POWER November 2021 - 10

GLOBAL MONITOR
Europe. Our first waste-to-hydrogen facility
in Tokyo with technology partner, Japan
Blue Energy Co., has already been deployed
and is in the process of being commissioned
now; full-scale development is
expected within the next two years. "
Kindler said the company is " also developing
commercial waste-to-hydrogen
facilities in Paris, as part of France's H2
Hub Airport initiative, and in the UK, as
part of a partnership with hydrogen refueling
station provider Element 2 to deploy
40 hydrogen refueling stations supplied
by waste-to-hydrogen facilities across the
region. With hydrogen demand expected
to double this year, we are planning additional
projects of all sizes and spanning
many different feedstocks to focus on
providing renewable hydrogen for both
fuel cells and power generation. "
-Darrell Proctor is a senior associate
editor for POWER.
A New Frontier: Quantum
Computing in the Power Sector
Digitalization, driven by big data, the
industrial internet of things (IIOT), and
even artificial intelligence (AI), has
made its mark on the power industry,
allowing for greater transparency into
operations and helping to ramp up efficiency,
reliability, and profitability. However,
as some experts point out, power
operations are quickly growing ever
more complex, and " classical " systems
may reach a level of " saturation " in their
ability to solve problems. A promising
emerging solution is embedded in quantum
computing, a relatively new field
that leverages the unique rules of quantum
mechanics to process information.
Classical computing systems rely on
semiconductor technologies like silicon
chips that use " bits " as a basic unit of
information for the representation of two
possible binary states, 0 or 1, which are
used in coding, explained Heike Riel, an
IBM fellow, who both heads the digital
giant's Science & Technology division
and leads its Research Quantum division
in Europe. In contrast, processors
in quantum computers use quantum
systems-atoms, ions, photons, or electrons-and
their properties to represent
bits. A quantum bit-or a " qubit " -is a
quantum particle in a " superposition " that
represents a linear combination of all possible
configurations of a state between 1
and 0, essentially allowing it to represent
more interesting or useful states than a
classical bit, she told POWER.
Other quantum properties like interference
and entanglement can also influence
how quantum computing is applied. When
a qubit is measured, it intrinsically " collapses "
the superposition state and takes
on a classical binary state of either 1 or 0.
" The contributions to a particular outcome
from a particular superposition
state can be both positive and negative,
meaning that the various states in superposition
can interfere constructively
or destructively to enhance or suppress
certain outcomes, " explained Annarita
Giani, a senior complex system scientist
at GE Research, and Zachary Eldredge, a
technology manager at the Department
of Energy (DOE), in a recent paper on
quantum computing's renewable energy
applications. " As a result, a clever measurement-although
it only yields a single
result-can hold tell-tale signatures
of a vast number of superposed states. "
Entanglement, the phenomenon
which Albert Einstein described as a
" spooky interaction at a distance, " allows
two separate quantum systems to be
bound together, no matter how distant
they are. These properties offer algorithmic
advantages that make them faster
than classical alternatives, allowing them
to perform more calculations of more significant
problems in the same amount of
time. Groups of qubits in superposition
can also create elaborate, complex, and
multidimensional computational spaces,
allowing complex problems to be represented
in new ways, Riel said.
" In reality, there are mathematical
problems which we cannot solve with
classical computers, " she said. These
include " several classes of problems, "
(Figure 3) including problems " where
the complexity increases exponentially
with the number of parameters. Some
of these problems are also optimization
problems, " she said. " For some of these
problems, we have learned how to approximate
some, but for [others] we just
cannot solve them because the approximation
is not good enough to give us a
good result, " given the scaling limitations
of a classical computing system.
" To double the level performance [of
a classical system], you must, roughly
speaking, double the number of transistors, "
Riel said. " In quantum computing,
theoretically, you add one qubit and you
double the performance because of its
exponential scaling. And this enables
quantum computing in the future to solve
problems which classical computers
cannot solve-and will never be able to
10
www.powermag.com
POWER | November 2021
https://www.valmatic.com/ http://www.powermag.com
POWER November 2021

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of POWER November 2021
