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      in Energy

      MIT design would harness 40 percent of the sun’s heat to produce clean hydrogen fuel

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      MIT engineers aim to produce totally green, carbon-free hydrogen fuel with a new, train-like system of reactors that is driven solely by the sun.

      In a study appearing today in Solar Energy Journal, the engineers lay out the conceptual design for a system that can efficiently produce “solar thermochemical hydrogen.” The system harnesses the sun’s heat to directly split water and generate hydrogen — a clean fuel that can power long-distance trucks, ships, and planes, while in the process emitting no greenhouse gas emissions.

      Today, hydrogen is largely produced through processes that involve natural gas and other fossil fuels, making the otherwise green fuel more of a “grey” energy source when considered from the start of its production to its end use. In contrast, solar thermochemical hydrogen, or STCH, offers a totally emissions-free alternative, as it relies entirely on renewable solar energy to drive hydrogen production. But so far, existing STCH designs have limited efficiency: Only about 7 percent of incoming sunlight is used to make hydrogen. The results so far have been low-yield and high-cost.

      In a big step toward realizing solar-made fuels, the MIT team estimates its new design could harness up to 40 percent of the sun’s heat to generate that much more hydrogen. The increase in efficiency could drive down the system’s overall cost, making STCH a potentially scalable, affordable option to help decarbonize the transportation industry.

      “We’re thinking of hydrogen as the fuel of the future, and there’s a need to generate it cheaply and at scale,” says the study’s lead author, Ahmed Ghoniem, the Ronald C. Crane Professor of Mechanical Engineering at MIT. “We’re trying to achieve the Department of Energy’s goal, which is to make green hydrogen by 2030, at $1 per kilogram. To improve the economics, we have to improve the efficiency and make sure most of the solar energy we collect is used in the production of hydrogen.”

      Ghoniem’s study co-authors are Aniket Patankar, first author and MIT postdoc; Harry Tuller, MIT professor of materials science and engineering; Xiao-Yu Wu of the University of Waterloo; and Wonjae Choi at Ewha Womans University in South Korea.

      Solar stations

      Similar to other proposed designs, the MIT system would be paired with an existing source of solar heat, such as a concentrated solar plant (CSP) — a circular array of hundreds of mirrors that collect and reflect sunlight to a central receiving tower. An STCH system then absorbs the receiver’s heat and directs it to split water and produce hydrogen. This process is very different from electrolysis, which uses electricity instead of heat to split water.

      At the heart of a conceptual STCH system is a two-step thermochemical reaction. In the first step, water in the form of steam is exposed to a metal. This causes the metal to grab oxygen from steam, leaving hydrogen behind. This metal “oxidation” is similar to the rusting of iron in the presence of water, but it occurs much faster. Once hydrogen is separated, the oxidized (or rusted) metal is reheated in a vacuum, which acts to reverse the rusting process and regenerate the metal. With the oxygen removed, the metal can be cooled and exposed to steam again to produce more hydrogen. This process can be repeated hundreds of times.

      The MIT system is designed to optimize this process. The system as a whole resembles a train of box-shaped reactors running on a circular track. In practice, this track would be set around a solar thermal source, such as a CSP tower. Each reactor in the train would house the metal that undergoes the redox, or reversible rusting, process.

      Each reactor would first pass through a hot station, where it would be exposed to the sun’s heat at temperatures of up to 1,500 degrees Celsius. This extreme heat would effectively pull oxygen out of a reactor’s metal. That metal would then be in a “reduced” state — ready to grab oxygen from steam. For this to happen, the reactor would move to a cooler station at temperatures around 1,000 C, where it would be exposed to steam to produce hydrogen.

      Rust and rails

      Other similar STCH concepts have run up against a common obstacle: what to do with the heat released by the reduced reactor as it is cooled. Without recovering and reusing this heat, the system’s efficiency is too low to be practical.

      A second challenge has to do with creating an energy-efficient vacuum where metal can de-rust. Some prototypes generate a vacuum using mechanical pumps, though the pumps are too energy-intensive and costly for large-scale hydrogen production.

      To address these challenges, the MIT design incorporates several energy-saving workarounds. To recover most of the heat that would otherwise escape from the system, reactors on opposite sides of the circular track are allowed to exchange heat through thermal radiation; hot reactors get cooled while cool reactors get heated. This keeps the heat within the system. The researchers also added a second set of reactors that would circle around the first train, moving in the opposite direction. This outer train of reactors would operate at generally cooler temperatures and would be used to evacuate oxygen from the hotter inner train, without the need for energy-consuming mechanical pumps.

      These outer reactors would carry a second type of metal that can also easily oxidize. As they circle around, the outer reactors would absorb oxygen from the inner reactors, effectively de-rusting the original metal, without having to use energy-intensive vacuum pumps. Both reactor trains would  run continuously and would enerate separate streams of pure hydrogen and oxygen.

      The researchers carried out detailed simulations of the conceptual design, and found that it would significantly boost the efficiency of solar thermochemical hydrogen production, from 7 percent, as previous designs have demonstrated, to 40 percent.

