Energy

Undergraduates Aljazzy Alahmadi, Andrea Garcia, and Quynh Nguyen are sustaining the nuclear science and engineering research mission from around the world. More

Topics include Covid-19 and urban mobility, strategies for electric vehicle charging networks, and infrastructure and economics for hydrogen-fueled transportation. More

In the transition to a decarbonized electric power system, variable renewable energy (VRE) resources such as wind and solar photovoltaics play a vital role due to their availability, scalability, and affordability. However, the degree to which VRE resources can be successfully deployed to decarbonize the electric power system hinges on the future availability and cost of energy storage technologies.
In a paper recently published in Applied Energy, researchers from MIT and Princeton University examine battery storage to determine the key drivers that impact its economic value, how that value might change with increasing deployment over time, and the implications for the long-term cost-effectiveness of storage.
“Battery storage helps make better use of electricity system assets, including wind and solar farms, natural gas power plants, and transmission lines, and that can defer or eliminate unnecessary investment in these capital-intensive assets,” says Dharik Mallapragada, the paper’s lead author. “Our paper demonstrates that this ‘capacity deferral,’ or substitution of batteries for generation or transmission capacity, is the primary source of storage value.”
Other sources of storage value include providing operating reserves to electricity system operators, avoiding fuel cost and wear and tear incurred by cycling on and off gas-fired power plants, and shifting energy from low price periods to high value periods — but the paper showed that these sources are secondary in importance to value from avoiding capacity investments.
For their study, the researchers — Mallapragada, a research scientist at the MIT Energy Initiative; Nestor Sepulveda SM’16, PhD ’20, a postdoc at MIT who was a MITEI researcher and nuclear science and engineering student at the time of the study; and fellow former MITEI researcher Jesse Jenkins SM ’14, PhD ’18, an assistant professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering and the Andlinger Center for Energy and the Environment at Princeton University — use a capacity expansion model called GenX to find the least expensive ways of integrating battery storage in a hypothetical low-carbon power system. They studied the role for storage for two variants of the power system, populated with load and VRE availability profiles consistent with the U.S. Northeast (North) and Texas (South) regions. The paper found that in both regions, the value of battery energy storage generally declines with increasing storage penetration.
“As more and more storage is deployed, the value of additional storage steadily falls,” explains Jenkins. “That creates a race between the declining cost of batteries and their declining value, and our paper demonstrates that the cost of batteries must continue to fall if storage is to play a major role in electricity systems.”
The study’s key findings include:
The economic value of storage rises as VRE generation provides an increasing share of the electricity supply.
The economic value of storage declines as storage penetration increases, due to competition between storage resources for the same set of grid services.
As storage penetration increases, most of its economic value is tied to its ability to displace the need for investing in both renewable and natural gas-based energy generation and transmission capacity.
Without further cost reductions, a relatively small magnitude (4 percent of peak demand) of short-duration (energy capacity of two to four hours of operation at peak power) storage is cost-effective in grids with 50-60 percent of electricity supply that comes from VRE generation. “The picture is more favorable to storage adoption if future cost projections ($150 per kilowatt-hour for four-hour storage) are realized,” notes Mallapragada.
Relevance to policymakers
The results of the study highlight the importance of reforming electricity market structures or contracting practices to enable storage developers to monetize the value from substituting generation and transmission capacity — a central component of their economic viability.
“In practice, there are few direct markets to monetize the capacity substitution value that is provided by storage,” says Mallapragada. “Depending on their administrative design and market rules, capacity markets may or may not adequately compensate storage for providing energy during peak load periods.”
In addition, Mallapragada notes that developers and integrated utilities in regulated markets can implicitly capture capacity substitution value through integrated development of wind, solar, and energy storage projects. Recent project announcements support the observation that this may be a preferred method for capturing storage value.
Implications for the low-carbon energy transition
The economic value of energy storage is closely tied to other major trends impacting today’s power system, most notably the increasing penetration of wind and solar generation. However, in some cases, the continued decline of wind and solar costs could negatively impact storage value, which could create pressure to reduce storage costs in order to remain cost-effective. 
“It is a common perception that battery storage and wind and solar power are complementary,” says Sepulveda. “Our results show that is true, and that all else equal, more solar and wind means greater storage value. That said, as wind and solar get cheaper over time, that can reduce the value storage derives from lowering renewable energy curtailment and avoiding wind and solar capacity investments. Given the long-term cost declines projected for wind and solar, I think this is an important consideration for storage technology developers.” 
The relationship between wind and solar cost and storage value is even more complex, the study found.
“Since storage derives much of its value from capacity deferral, going into this research, my expectation was that the cheaper wind and solar gets, the lower the value of energy storage will become, but our paper shows that is not always the case,” explains Mallapragada. “There are some scenarios where other factors that contribute to storage value, such as increases in transmission capacity deferral, outweigh the reduction in wind and solar deferral value, resulting in higher overall storage value.”
Battery storage is increasingly competing with natural gas-fired power plants to provide reliable capacity for peak demand periods, but the researchers also find that adding 1 megawatt (MW) of storage power capacity displaces less than 1 MW of natural gas generation. The reason: To shut down 1 MW of gas capacity, storage must not only provide 1 MW of power output, but also be capable of sustaining production for as many hours in a row as the gas capacity operates. That means you need many hours of energy storage capacity (megawatt-hours) as well. The study also finds that this capacity substitution ratio declines as storage tries to displace more gas capacity.
“The first gas plant knocked offline by storage may only run for a couple of hours, one or two times per year,” explains Jenkins. “But the 10th or 20th gas plant might run 12 or 16 hours at a stretch, and that requires deploying a large energy storage capacity for batteries to reliably replace gas capacity.”
Given the importance of energy storage duration to gas capacity substitution, the study finds that longer storage durations (the amount of hours storage can operate at peak capacity) of eight hours generally have greater marginal gas displacement than storage with two hours of duration. However, the additional system value from longer durations does not outweigh the additional cost of the storage capacity, the study finds. 
“From the perspective of power system decarbonization, this suggests the need to develop cheaper energy storage technologies that can be cost-effectively deployed for much longer durations, in order to displace dispatchable fossil fuel generation,” says Mallapragada.
To address this need, the team is preparing to publish a followup paper that provides the most extensive evaluation of the potential role and value of long-duration energy storage technologies to date.
“We are developing novel insights that can guide the development of a variety of different long-duration energy storage technologies and help academics, private-sector companies and investors, and public policy stakeholders understand the role of these technologies in a low-carbon future,” says Sepulveda.
This research was supported by General Electric through the MIT Energy Initiative’s Electric Power Systems Low-Carbon Energy Center.  More

