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      in Energy

      A green hydrogen innovation for clean energy

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      Renewable energy today — mainly derived from the sun or wind — depends on batteries for storage. While costs have dropped in recent years, the pursuit of more efficient means of storing renewable power continues.

      “All of these technologies, unfortunately, have a long way to go,” said Sossina Haile SB ’86, PhD ’92, the Walter P. Murphy Professor of Materials Science and Engineering at Northwestern University, at recent talk at MIT. She was the speaker of the fall 2023 Wulff Lecture, an event hosted by the Department of Materials Science and Engineering (DMSE) to ignite enthusiasm for the discipline.

      To add to the renewable energy mix — and help quicken the pace to a sustainable future — Haile is working on an approach based on hydrogen in fuel cells, particularly for eco-friendly fuel in cars. Fuel cells, like batteries, produce electricity from chemical reactions but don’t lose their charge so long as fuel is supplied.

      To generate power, the hydrogen must be pure — not attached to another molecule. Most methods of producing hydrogen today require burning fossil fuel, which generates planet-heating carbon emissions. Haile proposes a “green” process using renewable electricity to extract the hydrogen from steam.

      When hydrogen is used in a fuel cell, “you have water as the product, and that’s the beautiful zero emissions,” Haile said, referring to the renewable energy production cycle that is set in motion.

      Ammonia fuels hydrogen’s potential

      Hydrogen is not yet widely used as a fuel because it’s difficult to transport. For one, it has low energy density, meaning a large volume of hydrogen gas is needed to store a large amount of energy. And storing it is challenging because hydrogen’s tiny molecules can infiltrate metal tanks or pipes, causing cracks and gas leakage.

      Haile’s solution for transporting hydrogen is using ammonia to “carry” it. Ammonia is three parts hydrogen and one part nitrogen, so the hydrogen needs to be separated from the nitrogen before it can be used in the kind of fuel cells that can power cars.

      Ammonia has some advantages, including using existing pipelines and a high transmission capacity, Haile said — so more power can be transmitted at any given time.

      To extract the hydrogen from ammonia, Haile has built devices that look a lot like fuel cells, with cesium dihydrogen phosphate as an electrolyte. The “superprotonic” material displays high proton conductivity — it allows protons, or positively charged particles, to move through it. This is important for hydrogen, which has just a proton and an electron. By letting only protons through the electrolyte, the device strips hydrogen from the ammonia, leaving behind the nitrogen.

      The material has other benefits, too, Haile said: “It’s inexpensive, nontoxic, earth-abundant — all these good things that you want to have when you think about a sustainable energy technology.”

      Play video

      2023 Fall Wulff LectureVideo: Department of Materials Science and Engineering

      Sparking interest — and hope

      Haile’s talk piqued interest in the audience, which nearly filled the 6-120 auditorium at MIT, which seats about 150 people.

      Materials science and engineering major Nikhita Law heard hope in Haile’s talk for a more sustainable future.

      “A major problem in making our energy system sustainable is finding ways to store energy from renewables,” Law says. Even if hydrogen-powered cars are not as wide-scale as lithium-battery-powered electric cars, “a permanent energy storage station where we convert electricity into hydrogen and convert it back seems like it makes more sense than mining more lithium.”

      Another DMSE student, senior Daniel Tong, learned about the challenges involved in transporting hydrogen at another seminar and was curious to learn more. “This was something I hadn’t thought of: Can you carry hydrogen more effectively in a different form? That’s really cool.”

      He adds that talks like the Wulff Lecture are helpful in keeping people up to date in a wide-ranging, interdisciplinary field such as materials science and engineering, which spans chemistry, physics, engineering, and other disciplines. “This is a really good way to get exposed to different parts of materials science. There are so many more facets than you know of.”

      In her talk, Haile encouraged audience members to get involved in sustainability research.

      “There’s lots of room for further insight and materials discovery,” she said.

      Haile concluded by underscoring the challenges faced by developing countries in dealing with climate change impacts, particularly those near the equator where there isn’t adequate infrastructure to deal with big swings in precipitation and temperature. For the people who aren’t driven to solve problems that affect people on the other side of the world, Haile offered some extra motivation.

      “I’m sure many of you enjoy coffee. This is going to put the coffee crops in jeopardy as well,” she said. More

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      in Energy

      Ayomikun Ayodeji ’22 named a 2024 Rhodes Scholar

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      Ayomikun “Ayo” Ayodeji ’22 from Lagos, Nigeria, has been selected as a Rhodes Scholar for West Africa. He will begin fully funded postgraduate studies at Oxford University in the U.K. next fall.

      Ayodeji was supported by Associate Dean Kim Benard and the Distinguished Fellowships team in Career Advising and Professional Development, and received additional mentorship from the Presidential Committee on Distinguished Fellowships.

      “Ayo has worked hard to develop his vision and to express it in ways that will capture the imagination of the broader world. It is a thrill to see him recognized this year as a Rhodes Scholar,” says Professor Nancy Kanwisher, who co-chairs the committee along with Professor Will Broadhead.

      Ayodeji graduated from MIT in 2022 with BS degrees in chemical engineering and management. He is currently an associate at Boston Consulting Group.

      He is passionate about championing reliable energy access across the African landscape and fostering culturally inclusive communities. As a Rhodes Scholar, he will pursue an MSc in energy systems and an MSc in global governance and diplomacy.

      During his time at MIT, Ayodeji’s curiosity for energy innovations was fueled by his research on perovskite solar cells under the MIT Energy Initiative. He then went on to intern at Pioneer Natural Resources where he explored the boundless applications of machine learning tools in completions. At BCG, Ayodeji supports both public and private sector clients on a variety of renewable energy topics including clean energy transition, decarbonization roadmaps, and workforce development.

      Ayodeji’s community-oriented mindset led him to team up with a group of friends and partner with the Northeast Children’s Trust (NECT), an organization that helps children affected by the Boko Haram insurgency in northeastern Nigeria. The project, sponsored by Davis Projects for Peace and MIT’s PKG Center, expanded NECT’s programs via an offline, portable classroom server.