      “We have to think of every bit of energy in the system, and how to use it, to minimize the cost,” Ghoniem says. “And with this design, we found that everything can be powered by heat coming from the sun. It is able to use 40 percent of the sun’s heat to produce hydrogen.”

      “If this can be realized, it could drastically change our energy future — namely, enabling hydrogen production, 24/7,” says Christopher Muhich, an assistant professor of chemical engineering at Arizona State University, who was not involved in the research. “The ability to make hydrogen is the linchpin to producing liquid fuels from sunlight.”

      In the next year, the team will be building a prototype of the system that they plan to test in concentrated solar power facilities at laboratories of the Department of Energy, which is currently funding the project.

      “When fully implemented, this system would be housed in a little building in the middle of a solar field,” Patankar explains. “Inside the building, there could be one or more trains each having about 50 reactors. And we think this could be a modular system, where you can add reactors to a conveyor belt, to scale up hydrogen production.”

      This work was supported by the Centers for Mechanical Engineering Research and Education at MIT and SUSTech. More

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      in Environment

      Solve Challenge Finals 2023: Action in service to the world

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      In a celebratory convergence of innovation and global impact, the 2023 Solve Challenge Finals, hosted by MIT Solve, unfolded to welcome the 2023 Solver Class. These teams, resolute in their commitment to addressing Solve’s 2023 Global Challenges and rooted in advancing the United Nation’s Sustainable Development Goals, serve as the perfect examples of the impact technology can have when addressed toward social good.

      To set the tone of the day, Cynthia Barnhart, MIT provost, called for bold action in service to the world, and Hala Hanna, MIT Solve executive director, urged the new Solver teams and attendees to harness the power of technology for benevolent purposes. “Humans have lived with the dichotomy of technology since the dawn of time. Today we find ourselves at another juncture with generative AI, and we have choices to make. So, what if we choose that every line of code heals, and every algorithm uplifts, and every device includes?” she said during the opening plenary, Tech-Powered and Locally-Led: Solutions for Global Progress.

      Global, intergenerational, and contextual change for good

      This year’s Solve Challenge Finals served as a global platform for reflection. Majid Al Suwaidi, director-general of COP28, shared the experiences that have shaped his approach to climate negotiation. He recounted a poignant visit to a United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees-facilitated refugee camp housing 300,000 climate migrants. There he met a mother and her nine children. In a sprawling camp housing 300,000 people, scarcity was evident, with just one toilet for every 100 residents. “There are people who contribute nothing to the problem but are impacted the most,” Majid emphasized, stressing the need to prioritize those most affected by climate change when crafting solutions.

      Moderator Lysa John, secretary-general of CIVICUS, steered the conversation toward Africa’s growing influence during her fireside chat with David Sengeh SM ’12, PhD ’16, chief minister of Sierra Leone, and Toyin Saraki, president of the Wellbeing Foundation. The African Union was recently named a permanent member of the G20. Saraki passionately advocated for Africa to assert itself: “I would like this to be more than just the North recognizing the South. This is the time now for us to bring African intelligence to the forefront. We have to bring our own people, our own data, our own resources.” She also called for an intergenerational shift, recognizing the readiness of the younger generation to lead.

      Sengeh, who is 36 himself, emphasized that young people are natural leaders, especially in a nation where 70 percent of the population is youth. He challenged the status quo, urging society to entrust leadership roles to the younger generation.

      Saraki praised Solve as a vital incubation hub, satisfying the need for contextual innovation while contributing to global progress. She views Solve as a marketplace of solutions to systemic weaknesses, drawing upon the diverse approaches of innovators both young and old. “That is the generation of intelligence that needs to grow, not just in Africa. Solve is amazing for that, it’s an investor’s delight,” she said.

      Henrietta Fore, managing partner, chair, and CEO of Radiate Capital, Holsman International, shared an example of entrepreneurship catalyzed by country-level leaders, referencing India’s Swachh Bharat program aimed at promoting cleaner environments. The government initiative led to a burst of entrepreneurial activity, with women opening various shops for toilets and bathroom commodities. Fore highlighted the potential for companies to collaborate with countries on such programs, creating momentum and innovation.

      Trust as capital

      Trust was a prevalent theme throughout the event, from personal to business levels.

      Johanna Mair, academic editor of the Stanford Social Innovation Review, asked Sarah Chandler, vice president of environment and supply chain innovation at Apple, for advice she may have for corporations and startups thinking about their holistic climate goals. Chandler emphasized the importance of trust that businesses must have that environmental goals can align with business goals, highlighting Apple’s 45 percent reduction in carbon footprint since 2015 and 65 percent revenue increase.

      Neela Montgomery, board partner at Greycroft, discussed her initial skepticism around collaborating with large entities, seeking advice from Ilan Goldfajn, president of the Inter-American Development Bank. “Don’t be shy to come … take advantage of a multilateral bank … think about multilateral organizations as the ones to make connections. We can be your support commercially and financially, we could be your clients, and we could be your promoters,” said Goldfajn.

