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      Nurturing human communities and natural ecosystems

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      When she was in 7th grade, Heidi Li and the five other members of the Oyster Gardening Club cultivated hundreds of oysters to help repopulate the Chesapeake Bay. On the day they released the oysters into the bay, the event attracted TV journalists and local officials, including the governor. The attention opened the young Li’s eyes to the ways that a seemingly small effort in her local community could have a real-world impact.

      “I got to see firsthand how we can make change at a grassroots level and how that impacts where we are,” she says.

      Growing up in Howard County, Maryland, Li was constantly surrounded by nature. Her family made frequent trips to the Chesapeake Bay, as it reminded them of her parent’s home in Shandong, China. Li worked to bridge the cultural gap between parents, who grew up in China, and their children, who grew up in the U.S., and attended Chinese school every Sunday for 12 years. These experiences instilled in her a community-oriented mindset, which Li brought with her to MIT, where she now majors in materials science and engineering.

      During her first year, Li pursued a microbiology research project through the Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program (UROP) in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering. She studied microbes in aquatic environments, analyzing how the cleanliness of water impacted immunity and behavioral changes of the marine bacteria.

      The experience led her to consider the ways environmental policy affected sustainability efforts. She began applying the problem to energy, asking herself questions such as, “How can you take this specific economic principle and apply it to energy? What has energy policy looked like in the past and how can we tailor that to apply to our current energy system?”

      To explore the intersection of policy and energy, Li participated in the Roosevelt Project, through the Center of Energy and Environmental Policy Research, during the summer after her junior year. The project used case studies targeting specific communities in vulnerable areas to propose methods for a more sustainable future. Li focused on Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, evaluating the efficiency of an energy transition from natural gas and fossil fuels to carbon-capture, which would mean redistributing the carbon dioxide produced by the coal industry. After traveling to Pittsburgh and interviewing stakeholders in the area, Li watched as local community leaders created physical places for citizens to share their ideas and opinions on the energy transition

      “I watched community leaders create a safe space for people from the surrounding town to share their ideas for entrepreneurship. I saw how important community is and how to create change at a grassroots level,” she says.

      In the summer of 2021, Li pursued an internship through the energy consulting firm Wood Mackenzie, where she looked at technologies that could potentially help with the energy transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy. Her job was to make sure the technology could be implemented efficiently and cost-effectively, optimizing the resources available to the surrounding area. The project allowed Li to engage with industry-based efforts to chart and analyze the technological advancements for various decarbonization scenarios. She hopes to continue looking at both the local, community-based, and external, industry-based, inputs on how economic policy would affect stakeholders.

      On campus, Li is the current president of the Sustainable Energy Alliance (SEA), where she aims to make students more conscious about climate change and their impact on the environment. During summer of her sophomore year, Li chaired a sustainability hackathon for over 200 high school students, where she designed and led the “Protecting Climate Refugees” and “Tackling Environmental Injustice” challenges to inspire students to think about humanitarian efforts for protecting frontline communities.

      “The whole goal of this is to empower students to think about solutions for themselves. Empowering students is really important to show them they can make change and inspire hope in themselves and the people around them,” she says.

      Li also hosted and produced “Open SEAcrets,” a podcast designed to engage MIT students with topics surrounding energy sustainability and provide them with the opportunity to share their opinions on the subject. She sees the podcast as a platform to raise awareness about energy, climate change, and environmental policy, while also inspiring a sense of community with listeners.

      When she is not in the classroom or the lab, Li relaxes by playing volleyball. She joined the Volleyball Club during her first year at MIT, though she has been playing since she was 12. The sport allows her to not only relieve stress, but also have conversations with both undergrads and graduate students, who bring different their backgrounds, interests, and experiences to conversations. The sport has also taught Li about teamwork, trust, and the importance of community in ways that her other experience doesn’t.

      Looking ahead, Li is currently working on a UROP project, called Climate Action Through Education (CATE), that designs climate change curriculum for K-12 grades and aims to show how climate change and energy are integral to peoples’ daily lives. Seeing the energy transition as an interdisciplinary problem, she wants to educate students about the problems of climate change and sustainability using perspectives from math, science, history, and psychology to name a few areas.