      Ayodeji served as an undergraduate representative on the MIT Department of Chemical Engineering’s Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Committee. He was also vice president of the MIT African Students’ Association and a coordinator for the annual MIT International Students Orientation. More

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      in Energy

      MIT startup has big plans to pull carbon from the air

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      In order to avoid the worst effects of climate change, the United Nations has said we’ll need to not only reduce emissions but also remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. One method for achieving carbon removal is direct air capture and storage. Such technologies are still in their infancy, but many efforts are underway to scale them up quickly in hopes of heading off the most catastrophic effects of climate change.

      The startup Noya, founded by Josh Santos ’14, is working to accelerate direct-air carbon removal with a low-power, modular system that can be mass manufactured and deployed around the world. The company plans to power its system with renewable energy and build its facilities near injection wells to store carbon underground.

      Using third-party auditors to verify the amount of carbon dioxide captured and stored, Noya is selling carbon credits to help organizations reach net-zero emissions targets.

      “Think of our systems for direct air capture like solar panels for carbon negativity,” says Santos, who formerly played a role in Tesla’s much-publicized manufacturing scale-up for its Model 3 electric sedan. “We can stack these boxes in a LEGO-like fashion to achieve scale in the field.”

      The three-year old company is currently building its first commercial pilot facility, and says its first full-scale commercial facility will have the capacity to pull millions of tons of carbon from the air each year. Noya has already secured millions of dollars in presales to help build its first facilities from organizations including Shopify, Watershed, and a university endowment.

      Santos says the ambitious approach, which is driven by the urgent need to scale carbon removal solutions, was influenced by his time at MIT.

      “I need to thank all of my MIT professors,” Santos says. “I don’t think any of this would be possible without the way in which MIT opened up my horizons by showing me what’s possible when you work really hard.”

      Finding a purpose

      Growing up in the southeastern U.S., Santos says he first recognized climate change as an issue by experiencing the increasing intensity of hurricanes in his neighborhood. One year a hurricane forced his family to evacuate their town. When they returned, their church was gone.

      “The storm left a really big mark on me and how I thought about the world,” Santos says. “I realized how much climate change can impact people.”

      When Santos came to MIT as an undergraduate, he took coursework related to climate change and energy systems, eventually majoring in chemical engineering. He also learned about startups through courses he took at the MIT Sloan School of Management and by taking part in MIT’s Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program (UROP), which exposed him to researchers in the early stages of commercializing research from MIT labs.

      More than the coursework, though, Santos says MIT instilled in him a desire to make a positive impact on the world, in part through a four-day development workshop called LeaderShape that he took one January during the Institute’s Independent Activities Period (IAP).

      “LeaderShape teaches students how to lead with integrity, and the core lesson is that any privilege you have you should try to leverage to improve the lives of other people,” Santos says. “That really stuck with me. Going to MIT is a huge privilege, and it makes me feel like I have a responsibility to put that privilege to work to the betterment of society. It shaped a lot of how I view my career.”

      After graduation, Santos worked at Tesla, then at Harley Davidson, where he worked on electric powertrains. Eventually he decided electric vehicle technology couldn’t solve climate change on its own, so in the spring of 2020 he founded Noya with friend Daniel Cavaro.

      The initial idea for Noya was to attach carbon capture devices to cooling towers to keep equipment costs low. The founders pivoted in response to the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act in 2022 because their machines weren’t big enough to qualify for the new tax credits in the law, which required each system to capture at least 1,000 tons of CO2 per year.

      Noya’s new systems will combine thousands of its modular units to create massive facilities that can capture millions of tons of CO2 right next to existing injection wells.

      Each of Noya’s units is about the size of a solar panel at about 6 feet wide, 4.5 feet tall, and 1 foot thick. A fan blows air through tiny channels in each unit that contain Noya’s carbon capture material. The company’s material solution consists of an activated carbon monolith and a proprietary chemical feedstock that binds to the carbon in the air. When the material becomes saturated with carbon, electricity is applied to the material and a light vacuum collects a pure stream of carbon.

      The goal is for each of Noya’s modules to remove about 60 tons of CO2 from the atmosphere per year.

      “Other direct air capture companies need a big hot piece of equipment — like an oven, steam generator, or kiln — that takes electricity and converts it to get heat to the material,” Santos says. “Any lost heat into the surrounding environment is excess cost. We skip the need for the excess equipment and their inefficiencies by adding the electricity directly to the material itself.”

      Scaling with urgency

      From its office in Oakland, California, Noya is putting an experimental module through tests to optimize its design. Noya will launch its first testing facility, which should remove about 350 tons of CO2 per year, in 2024. It has already secured renewable energy and injection storage partners for that facility. Over the next few years Noya plans to capture and remove thousands of tons of CO2, and the company’s first commercial-scale facility will aim to remove about 3 million tons of carbon annually.

      “That design is what we’ll replicate across the world to grow our planetary impact,” Santos says. “We’re trying to scale up as fast as possible.”

      Noya has already sold all of the carbon credits it expects to generate in its first five years, and the founders believe the growing demand from companies and governments to purchase high-quality carbon credits will outstrip supply for at least the next 10 years in the nascent carbon removal industry, which also includes approaches like enhanced rock weathering, biomass carbon storage, and ocean alkalinity enhancement.

      “We’re going to need something like 30 companies the size of Shell to achieve the scale we need,” Santos says. “I think there will be large companies in each of those verticals. We’re in the early innings here.”

      Santos believes the carbon removal market can scale without government mandates, but he also sees increasing government and public support for carbon removal technologies around the world.

      “Carbon removal is a waste management problem,” Santos says. “You can’t just throw trash in the middle of the street. The way we currently deal with trash is polluters pay to clean up their waste. Carbon removal should be like that. CO2 is a waste product, and we should have regulations in place that are requiring polluters, like businesses, to clean up their waste emissions. It’s a public good to provide cleaner air.” More

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      in Environment

      Smart irrigation technology covers “more crop per drop”

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      In agriculture today, robots and drones can monitor fields, temperature and moisture sensors can be automated to meet crop needs, and a host of other systems and devices make farms more efficient, resource-conscious, and profitable. The use of precision agriculture, as these technologies are collectively known, offers significant advantages. However, because the technology can be costly, it remains out of reach for the majority of the world’s farmers.

      “Many of the poor around the world are small, subsistence farmers,” says Susan Amrose, research scientist with the Global Engineering and Research (GEAR) Lab at MIT. “With intensification of food production needs, worsening soil, water scarcity, and smaller plots, these farmers can’t continue with their current practices.”