The following is a joint release from the MIT Environmental Solutions Initiative and the office of Wyoming Governor Mark Gordon.
The State of Wyoming supplies 40 percent of the country’s coal used to power electric grids. The production of coal and other energy resources contributes over half of the state’s revenue, funding the government and many of the social services — including K-12 education — that residents rely on. With the consumption of coal in a long-term decline, decreased revenues from oil and natural gas, and growing concerns about carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions, the state is actively looking at how to adapt to a changing marketplace.
Recently, representatives from the Wyoming Governor’s Office, University of Wyoming School of Energy Resources, and Wyoming Energy Authority met with faculty and researchers from MIT in a virtual, two-day discussion to discuss avenues for the state to strengthen its energy economy while lowering CO2 emissions.
“This moment in time presents us with an opportunity to seize: creating a strong economic future for the people of Wyoming while protecting something we all care about — the climate,” says Wyoming Governor Mark Gordon. “Wyoming has tremendous natural resources that create thousands of high-paying jobs. This conversation with MIT allows us to consider how we use our strengths and adapt to the changes that are happening nationally and globally.”
The two dozen participants from Wyoming and MIT discussed pathways for long-term economic growth in Wyoming, given the global need to reduce carbon dioxide emissions. The wide-ranging and detailed conversation covered topics such as the future of carbon capture technology, hydrogen, and renewable energy; using coal for materials and advanced manufacturing; climate policy; and how communities can adapt and thrive in a changing energy marketplace.
The discussion paired MIT’s global leadership in technology development, economic modeling, and low-carbon energy research with Wyoming’s unique competitive advantages: its geology that provides vast underground storage potential for CO2; its existing energy and pipeline infrastructure; and the tight bonds between business, government, and academia.
“Wyoming’s small population and statewide support of energy technology development is an advantage,” says Holly Krutka, executive director of the University of Wyoming’s School of Energy Resources. “Government, academia, and industry work very closely together here to scale up technologies that will benefit the state and beyond. We know each other, so we can get things done and get them done quickly.”
“There’s strong potential for MIT to work with the State of Wyoming on technologies that could not only benefit the state, but also the country and rest of the world as we combat the urgent crisis of climate change,” says Bob Armstrong, director of the MIT Energy Initiative, who attended the forum. “It’s a very exciting conversation.”
The event was convened by the MIT Environmental Solutions Initiative as part of its Here & Real project, which works with regions in the United States to help further initiatives that are both climate-friendly and economically just.
“At MIT, we are focusing our attention on technologies that combat the challenge of climate change — but also, with an eye toward not leaving people behind,” says Maria Zuber, MIT’s vice president for research and the E. A. Griswold Professor of Geophysics.
“It is inspiring to see Wyoming’s state leadership seriously committed to finding solutions for adapting the energy industry, given what we know about the risks of climate change,” says Laur Hesse Fisher, director of the Here & Real project. “Their determination to build an economically and environmentally sound future for the people of Wyoming has been evident in our discussions, and I am excited to see this conversation continue and deepen.”

