As batteries have gotten cheaper and more powerful, they have enabled the electrification of everything from vehicles to lawn equipment, power tools, and scooters. But electrifying homes has been a slower process. That’s because switching from gas appliances often requires ripping out drywall, running new wires, and upgrading the electrical box.

Now the startup Copper, founded by Sam Calisch SM ’14, Ph.D. ’19, has developed a battery-equipped kitchen range that can plug into a standard 120-volt wall outlet. The induction range features a lithium iron phosphate battery that charges when energy is cheapest and cleanest, then delivers power when you’re ready to cook.

“We’re making ‘going electric’ like an appliance swap instead of a construction project,” says Calisch. “If you have a gas stove today, there is almost certainly an outlet within reach because the stove has an oven light, clock, or electric igniters. That’s big if you’re in a single-family home, but in apartments it’s an existential factor. Rewiring a 100-unit apartment building is such an expensive proposition that basically no one’s doing it.”

Copper has shipped about 1,000 of its battery-powered ranges to date, often to developers and owners of large apartment complexes. The company also has an agreement with the New York City Housing Authority for at least 10,000 units.

Once installed, the ranges can contribute to a distributed, cleaner, and more resilient energy network. In fact, Copper recently piloted a program in California to offer cheap, clean power to the grid from its home batteries when it would otherwise need to fire up a gas-powered plant to meet spiking electricity demand.

“After these appliances are installed, they become a grid asset,” Calisch says. “We can manage the fleet of batteries to help provide firm power and help grids deliver more clean electricity. We use that revenue, in turn, to further drive down the cost of electrification.”

Finding a mission

Calisch has been working on climate technologies his entire career. It all started at the clean technology incubator Otherlab that was founded by Saul Griffith SM ’01, Ph.D. ’04.

“That’s where I caught the bug for technology and product development for climate impact,” Calisch says. “But I realized I needed to up my game, so I went to grad school in [MIT Professor] Neil Gershenfeld’s lab, the Center for Bits and Atoms. I got to dabble in software engineering, mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, mathematical modeling, all with the lens of building and iterating quickly.”

Calisch stayed at MIT for his Ph.D., where he worked on approaches in manufacturing that used fewer materials and less energy. After finishing his Ph.D. in 2019, Calisch helped start a nonprofit called Rewiring America focused on advocating for electrification. Through that work, he collaborated with U.S. Senate offices on the Inflation Reduction Act.

The cost of lithium-ion batteries has decreased by about 97% since their commercial debut in 1991. As more products have gone electric, the manufacturing process for everything from phones to drones, robots, and electric vehicles has converged around an electric tech stack of batteries, electric motors, power electronics, and chips. The countries that master the electric tech stack will be at a distinct manufacturing advantage.

Calisch started Copper to boost the supply chain for batteries while contributing to the electrification movement.

“Appliances can help deploy batteries, and batteries help deploy appliances,” Calisch says. “Appliances can also drive down the installed cost of batteries.”

The company is starting with the kitchen range because its peak power draw is among the highest in the home. Flattening that peak brings big benefits. Ranges are also meaningful: It’s where people gather around and cook each night. People take pride in their kitchen ranges more than, say, a water heater.

Copper’s 30-inch induction range heats up more quickly and reaches more precise temperatures than its gas counterpart. Installing it is as easy as swapping a fridge or dishwasher. Thanks to its 5-kilowatt-hour battery, the range even works when the power goes out.

“Batteries have become 10 times cheaper and are now both affordable and create tangible improvements in quality of life,” Calisch says. “It’s a new notion of climate impact that isn’t about turning down thermostats and suffering for the planet, it’s about adopting new technologies that are better.”

Scaling impact

Calisch says there’s no way for the U.S. to maintain resilient energy systems in the future without a lot of batteries. Because of power transmission and regulatory limitations, those batteries can’t all be located out on the grid.

“We see an analog to the internet,” Calisch says. “In order to deliver millions of times more information across the internet, we didn’t add millions of times more wires. We added local storage and caching across the network. That’s what increased throughput. We’re doing the same thing for the electric grid.”

This summer, Copper raised $28 million to scale its production to meet growing demand for its battery-equipped appliances. Copper is also working to license its technology to other appliance manufacturers to help speed the electric transition.

“These electric technologies have the potential to improve people’s lives and, as a byproduct, take us off of fossil fuels,” Calisch says. “We’re in the business of identifying points of friction for that transition. We are not an appliance company; we’re an energy company.”

Looking back, Calisch credits MIT with equipping him with the knowledge needed to run a technical business.

“My time at MIT gave me hands-on experience with a variety of engineering systems,” Calisch. “I can talk to our embedded engineering team or electrical engineering team or mechanical engineering team and understand what they’re saying. That’s been enormously useful for running a company.”

He adds, “I also developed an expansive view of infrastructure at MIT, which has been instrumental in launching Copper and thinking about the electrical grid not just as wires on the street, but all of the loads in our buildings. It’s about making homes not just consumers of electricity, but participants in this broader network.”

This story is republished courtesy of MIT News (web.mit.edu/newsoffice/), a popular site that covers news about MIT research, innovation and teaching.

