Latest news: Metaverse in power

The UK Government has announced plans to develop a virtual prototype of a nuclear fusion power plant that will operate in the 2040s.  

The UK Atomic Energy Authority (UKAEA), the University of Cambridge, and technology giants Dell Technologies and Intel will collaborate on the project. The plant will be developed in a virtual environment known as the “Industrial Metaverse”.  

The UKAEA is developing a nuclear fusion power plant in Nottinghamshire in the centre of the UK. The plant, known as Spherical Tokamak for Energy Production (STEP), will be used to demonstrate stable nuclear fusion.  

The digital twin will enable the UKAEA to assess the feasibility of the project before commencing construction. The concept design is due to be completed by 2024.  

Interest in nuclear fusion has recently risen following a series of systemic advancements. Fusion produces significantly larger amounts of energy than nuclear fission, the main nuclear power source used up until now.   

“Exascale supercomputing, and the advent of the ‘AI era’ are essential and potentially transformative milestones that will help the UK to ensure STEP achieves its mission to connect fusion power to the national grid in the early 2040’s,” said Dr Rob Akers, head of advanced computing at the UKAEA, in a statement.  

According to Adam Roe, technical director with Intel, the use of computational resources and simulations generated using artificial intelligence “can make the journey to commercial fusion power lower-risk and accelerated”.

After years of talk and theory-crafting, the hydrogen industry will soon take its first real steps into existence. While there is plenty of enthusiasm to start in an industry looking to grow by approximately 5,000% before 2030, the complex engineering involved requires careful planning to get right. 

Electrolyser manufacturer ITM Power plans to build a commercial green hydrogen electrolysis facility with 1GW capacity in Humberside, UK. To create this “Gigastack” plant, larger than any currently in operation today, the company decided to first create the plant using software. 

This type of digital twin allows companies to build and refined planned facilities within software before breaking ground. ITM contracted offshore services supplier Worley to design the plant within facility modelling software Optiplant, made by Aspen Technology. The program then fed data into NVIDIA’s Omniverse software, which produced a visualised 3D model for teams to work on collaboratively. Nvidia, best known for its computer hardware manufacturing, launched its Omniverse platform in 2021.

The metaverse was the tech buzzword of 2022. An explosion of metaverse hype caused by Meta’s rebrand was followed by a notable slump in interest among consumers and investors. Uninspiring demand, high development costs and new disruptive forces such as inflation and generative AI have deflated sky-high expectations. This is a good thing. Now, we can more realistically assess the opportunities presented by the metaverse without the rose-tinted (smart) glasses. 

Metaverse technologies were providing real value to the energy sector years before Meta’s rebrand in 2021. Mark Zuckerberg’s interpretation of the metaverse—a virtual world in which humans can socialise, collaborate and spend via avatars—currently offers very little value to the energy sector. However, elements of the industrial metaverse, such as digital twins and enterprise VR and AR experiences, were improving asset management, employee training and other business operations long before the metaverse became the Web3 poster child of 2022.