Name: CNN10 Special Edition: Could this innovative tech help curb an energy crisis? | February 27, 2026
Uploaded: 2026-02-28T12:15:52.000Z
Duration: 10 min 22 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Today we are focusing on one of the biggest issues facing our planet's future and the innovative ways one company is looking to tackle it.

It's a crucial part of our everyday lives.

But as the global population continues to grow, so does its toll on our planet.

Pollution from our constantly increasing demand for energy has long been a key driver of the climatic and environmental disruption we're seeing.

Greenhouse gases and other emissions are raising global temperatures, acidifying our oceans and fueling extreme weather events.

This has led scientists from around the world to focus on developing clean, sustainable ways to help fuel fuel the future.

And one of the minds behind this movement, Dr.

Lonnie Johnson, right here in Atlanta, Georgia, we got an all access look at how he and his team at jtech Energy are developing ways to turn waste heat into clean, sustainable energy.

Dr. Lonnie Johnson is a man who needs no introduction, and his story reads like a movie script.

The engineer, inventor and entrepreneur rose from a childhood in a deeply segregated Alabama to become one of the brightest minds of his generation.

He holds more than 100 patents and worked on nuclear powered deep space probes for NASA and stealth bombers for the U.S.

But he's also the mind behind one of the best selling toys of all time, the Super Soaker.

Super Soaker MDS gives water guns a whole new twist.

You know, the human beings, creativity, problem solving, it's what we're built to do.

These days, he's turned his focus to our planet's energy crisis and the jtech, which stands for Johnson thermoelectrochemical Converter.

It creates energy using an incredibly unique technique that he hopes will help solve one of humanity's biggest issues.

A lot of the conflicts that you see in the world are centered on energy, oil.

So if we could reduce our dependence on oil, we'd not only improve the environment, but

we'd also have one less thing to fight about.

So I think energy is very important, but he's not doing it alone.

He's got a whole team of bright minds helping make this a reality.

And they're still pinching themselves that they've come this far.

Lonnie is a extraordinary scientist, engineer, inventor.

He puts on his lab coat, he wants to be in the lab, he's running experiments, he's trying to figure out the next big thing.

His mind just works on a different plane.

The idea of taking waste heat, geothermal heat, all this heat that comes out of your car exhaust, comes out of your chimney of the factory.

If we could capture that and convert that directly into electricity at high efficiency, it truly could be a big solution to the world's energy needs.

You may be wondering how exactly this process works.

He's the VP of engineering at jtech and he gave us an up close look at the process in real time.

What the J Tech device does at its simplest level is it takes waste heat, basically the heat that's produced by industrial processes and converts it into electricity at much higher efficiencies than competing technologies, at potentially much lower temperatures than competing technologies.

You put waste heat in one side, electrical power comes out the other side.

Do you want to see how we actually do that?

So like I said, we're feeding waste heat into the jtech through, through this line here.

The waste heat can be sent to one of the 1, 2, 3, 4 reactors that we have on this particular device.

So what's happening right now actually is we are feeding waste heat into reactor number three here.

You can see this light is on this reactor here, which is full of hydrogen and is increasing in pressure, is pumping hydrogen out.

This reactor over here, which is kept being kept cold and is sucking hydrogen and is pulling that hydrogen back in.

And that's how we close this hydrogen cycle to produce power.

So you're kind of using the same hydrogen all the time.

That's how we manage to make this system work without having to add any fuel.

All we're doing is pumping the hydrogen from one place to another place and then back again.

So if the reactors are one of the two kind of core things that make a jtec, a jtec, the stacks are the other ones.

Inside the stacks are the magic component, the membranes that make hydrogen fuel cells work.

The hydrogen can't sneak its way through that membrane.

So it has to do this really cool trick where the hydrogen separates into two hydrogen atoms.

The hydrogen atoms release their electrons to become protons, and

then at that point, those protons can wiggle through the membrane.

The electrons meanwhile, though, have to find their way back to the those protons.

And we make them go through a specific path to do that.

We make them actually come out still confused.

Let's break this down even further and science teachers feel free to jump in and back me up here.

Think of it like going through the security line at an airport.

The electrons are your bags, and the checkpoint is the membrane.

As your electrons detach and pass through a load, they create electricity.

You, you become a proton and pass through the checkpoint, meeting back up on the other side to reform hydrogen gas.

The process is repeated over and over, and the more heat you add, the faster it becomes.

So would you like to see this thing do something useful with the power producer?

Yeah, I want to see how waste heat was turned into something we can actually see.

This device here is what's called a boost converter.

It's going to take the power that's coming from the J Tech and boost it into a range that's useful to us.

With a mic in my hand and we have a tribe called Quest.

All this water that's not even hot enough to make a cup of coffee.

Using that to generate electricity and throw a party.

Okay, so now that we have an idea of how this all works, where could we see jtech help create power in the real world?

Turns out one potential application involves something we've been talking about a lot lately.

Tech giants are in a heated race to dominate the AI landscape and building thousands of data centers to do it.

The Department of Energy has estimated data centers could consume up to 12% of U.S.

But our aging power grid may not be ready for the massive demand increase increase.

And many households could end up footing the bill for power increases.

Plus, not only do data centers consume a lot of power, they generate a lot of heat.

Jtech CEO Mike McQuarrie or McQ, says it's the perfect environment for a JTEC to thrive.

The proliferation of data centers is almost unimaginable.

So the heat isn't high, but the amount of heat is spectacular.

So what we're doing is we're starting to work with data centers to figure out how can we put a JTEC in the stream of that waste heat to create your own electricity.

So you take some of the burden off of the grid so the local community doesn't have to worry about our power bills are going to go up because we're competing with that.

Subtitles ListPlay Video

CNN10 Special Edition: Could this innovative tech help curb an energy crisis? | February 27, 2026

stuff

process

figure

entrepreneur