Topics: MIT Energy Initiative, Climate change, Policy, Collaboration, Energy, Industry, Government, Sustainability, Emissions, Air pollution, Manufacturing, Carbon dioxide, ESI More

More than 90 percent of the world’s energy use today involves heat, whether for producing electricity, heating and cooling buildings and vehicles, manufacturing steel and cement, or other industrial activities. Collectively, these processes emit a staggering amount of greenhouse gases into the environment each year.
Reinventing the way we transport, store, convert, and use thermal energy would go a long way toward avoiding a global rise in temperature of more than 2 degrees Celsius — a critical increase that is predicted to tip the planet into a cascade of catastrophic climate scenarios.
But, as three thermal energy experts write in a letter published today in Nature Energy, “Even though this critical need exists, there is a significant disconnect between current research in thermal sciences and what is needed for deep decarbonization.”
In an effort to motivate the scientific community to work on climate-critical thermal issues, the authors have laid out five thermal energy “grand challenges,” or broad areas where significant innovations need to be made in order to stem the rise of global warming. MIT News spoke with Asegun Henry, the lead author and the Robert N. Noyce Career Development Associate Professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering, about this grand vision.
Q: Before we get into the specifics of the five challenges you lay out, can you say a little about how this paper came about, and why you see it as a call to action?
A: This paper was born out of this really interesting meeting, where my two co-authors and I were asked to meet with Bill Gates and teach him about thermal energy. We did a several-hour session with him in October of 2018, and when we were leaving, at the airport, we all agreed that the message we shared with Bill needs to be spread much more broadly.
This particular paper is about thermal science and engineering specifically, but it’s an interdisciplinary field with lots of intersections. The way we frame it, this paper is about five grand challenges that if solved, would literally alter the course of humanity. It’s a big claim — but we back it up.
And we really need this to be declared as a mission, similar to the declaration that we were going to put a man on the moon, where you saw this concerted effort among the scientific community to achieve that mission. Our mission here is to save humanity from extinction due to climate change. The mission is clear. And this is a subset of five problems that will get us the majority of the way there, if we can solve them. Time is running out, and we need all hands on deck. 
Q: What are the five thermal energy challenges you outline in your paper?
A: The first challenge is developing thermal storage systems for the power grid, electric vehicles, and buildings. Take the power grid: There is an international race going on to develop a grid storage system to store excess electricity from renewables so you can use it at a later time. This would allow renewable energy to penetrate the grid. If we can get to a place of fully decarbonizing the grid, that alone reduces carbon dioxide emissions from electricity production by 25 percent. And the beauty of that is, once you decarbonize the grid you open up decarbonizing the transportation sector with electric vehicles. Then you’re talking about a 40 percent reduction of global carbon emissions.
The second challenge is decarbonizing industrial processes, which contribute 15 percent of global carbon dioxide emissions. The big actors here are cement, steel, aluminum, and hydrogen. Some of these industrial processes intrinsically involve the emission of carbon dioxide, because the reaction itself has to release carbon dioxide for it to work, in the current form. The question is, is there another way? Either we think of another way to make cement, or come up with something different. It’s an extremely difficult challenge, but there are good ideas out there, and we need way more people thinking about this.
The third challenge is solving the cooling problem. Air conditioners and refrigerators have chemicals in them that are very harmful to the environment, 2,000 times more harmful than carbon dioxide on a molar basis. If the seal breaks and that refrigerant gets out, that little bit of leakage will cause global warming to shift significantly. When you account for India and other developing nations that are now getting access to electricity infrastructures to run AC systems, the leakage of these refrigerants will become responsible for 15 to 20 percent of global warming by 2050.
The fourth challenge is long-distance transmission of heat. We transmit electricity because it can be transmitted with low loss, and it’s cheap. The question is, can we transmit heat like we transmit electricity? There is an overabundance of waste heat available at power plants, and the problem is, where the power plants are and where people live are two different places, and we don’t have a connector to deliver heat from these power plants, which is literally wasted. You could satisfy the entire residential heating load of the world with a fraction of that waste heat. What we don’t have is the wire to connect them. And the question is, can someone create one?
The last challenge is variable conductance building envelopes. There are some demonstrations that show it is physically possible to create a thermal material, or a device that will change its conductance, so that when it’s hot, it can block heat from getting through a wall, but when you want it to, you could change its conductance to let the heat in or out. We’re far away from having a functioning system, but the foundation is there.
Q: You say that these five challenges represent a new mission for the scientific community, similar to the mission to land a human on the moon, which came with a clear deadline. What sort of timetable are we talking about here, in terms of needing to solve these five thermal problems to mitigate climate change?
A: In short, we have about 20 to 30 years of business as usual, before we end up on an inescapable path to an average global temperature rise of over 2 degrees Celsius. This may seem like a long time, but it’s not when you consider that it took natural gas 70 years to become 20 percent of our energy mix. So imagine that now we have to not just switch fuels, but do a complete overhaul of the entire energy infrastructure in less than one third the time. We need dramatic change, not yesterday, but years ago. So every day I fear we will do too little too late, and we as a species may not survive Mother Earth’s clapback.