      But above all, Li wants to empower younger generations to develop solution-minded approaches to environmentalism. She hopes to give local communities a voice in policy implementation, with the end goal of a more sustainable future for all.

      “Finding a community you really thrive in will allow you to push yourself and be the best version of yourself you can be. I want to take this mindset and create spaces for people and establish and instill this sense of community,” she says. More

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      First-ever Climate Grand Challenges recognizes 27 finalists

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      All-carbon buildings, climate-resilient crops, and new tools to improve the prediction of extreme weather events are just a few of the 27 bold, interdisciplinary research projects selected as finalists from a field of almost 100 proposals in the first MIT Climate Grand Challenges competition. Each of the finalist teams received $100,000 to develop a comprehensive research and innovation plan.

      A subset of the finalists will make up a portfolio of multiyear projects that will receive additional funding and other support to develop high-impact, science-based mitigation and adaptation solutions on an accelerated basis. These flagship projects, which will be announced later this spring, will augment the work of the many MIT units already pursuing climate-related research activities.

      “Climate change poses a suite of challenges of immense urgency, complexity and scale. At MIT, we are bringing our particular strengths to bear through our community — a rare concentration of ingenuity and determination, rooted in a vibrant innovation ecosystem,” President L. Rafael Reif says. “Through MIT’s Climate Grand Challenges, we are engaging hundreds of our brilliant faculty and researchers in the search for solutions with enormous potential for impact.”

      The Climate Grand Challenges launched in July 2020 with the goal of mobilizing the entire MIT research community around developing solutions to some of the most complex unsolved problems in emissions reduction, climate change adaptation and resilience, risk forecasting, carbon removal, and understanding the human impacts of climate change.

      An event in April will showcase the flagship projects, bringing together public and private sector partners with the MIT teams to begin assembling the necessary resources for developing, implementing, and scaling these solutions rapidly.

      A whole-of-MIT effort

      Part of a wide array of major climate programs outlined last year in “Fast Forward: MIT’s Climate Action Plan for the Decade,” the Climate Grand Challenges focuses on problems where progress depends on the application of forefront knowledge in the physical, life, and social sciences and the advancement of cutting-edge technologies.

      “We don’t have the luxury of time in responding to the intensifying climate crisis,” says Vice President for Research Maria Zuber, who oversees the implementation of MIT’s climate action plan. “The Climate Grand Challenges are about marshaling the wide and deep knowledge and methods of the MIT community around transformative research that can help accelerate our collective response to climate change.”

      If successful, the solutions will have tangible effects, changing the way people live and work. Examples of these new approaches range from developing cost-competitive long-term energy-storage systems to using drone technologies and artificial intelligence to study the role of the deep ocean in the climate crisis. Many projects also aim to increase the humanistic understanding of these phenomena, recognizing that technological advances alone will not address the widespread impacts of climate change, and a comparable behavioral and cultural shift is needed to stave off future threats.

      “To achieve net-zero emissions later this century we must deploy the tools and technologies we already have,” says Richard Lester, associate provost for international activities. “But we’re still far from having everything needed to get there in ways that are equitable and affordable. Nor do we have the solutions in hand that will allow communities — especially the most vulnerable ones — to adapt to the disruptions that will occur even if the world does get to net-zero. Climate Grand Challenges is creating a new opportunity for the MIT research community to attack some of these hard, unsolved problems, and to engage with partners in industry, government, and the nonprofit sector to accelerate the whole cycle of activities needed to implement solutions at scale.” 

      Selecting the finalist projects

      A 24-person faculty committee convened by Lester and Zuber with members from all five of MIT’s schools and the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing led the planning and initial call for ideas. A smaller group of committee members was charged with evaluating nearly 100 letters of interest, representing 90 percent of MIT departments and ​​involving almost 400 MIT faculty members and senior researchers as well as colleagues from other research institutions.

      “Effectively confronting the climate emergency requires risk taking and sustained investment over a period of many decades,” says Anantha Chandrakasan, dean of the School of Engineering. “We have a responsibility to use our incredible resources and expertise to tackle some of the most challenging problems in climate mitigation and adaptation, and the opportunity to make major advances globally.”