      By some estimates, the global demand for fresh water will outstrip supply by as much as 40 percent by the end of the decade. Nearly 80 percent of the world’s 570 million farms are classed as smallholder farms, with many located in under-resourced and water-stressed regions. With rapid population growth and climate change driving up demand for food, and with more strain on natural resources, increasing the adoption of sustainable agricultural practices among smallholder farmers is vital. 

      Amrose, who helps lead desalination, drip irrigation, water, and sanitation projects for GEAR Lab, says these small farmers need to move to more mechanized practices. “We’re trying to make it much, much more affordable for farmers to utilize solar-powered irrigation, and to have access to tools that, right now, they’re priced out of,” she says. “More crop per drop, more crop per area, that’s our goal.”

      Play video

      No Drop to Spare: MIT creates affordable, user-driven smart irrigation technology | MIT Mechanical Engineering

      Drip irrigation systems release water and nutrients in controlled volumes directly to the root zone of the crop through a network of pipes and emitters. These systems can reduce water consumption by 20 to 60 percent when compared to conventional flood irrigation methods.

      “Agriculture uses 70 percent of the fresh water that’s in use across the globe. Large-scale adoption and correct management of drip irrigation could help to reduce consumption of fresh water, which is especially critical for regions experiencing water shortages or groundwater depletion,” says Carolyn Sheline SM ’19, a PhD student and member of the GEAR Lab’s Drip Irrigation team. “A lot of irrigation technology is developed for larger farms that can put more money into it — but inexpensive doesn’t need to mean ‘not technologically advanced.’”

      GEAR Lab has created several drip irrigation technology solutions to date, including a low-pressure drip emitter that has been shown to reduce pumping energy by more than 50 percent when compared to existing emitters; a systems-level optimization model that analyzes factors like local weather conditions and crop layouts, to cut overall system operation costs by up to 30 percent; and a low-cost precision irrigation controller that optimizes system energy and water use, enabling farmers to operate the system on an ideal schedule given their specific resources, needs, and preferences. The controller has recently been shown to reduce water consumption by over 40 percent when compared to traditional practices.

      To build these new, affordable technologies, the team tapped into a critical knowledge source — the farmers themselves.

      “We didn’t just create technology in isolation — we also advanced our understanding of how people would interact with and value this technology, and we did that before the technology had come to fruition,” says Amos Winter SM ’05, PhD ’11, associate professor of mechanical engineering and MIT GEAR Lab principal investigator. “Getting affirmations that farmers would value what the technology would do before we finished it was incredibly important.”

      The team held “Farmer Field Days” and conducted interviews with more than 200 farmers, suppliers, and industry professionals in Kenya, Morocco, and Jordan, the regions selected to host field pilot test sites. These specific sites were selected for a variety of reasons, including solar availability and water scarcity, and because all were great candidate markets for eventual adoption of the technology.

      “People usually understand their own problems really well, and they’re very good at coming up with solutions to them,” says Fiona Grant ’17, SM ’19, also a PhD candidate with the GEAR Lab Drip Irrigation team. “As designers, our role really is to provide a different set of expertise and another avenue for them to get the tools or the resources that they need.”

      The controller, for example, takes in weather information, like relative humidity, temperature, wind speed values, and precipitation. Then, using artificial intelligence, it calculates and predicts the area’s solar exposure for the day and the exact irrigation needs for the farmer, and sends information to their smartphone. How much, or how little, automation an individual site uses remains up to the farmer. In its first season of operation on a Moroccan test site, GEAR Lab technology reduced water consumption by 44 percent and energy by 38 percent when compared to a neighboring farm using traditional drip irrigation practice.

      “The way you’re going to operate a system is going to have a big impact on the way you design it,” says Grant. “We gained a sense of what farmers would be willing to change, or not, regarding interactions with the system. We found that what we might change, and what would be acceptable to change, were not necessarily the same thing.”

      GEAR Lab alumna Georgia Van de Zande ’15, SM ’18, PhD ’23, concurs. “It’s about more than just delivering a lower-cost system, it’s also about creating something they’re going to want to use and want to trust.”

      In Jordan, researchers at a full-scale test farm are operating a solar-powered drip system with a prototype of the controller and are receiving smartphone commands on when to open and close the manual valves. In Morocco, the controller is operating at a research farm with a fully automated hydraulic system; researchers are monitoring the irrigation and conducting additional agronomic tasks. In Kenya, where precision agriculture and smart irrigation haven’t yet seen very much adoption, a simpler version of the controller serves to provide educational and training information in addition to offering scheduling and control capabilities.

      Knowledge is power for the farmers, and for designers and engineers, too. If an engineer can know a user’s requirements, Winter says, they’re much more likely to create a successful solution.

      “The most powerful tool a designer can have is perspective. I have one perspective — the math and science and tech innovation side — but I don’t know a thing about what it’s like to live every day as a farmer in Jordan or Morocco,” says Winter. “I don’t know what clogs the filters, or who shuts off the water. If you can see the world through the eyes of stakeholders, you’re going to spot requirements and constraints that you wouldn’t have picked up on otherwise.”

      Winter says the technology his team is building is exciting for a lot of reasons.

      “To be in a situation where the world is saying, ‘we need to deal with water stress, we need to deal with climate adaptation, and we need to particularly do this in resource-constrained countries,’ and to be in a position where we can do something about it and produce something of tremendous value and efficacy is incredible,” says Winter. “Solving the right problem at the right time, on a massive scale, is thrilling.” More

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      in Energy

      Bringing sustainable and affordable electricity to all

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      When MIT electrical engineer Reja Amatya PhD ’12 arrived in Rwanda in 2015, she was whisked off to a village. She saw that diesel generators provided power to the local health center, bank, and shops, but like most of rural Rwanda, Karambi’s 200 homes did not have electricity. Amatya knew the hilly terrain would make it challenging to connect the village to high-voltage lines from the capital, Kigali, 50 kilometers away.

      While many consider electricity a basic human right, there are places where people have never flipped a light switch. Among the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals is global access to affordable, reliable, and sustainable energy by 2030. Recently, the U.N. reported that progress in global electrification had slowed due to the challenge of reaching those hardest to reach.