      During a fireside chat among Janti Soeripto, president and CEO of Save the Children USA, and Imran Ahmed, founder and CEO of Center for Countering Digital, Soeripto shared her belief that the most effective change comes from the country and local community level. She pointed to a contextual example of this where Save the Children invested in scaling a small Austrian ed-tech startup — Library for All. The partnership positively impacted literacy for other communities around the world by making literature more accessible.

      There still exist major hurdles for small enterprises to enter the global market. Imran points to sclerosis and hesitancy to trust small-scale innovation as a roadblock to meaningful change. 

      The final discussion of the closing plenary, Funding the Future: Scaling up Inclusive Impact, featured Fore; Mohammed Nanabhay, managing partner of Mozilla Ventures; and Alfred Ironside, vice president of communications at MIT, who asked the two panelists, “What do you [look for] when thinking about putting money into leaders and organizations who are on this mission to create impact and achieve scale?”

      Beyond aligning principles with organizations, Nanabhay said that he looks for tenacity and, most importantly, trust in oneself. “Entrepreneurship is a long journey, it’s a hard journey — whether you’re on the for-profit side or the nonprofit side. It’s easy to say people should have grit, everyone says this. When the time comes and you’re struggling … you need to have the fundamental belief that what you’re working on is meaningful and that it’s going to make the world better.” More

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      in Environment

      Improving US air quality, equitably

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      Decarbonization of national economies will be key to achieving global net-zero emissions by 2050, a major stepping stone to the Paris Agreement’s long-term goal of keeping global warming well below 2 degrees Celsius (and ideally 1.5 C), and thereby averting the worst consequences of climate change. Toward that end, the United States has pledged to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions by 50-52 percent from 2005 levels by 2030, backed by its implementation of the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act. This strategy is consistent with a 50-percent reduction in carbon dioxide (CO2) by the end of the decade.

      If U.S. federal carbon policy is successful, the nation’s overall air quality will also improve. Cutting CO2 emissions reduces atmospheric concentrations of air pollutants that lead to the formation of fine particulate matter (PM2.5), which causes more than 200,000 premature deaths in the United States each year. But an average nationwide improvement in air quality will not be felt equally; air pollution exposure disproportionately harms people of color and lower-income populations.

      How effective are current federal decarbonization policies in reducing U.S. racial and economic disparities in PM2.5 exposure, and what changes will be needed to improve their performance? To answer that question, researchers at MIT and Stanford University recently evaluated a range of policies which, like current U.S. federal carbon policies, reduce economy-wide CO2 emissions by 40-60 percent from 2005 levels by 2030. Their findings appear in an open-access article in the journal Nature Communications.

      First, they show that a carbon-pricing policy, while effective in reducing PM2.5 exposure for all racial/ethnic groups, does not significantly mitigate relative disparities in exposure. On average, the white population undergoes far less exposure than Black, Hispanic, and Asian populations. This policy does little to reduce exposure disparities because the CO2 emissions reductions that it achieves primarily occur in the coal-fired electricity sector. Other sectors, such as industry and heavy-duty diesel transportation, contribute far more PM2.5-related emissions.

      The researchers then examine thousands of different reduction options through an optimization approach to identify whether any possible combination of carbon dioxide reductions in the range of 40-60 percent can mitigate disparities. They find that that no policy scenario aligned with current U.S. carbon dioxide emissions targets is likely to significantly reduce current PM2.5 exposure disparities.

      “Policies that address only about 50 percent of CO2 emissions leave many polluting sources in place, and those that prioritize reductions for minorities tend to benefit the entire population,” says Noelle Selin, supervising author of the study and a professor at MIT’s Institute for Data, Systems and Society and Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences. “This means that a large range of policies that reduce CO2 can improve air quality overall, but can’t address long-standing inequities in air pollution exposure.”

      So if climate policy alone cannot adequately achieve equitable air quality results, what viable options remain? The researchers suggest that more ambitious carbon policies could narrow racial and economic PM2.5 exposure disparities in the long term, but not within the next decade. To make a near-term difference, they recommend interventions designed to reduce PM2.5 emissions resulting from non-CO2 sources, ideally at the economic sector or community level.

      “Achieving improved PM2.5 exposure for populations that are disproportionately exposed across the United States will require thinking that goes beyond current CO2 policy strategies, most likely involving large-scale structural changes,” says Selin. “This could involve changes in local and regional transportation and housing planning, together with accelerated efforts towards decarbonization.” More

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      in Environment

      How to tackle the global deforestation crisis

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      Imagine if France, Germany, and Spain were completely blanketed in forests — and then all those trees were quickly chopped down. That’s nearly the amount of deforestation that occurred globally between 2001 and 2020, with profound consequences.

      Deforestation is a major contributor to climate change, producing between 6 and 17 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions, according to a 2009 study. Meanwhile, because trees also absorb carbon dioxide, removing it from the atmosphere, they help keep the Earth cooler. And climate change aside, forests protect biodiversity.