      Lester and Zuber charged a second faculty committee with organizing a rigorous and thorough evaluation of the plans developed by the 27 finalist teams. Drawing on an extensive review process involving international panels of prominent experts, MIT will announce a small group of flagship Grand Challenge projects in April. 

      Each of the 27 finalist teams is addressing one of four broad Grand Challenge problems:

      Building equity and fairness into climate solutions

      Policy innovation and experimentation for effective and equitable climate solutions, led by Abhijit Banerjee, Iqbal Dhaliwal, and Claire Walsh
      Protecting and enhancing natural carbon sinks – Natural Climate and Community Solutions (NCCS), led by John Fernandez, Daniela Rus, and Joann de Zegher
      Reducing group-based disparities in climate adaptation, led by Evan Lieberman, Danielle Wood, and Siqi Zheng
      Reinventing climate change adaptation – The Climate Resilience Early Warning System (CREWSnet), led by John Aldridge and Elfatih Eltahir
      The Deep Listening Project: Communication infrastructure for collaborative adaptation, led by Eric Gordon, Yihyun Lim, and James Paradis
      The Equitable Resilience Framework, led by Janelle Knox-Hayes

      Decarbonizing complex industries and processes

      Carbon >Building, led by Mark Goulthorpe
      Center for Electrification and Decarbonization of Industry, led by Yet-Ming Chiang and Bilge Yildiz
      Decarbonizing and strengthening the global energy infrastructure using nuclear batteries, led by Jacopo Buongiorno
      Emissions reduction through innovation in the textile industry, led by Yuly Fuentes-Medel and Greg Rutledge
      Rapid decarbonization of freight mobility, led by Yossi Sheffi and Matthias Winkenbach
      Revolutionizing agriculture with low-emissions, resilient crops, led by Christopher Voigt
      Solar fuels as a vector for climate change mitigation, led by Yuriy Román-Leshkov and Yogesh Surendranath
      The MIT Low-Carbon Co-Design Institute, led by Audun Botterud, Dharik Mallapragada, and Robert Stoner
      Tough to Decarbonize Transportation, led by Steven Barrett and William Green

      Removing, managing, and storing greenhouse gases

      Demonstrating safe, globally distributed geological CO2 storage at scale, led by Bradford Hager, Howard Herzog, and Ruben Juanes
      Deploying versatile carbon capture technologies and storage at scale, led by Betar Gallant, Bradford Hager, and T. Alan Hatton
      Directed Evolution of Biological Carbon Fixation Working Group at MIT (DEBC-MIT), led by Edward Boyden and Matthew Shoulders
      Managing sources and sinks of carbon in terrestrial and coastal ecosystems, led by Charles Harvey, Tami Lieberman, and Heidi Nepf
      Strategies to Reduce Atmospheric Methane, led by Desiree Plata

      The Advanced Carbon Mineralization Initiative, led by Edward Boyden, Matěj Peč, and Yogesh Surendranath

      Using data and science to forecast climate-related risk

      Bringing computation to the climate challenge, led by Noelle Eckley Selin and Raffaele Ferrari
      Ocean vital signs, led by Christopher Hill and Ryan Woosley
      Preparing for a new world of weather and climate extremes, led by Kerry Emanuel, Miho Mazereeuw, and Paul O’Gorman
      Quantifying and managing the risks of sea-level rise, led by Brent Minchew
      Stratospheric Airborne Climate Observatory System to initiate a climate risk forecasting revolution, led by R. John Hansman and Brent Minchew
      The future of coasts – Changing flood risk for coastal communities in the developing world, led by Dara Entekhabi, Miho Mazereeuw, and Danielle Wood

      To learn more about the MIT Climate Grand Challenges, visit climategrandchallenges.mit.edu. More

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      Investors awaken to the risks of climate change

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      Poppy Allonby, a senior financial executive and the former managing director of BlackRock, has been analyzing the link between climate change and investing for more than two decades. “For a lot of that, it was quite lonely,” Allonby said during her December address at the MIT Energy Initiative Fall Colloquium. “There weren’t that many other people looking at this field. And over the last three or four years, that’s completely changed.”