Topics: 3 Questions, Alternative energy, Carbon, Carbon dioxide, Climate change, Emissions, Energy, Energy storage, Global Warming, Greenhouse gases, Mechanical engineering, Renewable energy, Research, School of Engineering, Sustainability More

For the past 14 years, the MIT Energy Conference — a two-day event organized by energy students — has united students, faculty, researchers, and industry representatives from around the world to discuss cutting-edge developments in energy.
Under the supervision of Thomas “Trey” Wilder, an MBA candidate at the MIT Sloan School of Management, and a large team of student event organizers, the final pieces for the 2020 conference were falling into place by early March — and then the Covid-19 pandemic hit the United States. As the Institute canceled in-person events to reduce the spread of the virus, much of the planning that had gone into hosting the conference in its initial format was upended.
The Energy Conference team had less than a month to transition the entire event — scheduled for early April — online.
During the conference’s opening remarks, Wilder recounted the month leading up to the event. “Coincidently, the same day that we received the official notice that all campus events were canceled, we had a general body Energy Club meeting,” says Wilder. “All the leaders looked at each other in disbelief — seeing a lot of the work that we had put in for almost a year now, seemingly go down the drain. We decided that night to retain whatever value we could find from this event.”
The team immediately started contacting vendors and canceling orders, issuing refunds to guests, and informing panelists and speakers about the conference’s new format.
“One of the biggest issues was getting buy-in from the speakers. Everyone was new to this virtual world back at the end of March. Our speakers didn’t know what this was going to look like, and many backed out,” says Wilder. The team worked hard to find new speakers, with one even being brought on 12 hours before the start of the event.
Another challenge posed by taking the conference virtual was learning the ins and outs of running a Zoom webinar in a remarkably short time frame. “With the webinar, there are so many functions that the host controls that really affect the outcome of the event. Similarly, the speakers didn’t quite know how to operate it, either.”
In spite of the multitude of challenges posed by switching to an online format on a tight deadline, this year’s coordinating team managed to pull off an incredibly informative and timely conference that reached a much larger audience than those in years past. This was the first year the conference was offered for free online, which allowed for over 3,500 people globally to tune in — a marked increase from the 500 attendees planned for the original, in-person event.
Over the course of two days, panelists and speakers discussed a wide range of energy topics, including electric vehicles, energy policy, and the future of utilities. The three keynote speakers were Daniel M. Kammen, a professor of energy and the chair of the Goldman School of Public Policy at the University of California at Berkeley; Rachel Kyte, the dean of the Tufts Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy; and John Deutch, the Institute Professor of Chemistry at MIT.
Many speakers modified their presentations to address Covid-19 and how it relates to energy and the environment. For example, Kammen adjusted his address to cover what those who are working to address the climate emergency can learn from the Covid-19 pandemic. He emphasized the importance of individual actions for both the climate crisis and Covid-19; how global supply chains are vulnerable in a crowded, denuded planet; and how there is no substitute for thorough research and education when tackling these issues.
Wilder credits the team of dedicated, hardworking energy students as the most important contributors to the conference’s success. A couple of notable examples include Joe Connelly, an MBA candidate, and Leah Ellis, a materials science and engineering postdoc, who together managed the Zoom operations during the conference. They ensured that the panels and presentations flowed seamlessly.
Anna Sheppard, another MBA candidate, live-tweeted throughout the conference, managed the YouTube stream, and responded to emails during the event, with assistance from Michael Cheng, a graduate student in the Technology and Policy Program.
Wilder says MBA candidate Pervez Agwan “was the Swiss Army knife of the group”; he worked on everything from marketing to tickets to operations — and, because he had a final exam on the first day of the conference, Agwan even pulled an all-nighter to ensure that the event and team were in good shape.
“What I loved most about this team was that they were extremely humble and happy to do the dirty work,” Wilder says. “Everyone was content to put their head down and grind to make this event great. They did not desire praise or accolades, and are therefore worthy of both.” More