      “Climate change and biodiversity make this a global problem, not a local problem,” says MIT economist Ben Olken. “Deciding to cut down trees or not has huge implications for the world.”

      But deforestation is often financially profitable, so it continues at a rapid rate. Researchers can now measure this trend closely: In the last quarter-century, satellite-based technology has led to a paradigm change in charting deforestation. New deforestation datasets, based on the Landsat satellites, for instance, track forest change since 2000 with resolution at 30 meters, while many other products now offer frequent imaging at close resolution.

      “Part of this revolution in measurement is accuracy, and the other part is coverage,” says Clare Balboni, an assistant professor of economics at the London School of Economics (LSE). “On-site observation is very expensive and logistically challenging, and you’re talking about case studies. These satellite-based data sets just open up opportunities to see deforestation at scale, systematically, across the globe.”

      Balboni and Olken have now helped write a new paper providing a road map for thinking about this crisis. The open-access article, “The Economics of Tropical Deforestation,” appears this month in the Annual Review of Economics. The co-authors are Balboni, a former MIT faculty member; Aaron Berman, a PhD candidate in MIT’s Department of Economics; Robin Burgess, an LSE professor; and Olken, MIT’s Jane Berkowitz Carlton and Dennis William Carlton Professor of Microeconomics. Balboni and Olken have also conducted primary research in this area, along with Burgess.

      So, how can the world tackle deforestation? It starts with understanding the problem.

      Replacing forests with farms

      Several decades ago, some thinkers, including the famous MIT economist Paul Samuelson in the 1970s, built models to study forests as a renewable resource; Samuelson calculated the “maximum sustained yield” at which a forest could be cleared while being regrown. These frameworks were designed to think about tree farms or the U.S. national forest system, where a fraction of trees would be cut each year, and then new trees would be grown over time to take their place.

      But deforestation today, particularly in tropical areas, often looks very different, and forest regeneration is not common.

      Indeed, as Balboni and Olken emphasize, deforestation is now rampant partly because the profits from chopping down trees come not just from timber, but from replacing forests with agriculture. In Brazil, deforestation has increased along with agricultural prices; in Indonesia, clearing trees accelerated as the global price of palm oil went up, leading companies to replace forests with palm tree orchards.

      All this tree-clearing creates a familiar situation: The globally shared costs of climate change from deforestation are “externalities,” as economists say, imposed on everyone else by the people removing forest land. It is akin to a company that pollutes into a river, affecting the water quality of residents.

      “Economics has changed the way it thinks about this over the last 50 years, and two things are central,” Olken says. “The relevance of global externalities is very important, and the conceptualization of alternate land uses is very important.” This also means traditional forest-management guidance about regrowth is not enough. With the economic dynamics in mind, which policies might work, and why?

      The search for solutions

      As Balboni and Olken note, economists often recommend “Pigouvian” taxes (named after the British economist Arthur Pigou) in these cases, levied against people imposing externalities on others. And yet, it can be hard to identify who is doing the deforesting.

      Instead of taxing people for clearing forests, governments can pay people to keep forests intact. The UN uses Payments for Environmental Services (PES) as part of its REDD+ (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and forest Degradation) program. However, it is similarly tough to identify the optimal landowners to subsidize, and these payments may not match the quick cash-in of deforestation. A 2017 study in Uganda showed PES reduced deforestation somewhat; a 2022 study in Indonesia found no reduction; another 2022 study, in Brazil, showed again that some forest protection resulted.

      “There’s mixed evidence from many of these [studies],” Balboni says. These policies, she notes, must reach people who would otherwise clear forests, and a key question is, “How can we assess their success compared to what would have happened anyway?”

      Some places have tried cash transfer programs for larger populations. In Indonesia, a 2020 study found such subsidies reduced deforestation near villages by 30 percent. But in Mexico, a similar program meant more people could afford milk and meat, again creating demand for more agriculture and thus leading to more forest-clearing.

      At this point, it might seem that laws simply banning deforestation in key areas would work best — indeed, about 16 percent of the world’s land overall is protected in some way. Yet the dynamics of protection are tricky. Even with protected areas in place, there is still “leakage” of deforestation into other regions. 

      Still more approaches exist, including “nonstate agreements,” such as the Amazon Soy Moratorium in Brazil, in which grain traders pledged not to buy soy from deforested lands, and reduced deforestation without “leakage.”

      Also, intriguingly, a 2008 policy change in the Brazilian Amazon made agricultural credit harder to obtain by requiring recipients to comply with environmental and land registration rules. The result? Deforestation dropped by up to 60 percent over nearly a decade. 

      Politics and pulp

      Overall, Balboni and Olken observe, beyond “externalities,” two major challenges exist. One, it is often unclear who holds property rights in forests. In these circumstances, deforestation seems to increase. Two, deforestation is subject to political battles.