      Increasingly, Allonby said, investors are opening their eyes to the long-term risks of climate change — risks that threaten not only the planet, but also their portfolios. And as more institutional investors come to see climate change as a threat to their beneficiaries, they are taking action to fight it. Still, she cautioned that much more work remains to be done.

      “Various investors are at very different stages in considering climate change,” Allonby said. “Once they realize this is something they need to think about … they need to do a risk assessment, then develop a strategy.” 

      “When you look at different institutions,” she said, “some are just at the very beginning of this journey.”

      A changing landscape

      Although there is a compelling moral case to be made for taking steps to mitigate climate change, Allonby noted that institutional investors such as pension funds are bound by a fiduciary duty to their beneficiaries. That is to say, they are obligated to put their client or member interests ahead of their own.

      “I talk about fiduciary duty, because one of the things that has really changed in the investment space is that more and more investors are beginning to see climate change and climate risk as [impacting] their fiduciary duty,” said Allonby. “That has been a shift. In my mind, it makes total sense. If you’re a long-term investor … and you’re thinking about beneficiaries that need assets over the next 10 or 20 years, and thinking about risks that might materialize — and climate change, in particular — then that makes a lot of sense. But that is not where we were five or 10 years ago.”

      Allonby spent more than 20 years at the multinational investment management corporation BlackRock. For 17 of those years, she was a senior portfolio manager responsible for managing multibillion-dollar funds investing globally in companies across the traditional energy sector, and also those involved in sustainable energy and mitigating climate change. Most recently, she was head of the corporation’s Global Product Group on several continents, where she provided oversight for nearly $1 trillion assets and played a critical role in developing BlackRock’s sustainable product strategy.

      “Where I like to think the finance industry is heading is integration,” she said. “This means thinking holistically about pretty much every decision you make as an investor, and thinking about how climate risk is going to impact that investment. That is a sea change in the mentality around how people invest.”

      Divestment versus engagement

      For many years, activists have pushed for institutions — including MIT — to divest from fossil fuel companies. By keeping fossil fuel companies out of their portfolios, these activists argue, institutions and individuals can exert social, political, and economic pressure on these corporations and help to accelerate the shift to renewable energy.

      However, Allonby argued instead for ongoing engagement with fossil fuel companies, reasoning that this better positions investors to push for change. “My personal view with divesting from oil and gas companies is, that’s not very effective,” Allonby said. “I think there might be examples where you have very specific companies which you don’t think will be involved in the transition [to net zero], and [divestment] might make sense. Or if you’ve got an institutional investor where it is imperative that their investment is entirely aligned with their values — so, certain charities — it might make sense. But if you really care about change, I think you need to keep a seat at the table.”

      In a way, Allonby said, divesting from fossil fuel companies lets leaders at those organizations off the hook, reducing the pressure on them to make meaningful changes to their operations. “Imagine a company that is incredibly polluting and not sustainable, and they have shareholders that are not happy, but they don’t do anything, and those shareholders decide to divest,” she said. “What happens as a result of that, potentially, is the company goes, ‘Oh, that was easy! I didn’t have to do anything, and [the activists] have gone away.’ And potentially, those assets end up being owned by people who care less. So that is a risk, when you think about divestment.”

      Challenges and opportunities         

      Allonby outlined several challenges with climate-focused investing, but also noted a number of opportunities — both for investors looking to make money, and those looking to make a change.

      Among the challenges: For one, some investors simply still need to be convinced that climate change is a problem they should be working to solve. Also, Allonby said, there is a lack both of a formalized methodology and of specialized investment products for climate-focused investing, although she noted that both of these areas are improving. Finally, she said, it remains a challenge to encourage investors to direct capital toward clean-energy projects in developing countries. 

      Investors can both set themselves up for financial success and mitigate climate change, Allonby said, through savvy investments in either distressed or underpriced assets. “If you can buy assets that are discounted or cheaper because people have real concerns about their environmental footprint, then you can work with those companies to improve it and therefore reduce the risk and improve the valuation,” she said.