In 2018, Chinese scientist He Jiankui shocked the world when he revealed that he had created the first gene-edited babies. Using Crispr, he tweaked the genes of three human embryos in an attempt to make them immune to HIV and used the embryos to start pregnancies.

The backlash against He was immediate. Scientists said the technology was too new to be used for human reproduction and that the DNA change amounted to genetic enhancement. The Chinese government charged him with “illegal medical practices” and he served a three-year prison sentence.

Now, a New York-based startup called Manhattan Genomics is reviving the debate around gene-edited babies. Its stated goal is to end genetic disease and alleviate human suffering by fixing harmful mutations at the embryo stage. The company has announced a group of “scientific contributors” that includes a prominent in vitro fertilization doctor, a data scientist who worked for deextinction company Colossal Biosciences, and two reproductive biologists from a major primate research center. A scientist who pioneered a technique to make embryos using DNA from three people is also involved.

“I like to take on challenges when I see them,” says cofounder Cathy Tie, a former Thiel fellow who left college at 18 to start her first company, Ranomics, a genomics screening service. As Tie sees it, that challenge is making the idea of human embryo editing more acceptable in society.

The idea of editing human embryos is tantalizing because any changes made to the reproductive cells are heritable. Snip out a disease-causing mutation in an embryo and it would be deleted from future generations as well. But gene-editing technology also has the potential to cause unintended “off-target” effects. Edit the wrong gene by mistake and it could give rise to cancer, for instance. Those mistakes would also be passed down to any future children.

While newer forms of gene editing are more precise, there are still ethical issues to contend with. The prospect of being able to manipulate the DNA of a human embryo has raised fears of a new kind of eugenics, where parents with the means to do so could make “designer babies” with traits that they select.

Tie says the goal of Manhattan Genomics—originally called the Manhattan Project when the company first launched in August—is disease correction, not enhancement. Unlike the original Manhattan Project, a secretive US government program during World War II that produced the first nuclear weapons, Tie says her venture will operate openly and transparently. “We’re revolutionizing medicine, and this technology is definitely very powerful. That’s what I think is the commonality here with manipulating the nucleus of the atom and manipulating the nucleus of the cell,” she says.

In railroad tracks, rail ties hold the rails in place and ensure that their separation does not change. Modern concrete ties warp and crack through repeated use, leading to safety concerns including derailment if not regularly maintained.

Research from The Grainger College of Engineering at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign shows that damage to concrete ties can be mitigated using shape memory alloys (SMAs), metals with the ability to return to their original shape after they are deformed.

In a study led by civil and environmental engineering professor Bassem Andrawes, ties warped by simulated rail traffic were shown to return to their original state with the help of SMAs activated by induction heating. The paper, “Experimental Testing of Concrete Crossties Prestressed with Shape Memory Alloys,” is published in the Journal of Transportation Engineering, Part A: Systems.

“We’re doing something that I think is unprecedented in rail transportation engineering,” Andrawes said. “We’re working with a commercial supplier of concrete rail ties to implement and test our designs. For our publication, we went beyond laboratory experiments and demonstrated compliance with rail industry standards. We’re very excited to continue our industrial partnership and develop a practical, working design.”

Degradation in concrete is traditionally prevented through the process of prestressing, in which pre-tensioned steel rods are inserted to exert forces which counteract the effects of heavy loads. While this technique is applied in rail ties, the difficulty is that different parts of the tie experience different stresses. In addition, the ties shift as the ballast—the gravel bed distributing weight and providing drainage—settles in response to traffic.

Andrawes believes that SMAs are an ideal solution because they can be inserted into ties then independently controlled with self-contained heat sources. The reinforcement they provide could quickly adapt to the specific circumstances the tie is experiencing at different locations in its structure.

“SMAs are examples of what we call ‘smart materials,'” Andrawes said. “You can deform them, twist them into wild new shapes, but they retain the memory of their original state in the molecular structure. When you apply heat, they know to return to that state. So, if you just have a heat source, then the SMA can guide a concrete structure back to the desired shape stored in the alloy’s memory.”

Working with Illinois Grainger Engineering civil and environmental engineering graduate student Ernesto Pérez-Claros, Andrawes decided to use induction heating, in which the heat to restore the SMAs to their original shape is provided by a time-varying electromagnetic field. This was done to ensure that the electrical hardware would not need to be inserted inside the tie.

The research proceeded in three phases. First, the researchers worked with Rocla Concrete Tie, Inc., to cast their design in commercially available concrete rail ties. Second, the researchers conducted laboratory experiments to quantify the impacts of different lengths of SMAs in the ties. Finally, ties were subjected to stress tests simulating rail traffic, and the prototypes exceeded the standards of the American Railway Engineering and Maintenance-of-Way Association (AREMA).

“It was important to us that we actually make something that goes out of the lab and into practice,” Andrawes said. “Showing that our design meets and even exceeds AREMA specifications means that it’s not just academic research. This is something that railroads can use, and we intend to guide it to the point where it can be adopted.”

The researchers plan to continue working with Rocla to commercialize the technology. They also plan to submit their prototypes for full testing with real rail traffic at the Federal Railroad Administration Transportation Technology Center in Pueblo, Colorado.