      Researchers from the MIT Energy Initiative (MITEI) and Comillas Pontifical University in Madrid created Waya Energy Inc., a Cambridge, Massachusetts-based startup commercializing MIT-developed planning and analysis software, to help governments determine the most cost-effective ways to provide electricity to all their citizens.

      The researchers’ 2015 trip to Rwanda marked the beginning of four years of phone calls, Zoom meetings, and international travel to help the east African country — still reeling from the 1994 genocide that killed more than a million people — develop a national electrification strategy and extend its power infrastructure.

      Amatya, Waya president and one of five Waya co-founders, knew that electrifying Karambi and the rest of the country would provide new opportunities for work, education, and connections — and the ability to charge cellphones, often an expensive and inconvenient undertaking.

      To date, Waya — with funding from the Asian Development Bank, the African Development Bank, the Inter-American Development Bank for Latin America, and the World Bank — has helped governments develop electrification plans in 22 countries on almost every continent, including in refugee camps in sub-Saharan Africa’s Sahel and Chad regions, where violence has led to 3 million internally displaced people.

      “With a modeling and visualization tool like ours, we are able to look at the entire spectrum of need and demand and say, ‘OK, what might be the most optimized solution?’” Amatya says.

      More than 15 graduate students and researchers from MIT and Comillas contributed to the development of Waya’s software under the supervision of Robert Stoner, the interim director at MITEI, and Ignacio Pérez-Arriaga, a visiting professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management from Comillas. Pérez-Arriaga looks at how changing electricity use patterns have forced utilities worldwide to rethink antiquated business models.

      The team’s Reference Electrification Model (REM) software pulls information from population density maps, satellite images, infrastructure data, and geospatial points of interest to determine where extending the grid will be most cost-effective and where other solutions would be more practical.

      “I always say we are agnostic to the technology,” Amatya says. “Traditionally, the only way to provide long-term reliable access was through the grid, but that’s changing. In many developing countries, there are many more challenges for utilities to provide reliable service.”

      Off-grid solutions

      Waya co-founder Stoner, who is also the founding director of the MIT Tata Center for Technology and Design, recognized early on that connecting homes to existing infrastructure was not always economically feasible. What’s more, billions of people with grid connections had unreliable access due to uneven regulation and challenging terrain.

      With Waya co-founders Andres Gonzalez-Garcia, a MITEI affiliate researcher, and Professor Fernando de Cuadra Garcia of Comillas, Pérez-Arriaga and Stoner led a team that developed a set of principles to guide universal regional electrification. Their approach — which they dubbed the Integrated Distribution Framework — incorporates elements of optimal planning as well as novel business models and regulation. Getting all three right is “necessary,” Stoner says, “if you want a viable long-term outcome.”

      Amatya says, “Initially, we designed REM to understand what the level of demand is in these countries with very rural and poor populations, and what the system should look like to serve it. We took a lot of that input into developing the model.” In 2019, Waya was created to commercialize the software and add consulting to the package of services the team provides.

      Now, in addition to advising governments and regulators on how to expand existing grids, Waya proposes options such as a mini-grid, powered by renewables like wind, hydropower, or solar, to serve single villages or large-scale mini-grid solutions for larger areas. In some cases, an even more localized, scalable solution is a mesh grid, which might consist of a single solar panel for a few houses that, over time, can be expanded and ultimately connected to the main grid.

      The REM software has been used to design off-grid systems for remote and mountainous regions in Uganda, Peru, Nigeria, Cambodia, Indonesia, India, and elsewhere. When Tata Power, India’s largest integrated power company, saw how well mini-grids would serve parts of east India, the company created a mini-grid division called Tata Renewables.

      Amatya notes that the REM software enables her to come up with an entire national electrification plan from her workspace in Cambridge. But site visits and on-the-ground partners are critical in helping the Waya team understand existing systems, engage with clients to assess demand, and identify stakeholders. In Haiti, an energy consultant reported that the existing grid had typically been operational only six out of every 24 hours. In Karambi, University of Rwanda students surveyed the village’s 200 families and helped lead a community-wide meeting.

      Waya connects with on-the-ground experts and agencies “who can engage directly with the government and other stakeholders, because many times those are the doors that we knock on,” Amatya says. “Local energy ministries, utilities, and regulators have to be open to regulatory change. They have to be open to working with financial institutions and new technology.”

      The goals of regulators, energy providers, funding agencies, and government officials must align in real time “to provide reliable access to energy for a billion people,” she says.

      Moving past challenges

      Growing up in Kathmandu, Amatya used to travel to remote villages with her father, an electrical engineer who designed cable systems for landlines for Nepal Telecom. She remembers being fascinated by the high-voltage lines crisscrossing Nepal on these trips. Now, she points out utility poles to her children and explains how the distribution lines carry power from local substations to customers.

      After majoring in engineering science and physics at Smith College, Amatya completed her PhD in electrical engineering at MIT in 2012. Within two years, she was traveling to off-grid communities in India as a research scientist exploring potential technologies for providing access. There were unexpected challenges: At the time, digitized geospatial data didn’t exist for many regions. In India in 2013, the team used phones to take pictures of paper maps spread out on tables. Team members now scour digital data available through Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and other sources for useful geographical information. 

      It’s one thing to create a plan, Amatya says, but how it gets utilized and implemented becomes a big question. With all the players involved — funding agencies, elected officials, utilities, private companies, and regulators within the countries themselves — it’s sometimes hard to know who’s responsible for next steps.

      “Besides providing technical expertise, our team engages with governments to, let’s say, develop a financial plan or an implementation plan,” she says. Ideally, Waya hopes to stay involved with each project long enough to ensure that its proposal becomes the national electrification strategy of the country. That’s no small feat, given the multiple players, the opaque nature of government, and the need to enact a regulatory framework where none may have existed.

      For Rwanda, Waya identified areas without service, estimated future demand, and proposed the most cost-effective ways to meet that demand with a mix of grid and off-grid solutions. Based on the electrification plan developed by the Waya team, officials have said they hope to have the entire country electrified by 2024.

      In 2017, by the time the team submitted its master plan, which included an off-grid solution for Karambi, Amatya was surprised to learn that electrification in the village had already occurred — an example, she says, of the challenging nature of local planning.