      For instance, as economist Bard Harstad of Stanford University has observed, environmental lobbying is asymmetric. Balboni and Olken write: “The conservationist lobby must pay the government in perpetuity … while the deforestation-oriented lobby need pay only once to deforest in the present.” And political instability leads to more deforestation because “the current administration places lower value on future conservation payments.”

      Even so, national political measures can work. In the Amazon from 2001 to 2005, Brazilian deforestation rates were three to four times higher than on similar land across the border, but that imbalance vanished once the country passed conservation measures in 2006. However, deforestation ramped up again after a 2014 change in government. Looking at particular monitoring approaches, a study of Brazil’s satellite-based Real-Time System for Detection of Deforestation (DETER), launched in 2004, suggests that a 50 percent annual increase in its use in municipalities created a 25 percent reduction in deforestation from 2006 to 2016.

      How precisely politics matters may depend on the context. In a 2021 paper, Balboni and Olken (with three colleagues) found that deforestation actually decreased around elections in Indonesia. Conversely, in Brazil, one study found that deforestation rates were 8 to 10 percent higher where mayors were running for re-election between 2002 and 2012, suggesting incumbents had deforestation industry support.

      “The research there is aiming to understand what the political economy drivers are,” Olken says, “with the idea that if you understand those things, reform in those countries is more likely.”

      Looking ahead, Balboni and Olken also suggest that new research estimating the value of intact forest land intact could influence public debates. And while many scholars have studied deforestation in Brazil and Indonesia, fewer have examined the Democratic Republic of Congo, another deforestation leader, and sub-Saharan Africa.

      Deforestation is an ongoing crisis. But thanks to satellites and many recent studies, experts know vastly more about the problem than they did a decade or two ago, and with an economics toolkit, can evaluate the incentives and dynamics at play.

      “To the extent that there’s ambuiguity across different contexts with different findings, part of the point of our review piece is to draw out common themes — the important considerations in determining which policy levers can [work] in different circumstances,” Balboni says. “That’s a fast-evolving area. We don’t have all the answers, but part of the process is bringing together growing evidence about [everything] that affects how successful those choices can be.” More

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      in Energy

      Tracking US progress on the path to a decarbonized economy

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      Investments in new technologies and infrastucture that help reduce greenhouse gas emissions — everything from electric vehicles to heat pumps — are growing rapidly in the United States. Now, a new database enables these investments to be comprehensively monitored in real-time, thereby helping to assess the efficacy of policies designed to spur clean investments and address climate change.

      The Clean Investment Monitor (CIM), developed by a team at MIT’s Center for Energy and Environmental Policy Research (CEEPR) led by Institute Innovation Fellow Brian Deese and in collaboration with the Rhodium Group, an independent research firm, provides a timely and methodologically consistent tracking of all announced public and private investments in the manufacture and deployment of clean technologies and infrastructure in the U.S. The CIM offers a means of assessing the country’s progress in transitioning to a cleaner economy and reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

      In the year from July 1, 2022, to June 30, 2023, data from the CIM show, clean investments nationwide totaled $213 billion. To put that figure in perspective, 18 states in the U.S. have GDPs each lower than $213 billion.

      “As clean technology becomes a larger and larger sector in the United States, its growth will have far-reaching implications — for our economy, for our leadership in innovation, and for reducing our greenhouse gas emissions,” says Deese, who served as the director of the White House National Economic Council from January 2021 to February 2023. “The Clean Investment Monitor is a tool designed to help us understand and assess this growth in a real-time, comprehensive way. Our hope is that the CIM will enhance research and improve public policies designed to accelerate the clean energy transition.”

      Launched on Sept. 13, the CIM shows that the $213 billion invested over the last year reflects a 37 percent increase from the $155 billion invested in the previous 12-month period. According to CIM data, the fastest growth has been in the manufacturing sector, where investment grew 125 percent year-on-year, particularly in electric vehicle and solar manufacturing.

      Beyond manufacturing, the CIM also provides data on investment in clean energy production, such as solar, wind, and nuclear; industrial decarbonization, such as sustainable aviation fuels; and retail investments by households and businesses in technologies like heat pumps and zero-emission vehicles. The CIM’s data goes back to 2018, providing a baseline before the passage of the legislation in 2021 and 2022.

      “We’re really excited to bring MIT’s analytical rigor to bear to help develop the Clean Investment Monitor,” says Christopher Knittel, the George P. Shultz Professor of Energy Economics at the MIT Sloan School of Management and CEEPR’s faculty director. “Bolstered by Brian’s keen understanding of the policy world, this tool is poised to become the go-to reference for anyone looking to understand clean investment flows and what drives them.”

      In 2021 and 2022, the U.S. federal government enacted a series of new laws that together aimed to catalyze the largest-ever national investment in clean energy technologies and related infrastructure. The Clean Investment Monitor can also be used to track how well the legislation is living up to expectations.