      Allonby, pointing to the high cost of waterfront property in areas that are vulnerable to rising sea levels, also suggested that the long-term risks of climate change have not been fully priced into many assets. “My view is that we haven’t really gotten our arms around that,” she said. “From a purely investment perspective, that’s also an opportunity.”

      Additionally, Allonby noted the recent rise of ESG funds, which invest with environmental, social, and corporate governance guidelines in mind. Some of these funds, she noted, have outperformed the larger market over the past several years.

      “When we talk about climate change, one has a range of emotions,” Allonby said. “Sometimes it can feel like we’re not making enough progress. And one of the nice things about being here at MIT is that whenever I’m here, I always feel hopeful about the future, and quite hopeful about all of the technologies and work that you are doing to transition energy systems and move things forward. When you look at what’s happening in the financial services sector, there’s still a huge amount to do, but it’s also quite a hopeful story.” More

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      Energizing communities in Africa

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      Growing up in Lagos, Nigeria, Ayomikun Ayodeji enjoyed the noisy hustle and bustle of his neighborhood. The cacophony included everything from vendors hawking water sachets and mini sausages, to commuters shouting for the next bus.

      Another common sound was the cry of “Up NEPA!” — an acronym for the Nigerian Electrical Power Authority — which Ayodeji would chant in unison with other neighborhood children when power had been restored after an outage. He remembers these moments fondly because, despite the difficulties of the frequent outages, the call also meant that people finally did have long-awaited electricity in their homes.

      “I grew up without reliable electricity, so power is something I’ve always been interested in,” says Ayodeji, who is now a senior studying chemical engineering. He hopes to use the knowledge he has gained during his time at MIT to expand energy access in his home country and elsewhere in Africa.

      Before coming to MIT, Ayodeji spent two years in Italy at United World College, where he embarked on chemistry projects, specifically focusing on dye-sensitized solar cells. He then transferred to the Institute, seeking a more technical grounding. He hoped that the knowledge gained in and out of the classroom would equip him with the tools to help combat the energy crisis in Lagos.

      “The questions that remained in the back of my mind were: How can I give back to the community I came from? How can I use the resources around me to help others?”  he says.

      This community-oriented mindset led Ayodeji to team up with a group of friends and brainstorm ideas for how they could help communities close to them. They eventually partnered with the Northeast Children’s Trust (NECT), an organization that helps children affected by the extremist group Boko Haram. Ayodeji and his friends looked at how to expand NECT’s educational program, and decided to build an offline, portable classroom server with a repository of books, animations, and activities for students at the primary and secondary education levels. The project was sponsored by Davis Projects for Peace and MIT’s PKG Center.

      Because of travel restrictions, Ayodeji was the only member of his team able to fly to Nigeria in the summer of 2019 to facilitate installing the servers. He says he wished his team could have been there, but he appreciated the opportunity to speak with the children directly, inspired by their excitement to learn and grow. The experience reaffirmed Ayodeji’s desire to pursue social impact projects, especially in Nigeria.

      “We knew we hadn’t just taken a step in providing the kids with a well-rounded education, but we also supported the center, NECT, in raising the next generation of future leaders that would guide that region to a sustainable, peaceful future,” he says.

      Ayodeji has also sought out energy-related opportunities on campus, pursuing an undergraduate research program (UROP) in the Buonassisi Lab in his sophomore year. He was tasked with testing perovskite solar cells, which have the potential to reach high efficiencies at low production costs. He characterized the cells using X-ray diffraction, studying their stability and degradation pathways. While Ayodeji enjoyed his first experience doing hands-on energy research, he found he was more curious about how energy technologies were implemented to reach various communities. “I wanted to see how things were being done in the industry,” he says.

      In the summer after his sophomore year, Ayodeji interned with Pioneer Natural Resources, an independent oil and gas company in Texas. Ayodeji worked as part of the completions projects team to assess the impact of design changes on cluster efficiency, that is, how evenly fluid is distributed along the wellbore. By using fiberoptic and photographic data to analyze perforation erosion, he discovered ways to lower costs while maintaining environmental stability during completions. The experience taught Ayodeji about the corporate side of the energy industry and enabled him to observe how approaches to alternative energy sources differ across countries, especially in the U.S. and Nigeria.