      Perhaps because of Waya’s focus and outreach efforts, Karambi had become a priority. However it happened, Amatya is happy that Karambi’s 200 families finally have access to electricity. More

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      in Environment

      MIT at the 2023 Venice Biennale

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      The Venice Architecture Biennale, the world’s largest and most visited exhibition focusing on architecture, is once again featuring work by many MIT faculty, students, and alumni. On view through Nov. 26, the 2023 biennale, curated by Ghanaian-Scottish architect, academic, and novelist Lesley Lokko, is showcasing projects responding to the theme of “The Laboratory of Change.”

      Architecture and Planning and curator of the previous Venice Biennale. “Our students, faculty, and alumni have responded to the speculative theme with innovative projects at a range of scales and in varied media.”

      Below are descriptions of MIT-related projects and activities.

      MIT faculty participants

      Xavi Laida Aguirre, assistant professor of architecture

      Project: Everlasting Plastics

      Project description: SPACES, a nonprofit alternative art organization based in Cleveland, Ohio, and the U.S. Department of State’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs are behind the U.S. Pavilion’s exhibition at this year’s biennale. The theme, Everlasting Plastics, provides a platform for artists and designers to engage audiences in reframing the overabundance of plastic detritus in our waterways, landfills, and streets as a rich resource. Aguirre’s installation covers two rooms and holds a series of partial scenographies examining indoor proofing materials such as coatings, rubbers, gaskets, bent aluminum, silicone, foam, cement board, and beveled edges.

      Yolande Daniels, associate professor of architecture

      Project: The BLACK City Astrolabe: A Constellation of African Diasporic Women

      Project description: From the multiple displacements of race and gender, enter “The BLACK City Astrolabe,” a space-time field comprised of a 3D map and a 24-hour cycle of narratives that reorder the forces of subjugation, devaluation, and displacement through the spaces and events of African diasporic women. The diaspora map traces the flows of descendants of Africa (whether voluntary or forced) atop the visible tension between the mathematical regularity of meridians of longitude and the biases of international date lines.

      In this moment we are running out of time. The meridians and timeline decades are indexed to an infinite conical projection metered in decades. It structures both the diaspora map and timeline and serves as a threshold to project future structures and events. “The BLACK City Astrolabe” is a vehicle to proactively contemplate things that have happened, that are happening, and that will happen. Yesterday, a “Black” woman went to the future, and here she is.

      Mark Jarzombek, professor of architecture

      Project: Kishkindha NY

      Project description: “Kishkindha NY (Office of (Un)Certainty Research: Mark Jarzombek and Vikramaditya Parakash)” is inspired by an imagined forest-city as described in the ancient Indian text the Ramayana. It comes into being not through the limitations of human agency, but through a multi-species creature that destroys and rebuilds. It is exhibited as a video (Space, Time, Existence) and as a special dance performance.

      Ana Miljački, professor of architecture

      Team: Ana Miljački, professor of architecture and director of Critical Broadcasting Lab, MIT; Ous Abou Ras, MArch candidate; Julian Geltman, MArch; Recording and Design, faculty of Dramatic Arts, Belgrade; Calvin Zhong, MArch candidate. Sound design and production: Pavle Dinulović, assistant professor, Department of Sound Recording and Design, University of Arts in Belgrade.

      Collaborators: Melika Konjičanin, researcher, faculty of architecture, Sarajevo; Ana Martina Bakić, assistant professor, head of department of drawing and visual design, faculty of architecture, Zagreb; Jelica Jovanović, Grupa Arhitekata, Belgrade; Andrew Lawler, Belgrade; Sandro Đukić, CCN Images, Zagreb; Other Tomorrows, Boston.

      Project: The Pilgrimage/Pionirsko hodočašće

      Project description:  The artifacts that constitute Yugoslavia’s socialist architectural heritage, and especially those instrumental in the ideological wiring of several postwar generations for anti-fascism and inclusive living, have been subject to many forms of local and global political investment in forgetting their meaning, as well as to vandalism. The “Pilgrimage” synthesizes “memories” from Yugoslavian childhood visits to myriad postwar anti-fascist memorial monuments and offers them in a shifting and spatial multi-channel video presentation accompanied by a nonlinear documentary soundscape, presenting thus anti-fascism and unity as political and activist positions available (and necessary) today, for the sake of the future. Supported by: MIT Center for Art, Science, and Technology (CAST) Mellon Faculty Grant.

      Adèle Naudé Santos, professor of architecture, planning, and urban design; and Mohamad Nahleh, lecturer in architecture and urbanism; in collaboration with the Beirut Urban Lab at the American University of Beirut

      MIT research team: Ghida El Bsat, Joude Mabsout, Sarin Gacia Vosgerichian, Lasse Rau

      Project: Housing as Infrastructure

      Project description: On Aug. 4, 2020, an estimated 2,750 tons of ammonium nitrate stored at the Port of Beirut exploded, resulting in the deaths of more than 200 people and the devastation of port-adjacent neighborhoods. With over 200,000 housing units in disrepair, exploitative real estate ventures, and the lack of equitable housing policies, we viewed the port blast as a potential escalation of the mechanisms that have produced the ongoing affordable housing crisis across the city. 

      The Dar Group requested proposals to rethink the affected part of the city, through MIT’s Norman B. Leventhal Center for Advanced Urbanism. To best ground our design proposal, we invited the Beirut Urban Lab at the American University of Beirut to join us. We chose to work on the heavily impacted low-rise and high-density neighborhood of Mar Mikhael. Our resultant urban strategy anchors housing within a corridor of shared open spaces. Housing is inscribed within this network and sustained through an adaptive system defined by energy-efficiency and climate responsiveness. Cross-ventilation sweeps through the project on all sides, with solar panel lined roofs integrated to always provide adequate levels of electricity for habitation. These strategies are coupled with an array of modular units designed to echo the neighborhood’s intimate quality — all accessible through shared ramps and staircases. Within this context, housing itself becomes the infrastructure, guiding circulation, managing slopes, integrating green spaces, and providing solar energy across the community. 

      Rafi Segal, associate professor of architecture and urbanism, director of the Future Urban Collectives Lab, director of the SMArchS program; and Susannah Drake.