      The three pieces of federal legislation — the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, enacted in 2021, and the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) and the CHIPS and Science Act, both enacted in 2022 — provide grants, loans, loan guarantees, and tax incentives to spur investments in technologies that reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

      The effectiveness of the legislation in hastening the U.S. transition to a clean economy will be crucial in determining whether the country reaches its goal of reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 50 percent to 52 percent below 2005 levels in 2030. An analysis earlier this year estimated that the IRA will lead to a 43 percent to 48 percent decline in economywide emissions below 2005 levels by 2035, compared with 27 percent to 35 percent in a reference scenario without the law’s provisions, helping bring the U.S. goal closer in reach.

      The Clean Investment Monitor is available at cleaninvestmentmonitor.org. More

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      in Environment

      Desirée Plata appointed co-director of the MIT Climate and Sustainability Consortium

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      Desirée Plata, associate professor of civil and environmental engineering at MIT, has been named co-director of the MIT Climate and Sustainability Consortium (MCSC), effective Sept. 1. Plata will serve on the MCSC’s leadership team alongside Anantha P. Chandrakasan, dean of the MIT School of Engineering, the Vannevar Bush Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, and MCSC chair; Elsa Olivetti, the Jerry McAfee Professor in Engineering, a professor of materials science and engineering, and associate dean of engineering, and MCSC co-director; and Jeremy Gregory, MCSC executive director.Plata succeeds Jeffrey Grossman, the Morton and Claire Goulder and Family Professor in Environmental Systems, who has served as co-director since the MCSC’s launch in January 2021. Grossman, who played a central role in the ideation and launch of the MCSC, will continue his work with the MCSC as strategic advisor.“Professor Plata is a valued member of the MIT community. She brings a deep understanding of and commitment to climate and sustainability initiatives at MIT, as well as extensive experience working with industry, to her new role within the MCSC,” says Chandrakasan. The MIT Climate and Sustainability Consortium is an academia-industry collaboration working to accelerate implementation of large-scale solutions across sectors of the global economy. It aims to lay the groundwork for one critical aspect of MIT’s continued and intensified commitment to climate: helping large companies usher in, adapt to, and prosper in a decarbonized world.“We are thrilled to bring Professor Plata’s knowledge, vision, and passion to our leadership team,” says Olivetti. “Her experience developing sustainable technologies that have the potential to improve the environment and reduce the impacts of climate change will help move our work forward in meaningful ways. We have valued Professor Plata’s contributions to the consortium and look forward to continuing our work with her.”Plata played a pivotal role in the creation and launch of the MCSC’s Climate and Sustainability Scholars Program and its yearlong course for MIT rising juniors and seniors — an effort that she and Olivetti were recently recognized for with the Class of 1960 Innovation in Education Fellowship. She has also been a member of the MCSC’s Faculty Steering Committee since the consortium’s launch, helping to shape and guide its vision and work.Plata is a dedicated researcher, educator, and mentor. A member of MIT’s faculty since 2018, Plata and her team at the Plata Lab are helping to guide industry to more environmentally sustainable practices and develop new ways to protect the health of the planet — using chemistry to understand the impact that industrial materials and processes have on the environment. By coupling devices that simulate industrial systems with computation, she helps industry develop more environmentally friendly practices.To celebrate her work in the lab, classroom, and community, Plata has received many awards and honors. In 2020, she won MIT’s prestigious Harold E. Edgerton Faculty Achievement Award, recognizing her innovative approach to environmentally sustainable industrial practices, her inspirational teaching and mentoring, and her service to MIT and the community. She is a two-time National Academy of Sciences Kavli Frontiers of Science Fellow, a two-time National Academy of Engineers Frontiers of Engineering Fellow, and a Caltech Young Investigator Sustainability Fellow. She has also won the ACS C. Ellen Gonter Environmental Chemistry Award, an NSF CAREER award, and the 2016 Odebrecht Award for Sustainable Development.Beyond her work in the academic space, Plata is co-founder of two climate- and energy-related startups: Nth Cycle and Moxair, illustrating her commitment to translating academic innovations for real-world implementation — a core value of the MCSC.Plata received her bachelor’s degree from Union College and her PhD from the MIT and Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (MIT-WHOI) joint program in oceanography/applied ocean science and engineering. After receiving her doctorate, Plata held positions at Mount Holyoke College, Duke University, and Yale University.  More

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      in Environment

      AI pilot programs look to reduce energy use and emissions on MIT campus

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      Smart thermostats have changed the way many people heat and cool their homes by using machine learning to respond to occupancy patterns and preferences, resulting in a lower energy draw. This technology — which can collect and synthesize data — generally focuses on single-dwelling use, but what if this type of artificial intelligence could dynamically manage the heating and cooling of an entire campus? That’s the idea behind a cross-departmental effort working to reduce campus energy use through AI building controls that respond in real-time to internal and external factors. 

      Understanding the challenge

      Heating and cooling can be an energy challenge for campuses like MIT, where existing building management systems (BMS) can’t respond quickly to internal factors like occupancy fluctuations or external factors such as forecast weather or the carbon intensity of the grid. This results in using more energy than needed to heat and cool spaces, often to sub-optimal levels. By engaging AI, researchers have begun to establish a framework to understand and predict optimal temperature set points (the temperature at which a thermostat has been set to maintain) at the individual room level and take into consideration a host of factors, allowing the existing systems to heat and cool more efficiently, all without manual intervention. 