      “Some developing economies don’t have the capacity to pour resources into expanding renewable energy infrastructure at the rate that most developed economies do. While it is important to think sustainably for the long run, it is also important for us to understand that a clean energy transition is not something that can be done overnight,” he says.

      Ayodeji also employs his community-oriented mindset on campus. He is currently the vice president of the African Students’ Association (ASA), where he formerly chaired the African Learning Circle, a weekly discussion panel spotlighting key development and innovation events taking place on the African continent. He is also involved with student outreach, both within the ASA and as an international orientation student coordinator for the International Students Office.

      As a member of Cru, a Christian community on campus, Ayodeji helps lead a bible study and says the group supports him as he navigates college life. “It is a wonderful community of people I explore faith with and truly lean on when things get tough,” he says.

      After graduating, Ayodeji plans to start work at Boston Consulting Group, where he interned last summer. He expects he’ll have opportunities to engage with private equity issues and tackle energy-related cases while learning more about where the industry is headed.

      His long-term goal is to help expand renewable energy access and production across the African continent.

      “A key element of what the world needs to develop and grow is access to reliable energy. I hope to keep expanding my problem-solving toolkit so that, one day, it can be useful in electrifying communities back home,” he says. More

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      Preparing global online learners for the clean energy transition

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      After a career devoted to making the electric power system more efficient and resilient, Marija Ilic came to MIT in 2018 eager not just to extend her research in new directions, but to prepare a new generation for the challenges of the clean-energy transition.

      To that end, Ilic, a senior research scientist in MIT’s Laboratory for Information and Decisions Systems (LIDS) and a senior staff member at Lincoln Laboratory in the Energy Systems Group, designed an edX course that captures her methods and vision: Principles of Modeling, Simulation, and Control for Electric Energy Systems.

      EdX is a provider of massive open online courses produced in partnership with MIT, Harvard University, and other leading universities. Ilic’s class made its online debut in June 2021, running for 12 weeks, and it is one of an expanding set of online courses funded by the MIT Energy Initiative (MITEI) to provide global learners with a view of the shifting energy landscape.

      Ilic first taught a version of the class while a professor at Carnegie Mellon University, rolled out a second iteration at MIT just as the pandemic struck, and then revamped the class for its current online presentation. But no matter the course location, Ilic focuses on a central theme: “With the need for decarbonization, which will mean accommodating new energy sources such as solar and wind, we must rethink how we operate power systems,” she says. “This class is about how to pose and solve the kinds of problems we will face during this transformation.”

      Hot global topic

      The edX class has been designed to welcome a broad mix of students. In summer 2021, more than 2,000 signed up from 109 countries, ranging from high school students to retirees. In surveys, some said they were drawn to the class by the opportunity to advance their knowledge of modeling. Many others hoped to learn about the move to decarbonize energy systems.

      “The energy transition is a hot topic everywhere in the world, not just in the U.S.,” says teaching assistant Miroslav Kosanic. “In the class, there were veterans of the oil industry and others working in investment and finance jobs related to energy who wanted to understand the potential impacts of changes in energy systems, as well as students from different fields and professors seeking to update their curricula — all gathered into a community.”

      Kosanic, who is currently a PhD student at MIT in electrical engineering and computer science, had taken this class remotely in the spring semester of 2021, while he was still in college in Serbia. “I knew I was interested in power systems, but this course was eye-opening for me, showing how to apply control theory and to model different components of these systems,” he says. “I finished the course and thought, this is just the beginning, and I’d like to learn a lot more.” Kosanic performed so well online that Ilic recruited him to MIT, as a LIDS researcher and edX course teaching assistant, where he grades homework assignments and moderates a lively learner community forum.

      A platform for problem-solving

      The course starts with fundamental concepts in electric power systems operations and management, and it steadily adds layers of complexity, posing real-world problems along the way. Ilic explains how voltage travels from point to point across transmission lines and how grid managers modulate systems to ensure that enough, but not too much, electricity flows. “To deliver power from one location to the next one, operators must constantly make adjustments to ensure that the receiving end can handle the voltage transmitted, optimizing voltage to avoid overheating the wires,” she says.