      Contributors: Olivia Serra, William Minghao Du

      Project:  From Redlining to Blue Zoning: Equity and Environmental Risk, Miami 2100 (2021)

      Project description: As part of Susannah Drake and Rafi Segal’s ongoing work on “Coastal Urbanism,” this project examines the legacy of racial segregation in South Florida and the existential threat that climate change poses to communities in Miami. Through models of coops and community-owned urban blocks, this project seeks to empower formerly disenfranchised communities with new methods of equity capture, allowing residents whose parents and grandparents suffered from racial discrimination to build wealth and benefit from increased real estate value and development.

      Nomeda Urbonas, Art, Culture, and Technology research affiliate; and Gediminas Urbonas, ACT associate professor

      Project: The Swamp Observatory

      Project description: “The Swamp Observatory” augmented reality app is a result of two-year collaboration with a school in Gotland Island in the Baltic Sea, arguably the most polluted sea in the world. Developed as a conceptual playground and a digital tool to augment reality with imaginaries for new climate commons, the app offers new perspective to the planning process, suggesting eco-monsters as emergent ecology for the planned stormwater ponds in the new sustainable city. 

      Sarah Williams, associate professor, technology and urban planning

      Team members: listed here.

      Project: DISTANCE UNKNOWN: RISKS AND OPPORTUNITIES OF MIGRATION IN THE AMERICAS 

      Project description: On view are visualizations made by the MIT Civic Data Design Lab and the United Nations World Food Program that helped to shape U.S. migration policy. The exhibition is built from a unique dataset collected from 4,998 households surveyed in El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras. A tapestry woven out of money and constructed by the hands of Central America migrants illustrates that migrants spent $2.2 billion to migrate from Central America in 2021.

      MIT student curators

      Carmelo Ignaccolo, PhD candidate, Department of Urban Studies and Planning (DUSP)

      Curator: Carmelo Ignaccolo; advisor: Sarah Williams; researchers: Emily Levenson (DUSP), Melody Phu (MIT), Leo Saenger (Harvard University), Yuke Zheng (Harvard); digital animation designer: Ting Zhang

      Exhibition Design Assistant: Dila Ozberkman (architecture and DUSP)

      Project: The Consumed City 

      Project description: “The Consumed City” narrates a spatial investigation of “overtourism” in the historic city of Venice by harnessing granular data on lodging, dining, and shopping. The exhibition presents two large maps and digital animations to showcase the complexity of urban tourism and to reveal the spatial interplay between urban tourism and urban features, such as landmarks, bridges, and street patterns. By leveraging by-product geospatial datasets and advancing visualization techniques, “The Consumed City” acts as a prototype to call for novel policymaking tools in cities “consumed” by “overtourism.”

      MIT-affiliated auxiliary events

      Rania Ghosn, associate professor of architecture and urbanism, El Hadi Jazairy, Anhong Li, and Emma Jurczynski, with initial contributions from Marco Nieto and Zhifei Xu. Graphic design: Office of Luke Bulman.

      Project: Climate Inheritance

      Project description: “Climate Inheritance” is a speculative design research publication that reckons with the complexity of “heritage” and “world” in the Anthropocene Epoch. The impacts of climate change on heritage sites — from Venice flooding to extinction in the Galapagos Islands — have garnered empathetic attention in a media landscape that has otherwise mostly failed to communicate the urgency of the climate crisis. In a strategic subversion of the media aura of heritage, the project casts World Heritage sites as narrative figures to visualize pervasive climate risks all while situating the present emergency within the wreckage of other ends of worlds, replete with the salvages of extractivism, racism, and settler colonialism.   

      Rebuilding Beirut: Using Data to Co-Design a New Future

      SA+P faculty, researchers, and students are participating in the sixth biennial architecture exhibition “Time Space Existence,” presented by the European Cultural Center. The exhibit showcases three collaborative research and design proposals that support the rebuilding efforts in Beirut following the catastrophic explosion at the Port of Beirut in August 2020.

      “Living Heritage Atlas” captures the significance and vulnerability of Beirut’s cultural heritage. 

      “City Scanner” tracks the environmental impacts of the explosion and the subsequent rebuilding efforts. “Community Streets” supports the redesign of streets and public space. 

      The work is supported by the Dar Group Urban Seed Grant Fund at MIT’s Norman B. Leventhal Center for Advanced Urbanism.

      Team members:Living Heritage AtlasCivic Data Design Lab and Future Heritage Lab at MITAssociate Professor Sarah Williams, co-principal investigator (PI)Associate Professor Azra Aksamija, co-PICity Scanner Senseable City Lab at MIT with the American University of Beirut and FAE Technology Professor Carlo Ratti, co-PIFábio Duarte, co-PISimone Mora, research and project leadCommunity Streets City Form Lab at MIT with the American University of BeirutAssociate Professor Andres Sevtsuk, co-PIProfessor Maya Abou-Zeid, co-PISchool of Architecture and Planning alumni participants   Rodrigo Escandón Cesarman SMArchS Design ’20 (co-curator, Mexican Pavilion)Felecia Davis PhD ’17 Design and Computation, SOFTLAB@PSU (Penn State University)Jaekyung Jung SM ’10, (with the team for the Korean pavilion)Vijay Rajkumar MArch ’22 (with the team for the Bahrain Pavilion)

      Other MIT alumni participants

      Basis with GKZ

      Team: Emily Mackevicius PhD ’18, brain and cognitive sciences, with Zenna Tavares, Kibwe Tavares, Gaika Tavares, and Eli Bingham

      Project description: The nonprofit research group works on rethinking AI as a “reasoning machine.” Their two goals are to develop advanced technological models and to make society able to tackle “intractable problems.” Their approach to technology is founded less on pattern elaboration than on the Bayes’ hypothesis, the ability of machines to work on abductive reasoning, which is the same used by the human mind. Two city-making projects model cities after interaction between experts and stakeholders, and representation is at the heart of the dialogue. More

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      in Energy

      Alumnus’ thermal battery helps industry eliminate fossil fuels

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      The explosion of renewable energy projects around the globe is leading to a saturation problem. As more renewable power contributes to the grid, the value of electricity is plummeting during the times of day when wind and solar hit peak productivity. The problem is limiting renewable energy investments in some of the sunniest and windiest places in the world.

      Now Antora Energy, co-founded by David Bierman SM ’14, PhD ’17, is addressing the intermittent nature of wind and solar with a low-cost, highly efficient thermal battery that stores electricity as heat to allow manufacturers and other energy-hungry businesses to eliminate their use of fossil fuels.

