusual” to produce gas turbines with AM, using it for fuel injection systems is a novel concept because the rougher surface finish has made printed parts untenable:

Prof. Dr. Hans-Christian Möhring, director of the Institute for Machine Tools (IFW) of the University of Stuttgart, says, “The problem is that the surfaces of these printed structures are never completely smooth. This causes problems when a specific amount of fuel needs to be injected into a combustion chamber as a fine mist through very small openings.”

For this project, though, the researchers solved that problem by miniaturizing a concept that’s already in-use for 3D printed aerospace turbines. (Another lead researcher involved in the effort is Dr. Oliver Lammel, a senior researcher at the Institute of Combustion Technology of the German Aerospace Center). What’s especially valuable about the fuel injection systems that the German researchers are developing is that they work with a variety of fuels, not just natural gas, aligning with the objectives of many energy stakeholders to find a path to fuels including hydrogen that uses natural gas as a byway.

Moreover, this takes on particular relevance in the context of the AI infrastructure boom, which has revived the appetite for natural gas, but with the catch that this resurgence is happening in an environment where institutions must remain no less committed to their energy transition strategies. The energy transition has long since ceased to be something that only exists in the imaginations of Al Gore and a bunch of hippies; it is Big Business in the most traditional sense of the term.

Indeed, much of the rationale behind the AM Drilldown posts that I’ve written very sporadically since 2022 lies in the idea that oil & gas giants and green energy proponents are in no way strange bedfellows: they are simply two sides of a coin that increasingly looks like it, in fact, has only one side, defined by a need to serve what will be growing global demand for electricity until the end of time. I view AM as one of the most logical elements within this framework because I think the resilience the WEF calls for depends on manufacturers figuring out how to use the same or similar production infrastructure to meet demand for both oil & gas applications and clean energy sources.

Now, if we can, as the University of Stuttgart researchers claim, use AM to produce end-use components that apply to multiple different energy sources, that would be all the better. And the kicker to all this is that all of the work that’s been done over the years qualifying materials and processes for aerospace turbines has demonstrable value to the energy sector, as well. All the activity to use AM to link aerospace and defense production for NATO members should yield benefits far beyond that immediate purpose, and the benefits to the energy transition could be the most valuable of all.

Image courtesy of University of Stuttgart