      In her early lectures, Ilic notes the fundamental constraints of current grid operations, organized around a hierarchy of regional managers dealing with a handful of very large oil, gas, coal, and nuclear power plants, and occupied primarily with the steady delivery of megawatt-hours to far-flung customers. But historically, this top-down structure doesn’t do a good job of preventing loss of energy due to sub-optimal transmission conditions or due to outages related to extreme weather events.

      These issues promise to grow for grid operators as distributed resources such as solar and wind enter the picture, Ilic tells students. In the United States, under new rules dictated by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, utilities must begin to integrate the distributed, intermittent electricity produced by wind farms, solar complexes, and even by homes and cars, which flows at voltages much lower than electricity produced by large power plants.

      Finding ways to optimize existing energy systems and to accommodate low- and zero-carbon energy sources requires powerful new modes of analysis and problem-solving. This is where Ilic’s toolbox comes in: a mathematical modeling strategy and companion software that simplifies the input and output of electrical systems, no matter how large or how small. “In the last part of the course, we take up modeling different solutions to electric service in a way that is technology-agnostic, where it only matters how much a black-box energy source produces, and the rates of production and consumption,” says Ilic.

      This black-box modeling approach, which Ilic pioneered in her research, enables students to see, for instance, “what is happening with their own household consumption, and how it affects the larger system,” says Rupamathi Jaddivada PhD ’20, a co-instructor of the edX class and a postdoc in electrical engineering and computer science. “Without getting lost in details of current or voltage, or how different components work, we think about electric energy systems as dynamical components interacting with each other, at different spatial scales.” This means that with just a basic knowledge of physical laws, high school and undergraduate students can take advantage of the course “and get excited about cleaner and more reliable energy,” adds Ilic.

      What Jaddivada and Ilic describe as “zoom in, zoom out” systems thinking leverages the ubiquity of digital communications and the so-called “internet of things.” Energy devices of all scales can link directly to other devices in a network instead of just to a central operations hub, allowing for real-time adjustments in voltage, for instance, vastly improving the potential for optimizing energy flows.

      “In the course, we discuss how information exchange will be key to integrating new end-to-end energy resources and, because of this interactivity, how we can model better ways of controlling entire energy networks,” says Ilic. “It’s a big lesson of the course to show the value of information and software in enabling us to decarbonize the system and build resilience, rather than just building hardware.”

      By the end of the course, students are invited to pursue independent research projects. Some might model the impact of a new energy source on a local grid or investigate different options for reducing energy loss in transmission lines.

      “It would be nice if they see that we don’t have to rely on hardware or large-scale solutions to bring about improved electric service and a clean and resilient grid, but instead on information technologies such as smart components exchanging data in real time, or microgrids in neighborhoods that sustain themselves even when they lose power,” says Ilic. “I hope students walk away convinced that it does make sense to rethink how we operate our basic power systems and that with systematic, physics-based modeling and IT methods we can enable better, more flexible operation in the future.”

      This article appears in the Autumn 2021 issue of Energy Futures, the magazine of the MIT Energy Initiative More

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      3 Questions: Anuradha Annaswamy on building smart infrastructures

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      Much of Anuradha Annaswamy’s research hinges on uncertainty. How does cloudy weather affect a grid powered by solar energy? How do we ensure that electricity is delivered to the consumer if a grid is powered by wind and the wind does not blow? What’s the best course of action if a bird hits a plane engine on takeoff? How can you predict the behavior of a cyber attacker?

      A senior research scientist in MIT’s Department of Mechanical Engineering, Annaswamy spends most of her research time dealing with decision-making under uncertainty. Designing smart infrastructures that are resilient to uncertainty can lead to safer, more reliable systems, she says.

      Annaswamy serves as the director of MIT’s Active Adaptive Control Laboratory. A world-leading expert in adaptive control theory, she was named president of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Control Systems Society for 2020. Her team uses adaptive control and optimization to account for various uncertainties and anomalies in autonomous systems. In particular, they are developing smart infrastructures in the energy and transportation sectors.