Nuclear energy provides about 20 percent of the U.S. electricity supply, and over half of its carbon-free generating capacity.   
Operations of commercial nuclear reactors produce small quantities of spent fuel, which in some countries is reprocessed to extract materials that can be recycled as fuel in other reactors. Key to the improvement of the economics of this fuel cycle is the capture of gaseous radioactive products of fission such as 85krypton.
Therefore, developing efficient technology to capture and secure 85krypton from the mix of effluent gasses would represent a significant improvement in the management of used nuclear fuels. One promising avenue is the adsorption of gasses into an advanced type of soft crystalline material, metal organic frameworks (MOFs), which have extremely high porosity and enormous internal surface area and can incorporate a vast array of organic and inorganic components.
Recently published research by a multidisciplinary group that includes members of MIT’s Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering (NSE) represents one of the first steps toward practical application of MOFs for nuclear fuel management, with novel findings on efficacy and radiation resistance, and an initial concept for implementation.
One fundamental challenge is that the mix of gasses produced during fuel reprocessing is rich in oxygen and nitrogen, and existing methods tend to collect them as well as the part-per-million quantities of krypton that represent the highest risk. This reduces the purity of the collected 85Kr and increases the waste volume. Moreover, existing krypton extraction methods rely on costly and complex cryogenic processes.
The group’s study, published in the journal Nature Communications, evaluated a series of ultra-microporous MOFs with different metal centers including zinc, cobalt, nickel, and iron, and found that a copper-containing crystal, SIFSIX-Cu, showed good promise.
To harness its favorable combination of radiation stability and selective adsorption, while also minimizing the volume of waste, the team proposed a two-step treatment process, in which an initial bed of the material is used to adsorb xenon and carbon dioxide from the effluent gas mixture, after which the gas is transferred to a second bed which selectively adsorbs krypton but not nitrogen or oxygen.
“If one day we want to treat the spent fuels, which in the U.S. are currently stored in pools and dry casks at the nuclear power plant sites, we need to handle the volatile radionuclides.” explains Ju Li, MIT’s Battelle Energy Alliance Professor of Nuclear Science and Engineering and professor of materials science and engineering. “Physisorption of krypton and xenon is a good approach, and we were very happy to collaborate with this large team on the MOF approach.”
MOFs have been seen as a possible solution for applications in many fields, but this research marks the first systematic study of their applicability in the nuclear sector, and the effectiveness of different metal centers on MOF radiation stability, notes Sameh K. Elsaidi, a research scientist at the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Energy and Technology Laboratory and the paper’s lead author.
“There are already over 60,000 different MOFs, and more are being developed every day, so there are a lot to choose from,” says Elsaidi. “The selection of one for 85Kr separation during reprocessing is based on several essential criteria. During our long search for porous materials that can meet these criteria, we found that a class of microporous MOFs called SIFSIX-3-M can efficiently reduce the volume of nuclear waste by separating 85Kr in more pure form from the other nonradioactive gasses. However, in order to be useful for practical separation of 85Kr, these materials must be resistant to radiation under reprocessing conditions.
“This is a first look at candidates that can meet the criteria. I feel very lucky to be working with Ju and [MIT NSE postdoc Ahmed Sami Helal] as we start to evaluate whether these materials can be used in the real world. This project was a very good example of how collaborative work can lead to better fundamental understanding, and there’s a lot down the road that we can do together,” adds Elsaidi.
Helal notes, “Studying the effect of high-energy ionizing radiation, including β-rays and γ-rays, on the stability of MOFs is a very important factor in determining whether the MOFs can be used for capture of fission gasses from used fuel. This work is the first to investigate the radiolytic stability of MOFs at radiation doses relevant to practical Xe/Kr separation at fuel reprocessing plants.”
Developing a practical adsorption process is a complex task, requiring capabilities from multiple disciplines including chemical engineering, materials science, and nuclear engineering. The research leveraged several specialized Institute resources, including the MIT gamma irradiation facility (managed by the MIT Radiation Protection Program) and the High Voltage Research Laboratory, which was used for beta irradiation measurements with assistance from Mitchell Galanek of the MIT Office of Environment, Health and Safety.
Those efforts, in conjunction with X-ray diffraction studies and electronic structure modeling, “were fascinating and helped us learn a lot about MOFs and build our understanding of non-neutronic radiation resistance of this new class of materials,” says Li. “That could be useful in other applications in the future,” including detectors.
In addition to MIT and the National Energy Technology Laboratory, collaborators on the project included the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (Praveen Thallapally), the University of Pittsburgh (Mona Mohamed), and the University of South Florida (Brian Space and Tony Pham). Programmatic funding was provided by the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Nuclear Energy, with additional support from the National Science Foundation. Computational resources were made available via an XSEDE Grant and by the University of South Florida.