      “We take electricity when it’s cheapest, meaning when wind gusts are strongest and the sun is shining brightest,” Bierman explains. “We run that electricity through a resistive heater to drive up the temperature of a very inexpensive material — we use carbon blocks, which are extremely stable, produced at incredible scales, and are some of the cheapest materials on Earth. When you need to pull energy from the battery, you open a large shutter to extract thermal radiation, which is used to generate process heat or power using our thermophotovoltaic, or TPV, technology. The end result is a zero-carbon, flexible, combined heat and power system for industry.”

      Antora’s battery could dramatically expand the application of renewable energy by enabling its use in industry, a sector of the U.S. economy that accounted for nearly a quarter of all greenhouse gas emissions in 2021.

      Antora says it is able to deliver on the long-sought promise of heat-to-power TPV technology because it has achieved new levels of efficiency and scalability with its cells. Earlier this year, Antora opened a new manufacturing facility that will be capable of producing 2 megawatts of its TPV cells each year — which the company says makes it the largest TPV production facility in the world.

      Antora’s thermal battery manufacturing facilities and demonstration unit are located in sun-soaked California, where renewables make up close to a third of all electricity. But Antora’s team says its technology holds promise in other regions as increasingly large renewable projects connect to grids across the globe.

      “We see places today [with high renewables] as a sign of where things are going,” Bierman says. “If you look at the tailwinds we have in the renewable industry, there’s a sense of inevitability about solar and wind, which will need to be deployed at incredible scales to avoid a climate catastrophe. We’ll see terawatts and terawatts of new additions of these renewables, so what you see today in California or Texas or Kansas, with significant periods of renewable overproduction, is just the tip of the iceberg.”

      Bierman has been working on thermal energy storage and thermophotovoltaics since his time at MIT, and Antora’s ties to MIT are especially strong because its progress is the result of two MIT startups becoming one.

      Alumni join forces

      Bierman did his masters and doctoral work in MIT’s Department of Mechanical Engineering, where he worked on solid-state solar thermal energy conversion systems. In 2016, while taking course 15.366 (Climate and Energy Ventures), he met Jordan Kearns SM ’17, then a graduate student in the Technology and Policy Program and the Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering. The two were studying renewable energy when they began to think about the intermittent nature of wind and solar as an opportunity rather than a problem.

      “There are already places in the U.S. where we have more wind and solar at times than we know what to do with,” Kearns says. “That is an opportunity for not only emissions reductions but also for reducing energy costs. What’s the application? I don’t think the overproduction of energy was being talked about as much as the intermittency problem.”

      Kearns did research through the MIT Energy Initiative and the researchers received support from MIT’s Venture Mentoring Service and the MIT Sandbox Innovation Fund to further explore ways to capitalize on fluctuating power prices.

      Kearns officially founded a company called Medley Thermal in 2017 to help companies that use natural gas switch to energy produced by renewables when the price was right. To accomplish that, he combined an off-the-shelf electric boiler with novel control software so the companies could switch energy sources seamlessly from fossil fuel to electricity at especially windy or sunny times. Medley went on to become a finalist for the MIT Clean Energy Prize, and Kearns wanted Bierman to join him as a co-founder, but Bierman had received a fellowship to commercialize a thermal energy storage solution and decided to pursue that after graduation.

      The split ended up working out for both alumni. In the ensuing years, Kearns led Medley Thermal through a number of projects in which gradually larger companies switched from relying on natural gas or propane sources to renewable electricity from the grid. The work culminated in an installment at the Jay Peak resort in Vermont that Kearns says is one of the largest projects in the U.S. using renewable energy to produce heat. The project is expected to reduce about 2,500 tons of carbon dioxide per year.

      Bierman, meanwhile, further developed a thermal energy storage solution for industrial decarbonization, which works by using renewable electricity to heat blocks of carbon, which are stored in insulation to retain energy for long periods of time. The heat from those blocks can then be used to deliver electricity or heat to customers, at temperatures that can exceed 1,500 C. When Antora raised a $50 million Series A funding round last year, Bierman asked Kearns if he could buy out Medley’s team, and the researchers finally became co-workers.

      “Antora and Medley Thermal have a similar value prop: There’s low-cost electricity, and we want to connect that to the industrial sector,” Kearns explains. “But whereas Medley used renewables on an as-available basis, and then when the winds stop we went back to burning fossil fuel with a boiler, Antora has a thermal battery that takes in the electricity, converts it to heat, but also stores it as heat so even when the wind stops blowing we have a reservoir of heat that we can continue to pull from to make steam or power or whatever the facility needs. So, we can now further reduce energy costs by offsetting more fuel and offer a 100 percent clean energy solution.”

      United we scale

      Today, Kearns runs the project development arm of Antora.

      “There are other, much larger projects in the pipeline,” Kearns says. “The Jay Peak project is about 3 megawatts of power, but some of the ones we’re working on now are 30, 60 megawatt projects. Those are more industrial focused, and they’re located in places where we have a strong industrial base and an abundance of renewables, everywhere from Texas to Kansas to the Dakotas — that heart of the country that our team lovingly calls the Wind Belt.”

      Antora’s future projects will be with companies in the chemicals, mining, food and beverage, and oil and gas industries. Some of those projects are expected to come online as early as 2025.          

      The company’s scaling strategy is centered on the inexpensive production process for its batteries.

      “We constantly ask ourselves, ‘What is the best product we can make here?’” Bierman says. “We landed on a compact, containerized, modular system that gets shipped to sites and is easily integrated into industrial processes. It means we don’t have huge construction projects, timelines, and budget overruns. Instead, it’s all about scaling up the factory that builds these thermal batteries and just churning them out.”

      It was a winding journey for Kearns and Bierman, but they now believe they’re positioned to help huge companies become carbon-free while promoting the growth of the solar and wind industries.

      “The more I dig into this, the more shocked I am at how important a piece of the decarbonization puzzle this is today,” Bierman says. “The need has become super real since we first started talking about this in 2016. The economic opportunity has grown, but more importantly the awareness from industries that they need to decarbonize is totally different. Antora can help with that, so we’re scaling up as rapidly as possible to meet the demand we see in the market.” More

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      Embracing the future we need

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      When you picture MIT doctoral students taking small PhD courses together, you probably don’t imagine them going on class field trips. But it does happen, sometimes, and one of those trips changed Andy Sun’s career.