      “It’s not that different from what folks are doing in houses,” explains Les Norford, a professor of architecture at MIT, whose work in energy studies, controls, and ventilation connected him with the effort. “Except we have to think about things like how long a classroom may be used in a day, weather predictions, time needed to heat and cool a room, the effect of the heat from the sun coming in the window, and how the classroom next door might impact all of this.” These factors are at the crux of the research and pilots that Norford and a team are focused on. That team includes Jeremy Gregory, executive director of the MIT Climate and Sustainability Consortium; Audun Botterud, principal research scientist for the Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems; Steve Lanou, project manager in the MIT Office of Sustainability (MITOS); Fran Selvaggio, Department of Facilities Senior Building Management Systems engineer; and Daisy Green and You Lin, both postdocs.

      The group is organized around the call to action to “explore possibilities to employ artificial intelligence to reduce on-campus energy consumption” outlined in Fast Forward: MIT’s Climate Action Plan for the Decade, but efforts extend back to 2019. “As we work to decarbonize our campus, we’re exploring all avenues,” says Vice President for Campus Services and Stewardship Joe Higgins, who originally pitched the idea to students at the 2019 MIT Energy Hack. “To me, it was a great opportunity to utilize MIT expertise and see how we can apply it to our campus and share what we learn with the building industry.” Research into the concept kicked off at the event and continued with undergraduate and graduate student researchers running differential equations and managing pilots to test the bounds of the idea. Soon, Gregory, who is also a MITOS faculty fellow, joined the project and helped identify other individuals to join the team. “My role as a faculty fellow is to find opportunities to connect the research community at MIT with challenges MIT itself is facing — so this was a perfect fit for that,” Gregory says. 

      Early pilots of the project focused on testing thermostat set points in NW23, home to the Department of Facilities and Office of Campus Planning, but Norford quickly realized that classrooms provide many more variables to test, and the pilot was expanded to Building 66, a mixed-use building that is home to classrooms, offices, and lab spaces. “We shifted our attention to study classrooms in part because of their complexity, but also the sheer scale — there are hundreds of them on campus, so [they offer] more opportunities to gather data and determine parameters of what we are testing,” says Norford. 

      Developing the technology

      The work to develop smarter building controls starts with a physics-based model using differential equations to understand how objects can heat up or cool down, store heat, and how the heat may flow across a building façade. External data like weather, carbon intensity of the power grid, and classroom schedules are also inputs, with the AI responding to these conditions to deliver an optimal thermostat set point each hour — one that provides the best trade-off between the two objectives of thermal comfort of occupants and energy use. That set point then tells the existing BMS how much to heat up or cool down a space. Real-life testing follows, surveying building occupants about their comfort. Botterud, whose research focuses on the interactions between engineering, economics, and policy in electricity markets, works to ensure that the AI algorithms can then translate this learning into energy and carbon emission savings. 

      Currently the pilots are focused on six classrooms within Building 66, with the intent to move onto lab spaces before expanding to the entire building. “The goal here is energy savings, but that’s not something we can fully assess until we complete a whole building,” explains Norford. “We have to work classroom by classroom to gather the data, but are looking at a much bigger picture.” The research team used its data-driven simulations to estimate significant energy savings while maintaining thermal comfort in the six classrooms over two days, but further work is needed to implement the controls and measure savings across an entire year. 

      With significant savings estimated across individual classrooms, the energy savings derived from an entire building could be substantial, and AI can help meet that goal, explains Botterud: “This whole concept of scalability is really at the heart of what we are doing. We’re spending a lot of time in Building 66 to figure out how it works and hoping that these algorithms can be scaled up with much less effort to other rooms and buildings so solutions we are developing can make a big impact at MIT,” he says.

      Part of that big impact involves operational staff, like Selvaggio, who are essential in connecting the research to current operations and putting them into practice across campus. “Much of the BMS team’s work is done in the pilot stage for a project like this,” he says. “We were able to get these AI systems up and running with our existing BMS within a matter of weeks, allowing the pilots to get off the ground quickly.” Selvaggio says in preparation for the completion of the pilots, the BMS team has identified an additional 50 buildings on campus where the technology can easily be installed in the future to start energy savings. The BMS team also collaborates with the building automation company, Schneider Electric, that has implemented the new control algorithms in Building 66 classrooms and is ready to expand to new pilot locations. 

      Expanding impact

      The successful completion of these programs will also open the possibility for even greater energy savings — bringing MIT closer to its decarbonization goals. “Beyond just energy savings, we can eventually turn our campus buildings into a virtual energy network, where thousands of thermostats are aggregated and coordinated to function as a unified virtual entity,” explains Higgins. These types of energy networks can accelerate power sector decarbonization by decreasing the need for carbon-intensive power plants at peak times and allowing for more efficient power grid energy use.