Topics: Nuclear science and engineering, Materials Science and Engineering, Research, Collaboration, Energy, Nuclear power and reactors, School of Engineering, Department of Energy (DoE), National Science Foundation (NSF), Emissions, DMSE More

The following letter was sent to the MIT community today by President L. Rafael Reif.
To the members of the MIT community,
I am delighted to share an important step in MIT’s ongoing efforts to take action against climate change.
Thanks to the thoughtful leadership of Vice President for Research Maria Zuber, Associate Provost Richard Lester and a committee of 26 faculty leaders representing all five schools and the college, today we are committing to an ambitious new research effort called Climate Grand Challenges.
MIT’s Plan for Action on Climate Change stressed the need for breakthrough innovations and underscored MIT’s responsibility to lead. Since then, the escalating climate crisis and lagging global response have only intensified the need for action.
With this letter, we invite all principal investigators (PIs) from across MIT to help us define a new agenda of transformative research. The threat of climate change demands a host of interlocking solutions; to shape a research program worthy of MIT, we seek bold faculty proposals that address the most difficult problems in the field, problems whose solutions would make the most decisive difference.
The focus will be on those hard questions where progress depends on advancing and applying frontier knowledge in the physical, life and social sciences, or advancing and applying cutting-edge technologies, or both; solutions may require the wisdom of many disciplines. Equally important will be to advance the humanistic and scientific understanding of how best to inspire 9 billion humans to adopt the technologies and behaviors the crisis demands.
We encourage interested PIs to submit a letter of interest. A group of MIT faculty and outside experts will choose the most compelling – the five or six ideas that offer the most effective levers for rapid, large-scale change. MIT will then focus intensely on securing the funds for the work to succeed. To meet this great rolling emergency for the species, we are seeking and expecting big ideas for sharpening our understanding, combatting climate change itself and adapting constructively to its impacts.
You can learn much more about the overall concept as well as specific deadlines and requirements here.
This invitation is geared specifically for MIT PIs – but the climate problem deserves wholehearted attention from every one of us. Whatever your role, I encourage you to find ways to be part of the broad range of climate events, courses and research and other work already under way at MIT. 
For decades, MIT students, staff, postdocs, faculty and alumni have poured their energy, insight and ingenuity into countless aspects of the climate problem; in this new work, your efforts are our inspiration and our springboard. 
We will share next steps in the Climate Grand Challenges process later in the fall semester.
Sincerely,
L. Rafael Reif More