      Today, Sun is a faculty member at the MIT Sloan School of Management and a leading global expert on integrating renewable energy into the electric grid. Back in 2007, Sun was an operations research PhD candidate with a diversified academic background: He had studied electrical engineering, quantum computing, and analog computing but was still searching for a doctoral research subject involving energy. 

      One day, as part of a graduate energy class taught by visiting professor Ignacio J. Pérez Arriaga, the students visited the headquarters of ISO-New England, the organization that operates New England’s entire power grid and wholesale electricity market. Suddenly, it hit Sun. His understanding of engineering, used to design and optimize computing systems, could be applied to the grid as a whole, with all its connections, circuitry, and need for efficiency. 

      “The power grids in the U.S. continent are composed of two major interconnections, the Western Interconnection, the Eastern Interconnection, and one minor interconnection, the Texas grid,” Sun says. “Within each interconnection, the power grid is one big machine, essentially. It’s connected by tens of thousands of miles of transmission lines, thousands of generators, and consumers, and if anything is not synchronized, the system may collapse. It’s one of the most complicated engineering systems.”

      And just like that, Sun had a subject he was motivated to pursue. “That’s how I got into this field,” he says. “Taking a field trip.”Sun has barely looked back. He has published dozens of papers about optimizing the flow of intermittent renewable energy through the electricity grid, a major practical issue for grid operators, while also thinking broadly about the future form of the grid and the process of making almost all energy renewable. Sun, who in 2022 rejoined MIT as the Iberdrola-Avangrid Associate Professor in Electric Power Systems, and is also an associate professor of operations research, emphasizes the urgency of rapidly switching to renewables.

      “The decarbonization of our energy system is fundamental,” Sun says. “It will change a lot of things because it has to. We don’t have much time to get there. Two decades, three decades is the window in which we have to get a lot of things done. If you think about how much money will need to be invested, it’s not actually that much. We should embrace this future that we have to get to.”

      Successful operations

      Unexpected as it may have been, Sun’s journey toward being an electricity grid expert was informed by all the stages of his higher education. Sun grew up in China, and received his BA in electronic engineering from Tsinghua University in Beijing, in 2003. He then moved to MIT, joining the Media Lab as a graduate student. Sun intended to study quantum computing but instead began working on analog computer circuit design for Professor Neil Gershenfeld, another person whose worldview influenced Sun.  

      “He had this vision about how optimization is very important in things,” Sun says. “I had never heard of optimization before.” 

      To learn more about it, Sun started taking MIT courses in operations research. “I really enjoyed it, especially the nonlinear optimization course taught by Robert Freund in the Operations Research Center,” he recalls. 

      Sun enjoyed it so much that after a while, he joined MIT’s PhD program in operations research, thanks to the guidance of Freund. Later, he started working with MIT Sloan Professor Dimitri Bertsimas, a leading figure in the field. Still, Sun hadn’t quite nailed down what he wanted to focus on within operations research. Thinking of Sun’s engineering skills, Bertsimas suggested that Sun look for a research topic related to energy. 

      “He wasn’t an expert in energy at that time, but he knew that there are important problems there and encouraged me to go ahead and learn,” Sun says. 

      So it was that Sun found himself in ISO-New England headquarters one day in 2007, finally knowing what he wanted to study, and quickly finding opportunities to start learning from the organization’s experts on electricity markets. By 2011, Sun had finished his MIT PhD dissertation. Based in part on ISO-New England data, the thesis presented new modeling to more efficiently integrate renewable energy into the grid; built some new modeling tools grid operators could use; and developed a way to add fair short-term energy auctions to an efficient grid system.

      The core problem Sun deals with is that, unlike some other sources of electricity, renewables tend to be intermittent, generating power in an uneven pattern over time. That’s not an insurmountable problem for grid operators, but it does require some new approaches. Many of the papers Sun has written focus on precisely how to increasingly draw upon intermittent energy sources while ensuring that the grid’s current level of functionality remains intact. This is also the focus of his 2021 book, co-authored with Antonio J. Conejo, “Robust Optimiziation in Electric Energy Systems.”

      “A major theme of my research is how to achieve the integration of renewables and still operate the system reliably,” Sun says. “You have to keep the balance of supply and demand. This requires many time scales of operation from multidecade planning, to monthly or annual maintenance, to daily operations, down through second-by-second. I work on problems in all these timescales.”

      “I sit in the interface between power engineering and operations research,” Sun says. “I’m not a power engineer, but I sit in this boundary, and I keep the problems in optimization as my motivation.”

      Culture shift

      Sun’s presence on the MIT campus represents a homecoming of sorts. After receiving his doctorate from MIT, Sun spent a year as a postdoc at IBM’s Thomas J. Watson Research Center, then joined the faculty at Georgia Tech, where he remained for a decade. He returned to the Institute in January of 2022.

      “I’m just very excited about the opportunity of being back at MIT,” Sun says. “The MIT Energy Initiative is a such a vibrant place, where many people come together to work on energy. I sit in Sloan, but one very strong point of MIT is there are not many barriers, institutionally. I really look forward to working with colleagues from engineering, Sloan, everywhere, moving forward. We’re moving in the right direction, with a lot of people coming together to break the traditional academic boundaries.” 

      Still, Sun warns that some people may be underestimating the severity of the challenge ahead and the need to implement changes right now. The assets in power grids have long life time, lasting multiple decades. That means investment decisions made now could affect how much clean power is being used a generation from now. 

      “We’re talking about a short timeline, for changing something as huge as how a society fundamentally powers itself with energy,” Sun says. “A lot of that must come from the technology we have today. Renewables are becoming much better and cheaper, so their use has to go up.”

      And that means more people need to work on issues of how to deploy and integrate renewables into everyday life, in the electric grid, transportation, and more. Sun hopes people will increasingly recognize energy as a huge growth area for research and applied work. For instance, when MIT President Sally Kornbluth gave her inaugural address on May 1 this year, she emphasized tackling the climate crisis as her highest priority, something Sun noticed and applauded. 

      “I think the most important thing is the culture,” Sun says. “Bring climate up to the front, and create the platform to encourage people to come together and work on this issue.” More