      As pilots continue, they fulfill another call to action in Fast Forward — for campus to be a “test bed for change.” Says Gregory: “This project is a great example of using our campus as a test bed — it brings in cutting-edge research to apply to decarbonizing our own campus. It’s a great project for its specific focus, but also for serving as a model for how to utilize the campus as a living lab.” More

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      in Energy

      Jackson Jewett wants to design buildings that use less concrete

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      After three years leading biking tours through U.S. National Parks, Jackson Jewett decided it was time for a change.

      “It was a lot of fun, but I realized I missed buildings,” says Jewett. “I really wanted to be a part of that industry, learn more about it, and reconnect with my roots in the built environment.”

      Jewett grew up in California in what he describes as a “very creative household.”

      “I remember making very elaborate Halloween costumes with my parents, making fun dioramas for school projects, and building forts in the backyard, that kind of thing,” Jewett explains.

      Both of his parents have backgrounds in design; his mother studied art in college and his father is a practicing architect. From a young age, Jewett was interested in following in his father’s footsteps. But when he arrived at the University of California at Berkeley in the midst of the 2009 housing crash, it didn’t seem like the right time. Jewett graduated with a degree in cognitive science and a minor in history of architecture. And even as he led tours through Yellowstone, the Grand Canyon, and other parks, buildings were in the back of his mind.

      It wasn’t just the built environment that Jewett was missing. He also longed for the rigor and structure of an academic environment.

      Jewett arrived at MIT in 2017, initially only planning on completing the master’s program in civil and environmental engineering. It was then that he first met Josephine Carstensen, a newly hired lecturer in the department. Jewett was interested in Carstensen’s work on “topology optimization,” which uses algorithms to design structures that can achieve their performance requirements while using only a limited amount of material. He was particularly interested in applying this approach to concrete design, and he collaborated with Carstensen to help demonstrate its viability.

      After earning his master’s, Jewett spent a year and a half as a structural engineer in New York City. But when Carstensen was hired as a professor, she reached out to Jewett about joining her lab as a PhD student. He was ready for another change.

      Now in the third year of his PhD program, Jewett’s dissertation work builds upon his master’s thesis to further refine algorithms that can design building-scale concrete structures that use less material, which would help lower carbon emissions from the construction industry. It is estimated that the concrete industry alone is responsible for 8 percent of global carbon emissions, so any efforts to reduce that number could help in the fight against climate change.

      Implementing new ideas

      Topology optimization is a small field, with the bulk of the prior work being computational without any experimental verification. The work Jewett completed for his master’s thesis was just the start of a long learning process.

      “I do feel like I’m just getting to the part where I can start implementing my own ideas without as much support as I’ve needed in the past,” says Jewett. “In the last couple of months, I’ve been working on a reinforced concrete optimization algorithm that I hope will be the cornerstone of my thesis.”

      The process of fine-tuning a generative algorithm is slow going, particularly when tackling a multifaceted problem.

      “It can take days or usually weeks to take a step toward making it work as an entire integrated system,” says Jewett. “The days when that breakthrough happens and I can see the algorithm converging on a solution that makes sense — those are really exciting moments.”

      By harnessing computational power, Jewett is searching for materially efficient components that can be used to make up structures such as bridges or buildings. These are other constraints to consider as well, particularly ensuring that the cost of manufacturing isn’t too high. Having worked in the industry before starting the PhD program, Jewett has an eye toward doing work that can be feasibly implemented.

      Inspiring others

      When Jewett first visited MIT campus, he was drawn in by the collaborative environment of the institute and the students’ drive to learn. Now, he’s a part of that process as a teaching assistant and a supervisor in the Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program.  

      Working as a teaching assistant isn’t a requirement for Jewett’s program, but it’s been one of his favorite parts of his time at MIT.

      “The MIT undergrads are so gifted and just constantly impress me,” says Jewett. “Being able to teach, especially in the context of what MIT values is a lot of fun. And I learn, too. My coding practices have gotten so much better since working with undergrads here.”

      Jewett’s experiences have inspired him to pursue a career in academia after the completion of his program, which he expects to complete in the spring of 2025. But he’s making sure to take care of himself along the way. He still finds time to plan cycling trips with his friends and has gotten into running ever since moving to Boston. So far, he’s completed two marathons.

      “It’s so inspiring to be in a place where so many good ideas are just bouncing back and forth all over campus,” says Jewett. “And on most days, I remember that and it inspires me. But it’s also the case that academics is hard, PhD programs are hard, and MIT — there’s pressure being here, and sometimes that pressure can feel like it’s working against you.”

      Jewett is grateful for the mental health resources that MIT provides students. While he says it can be imperfect, it’s been a crucial part of his journey.

      “My PhD thesis will be done in 2025, but the work won’t be done. The time horizon of when these things need to be implemented is relatively short if we want to make an impact before global temperatures have already risen too high. My PhD research will be developing a framework for how that could be done with concrete construction, but I’d like to keep thinking about other materials and construction methods even after this project is finished.” More