      Using a combination of control theory, cognitive science, economic modeling, and cyber-physical systems, Annaswamy and her team have designed intelligent systems that could someday transform the way we travel and consume energy. Their research includes a diverse range of topics such as safer autopilot systems on airplanes, the efficient dispatch of resources in electrical grids, better ride-sharing services, and price-responsive railway systems.

      In a recent interview, Annaswamy spoke about how these smart systems could help support a safer and more sustainable future.

      Q: How is your team using adaptive control to make air travel safer?

      A: We want to develop an advanced autopilot system that can safely recover the airplane in the event of a severe anomaly — such as the wing becoming damaged mid-flight, or a bird flying into the engine. In the airplane, you have a pilot and autopilot to make decisions. We’re asking: How do you combine those two decision-makers?

      The answer we landed on was developing a shared pilot-autopilot control architecture. We collaborated with David Woods, an expert in cognitive engineering at The Ohio State University, to develop an intelligent system that takes the pilot’s behavior into account. For example, all humans have something known as “capacity for maneuver” and “graceful command degradation” that inform how we react in the face of adversity. Using mathematical models of pilot behavior, we proposed a shared control architecture where the pilot and the autopilot work together to make an intelligent decision on how to react in the face of uncertainties. In this system, the pilot reports the anomaly to an adaptive autopilot system that ensures resilient flight control.

      Q: How does your research on adaptive control fit into the concept of smart cities?

      A: Smart cities are an interesting way we can use intelligent systems to promote sustainability. Our team is looking at ride-sharing services in particular. Services like Uber and Lyft have provided new transportation options, but their impact on the carbon footprint has to be considered. We’re looking at developing a system where the number of passenger-miles per unit of energy is maximized through something called “shared mobility on demand services.” Using the alternating minimization approach, we’ve developed an algorithm that can determine the optimal route for multiple passengers traveling to various destinations.

      As with the pilot-autopilot dynamic, human behavior is at play here. In sociology there is an interesting concept of behavioral dynamics known as Prospect Theory. If we give passengers options with regards to which route their shared ride service will take, we are empowering them with free will to accept or reject a route. Prospect Theory shows that if you can use pricing as an incentive, people are much more loss-averse so they would be willing to walk a bit extra or wait a few minutes longer to join a low-cost ride with an optimized route. If everyone utilized a system like this, the carbon footprint of ride-sharing services could decrease substantially.

      Q: What other ways are you using intelligent systems to promote sustainability?

      A: Renewable energy and sustainability are huge drivers for our research. To enable a world where all of our energy is coming from renewable sources like solar or wind, we need to develop a smart grid that can account for the fact that the sun isn’t always shining and wind isn’t always blowing. These uncertainties are the biggest hurdles to achieving an all-renewable grid. Of course, there are many technologies being developed for batteries that can help store renewable energy, but we are taking a different approach.

      We have created algorithms that can optimally schedule distributed energy resources within the grid — this includes making decisions on when to use onsite generators, how to operate storage devices, and when to call upon demand response technologies, all in response to the economics of using such resources and their physical constraints. If we can develop an interconnected smart grid where, for example, the air conditioning setting in a house is set to 72 degrees instead of 69 degrees automatically when demand is high, there could be a substantial savings in energy usage without impacting human comfort. In one of our studies, we applied a distributed proximal atomic coordination algorithm to the grid in Tokyo to demonstrate how this intelligent system could account for the uncertainties present in a grid powered by renewable resources. More

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      in Energy

      MIT Energy Initiative launches the Future Energy Systems Center

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      The MIT Energy Initiative (MITEI) has launched a new research consortium — the Future Energy Systems Center — to address the climate crisis and the role energy systems can play in solving it. This integrated effort engages researchers from across all of MIT to help the global community reach its goal of net-zero carbon emissions. The center examines the accelerating energy transition and collaborates with industrial leaders to reform the world’s energy systems. The center is part of “Fast Forward: MIT’s Climate Action Plan for the Decade,” MIT’s multi-pronged effort announced last year to address the climate crisis.

      The Future Energy Systems Center investigates the emerging technology, policy, demographics, and economics reshaping the landscape of energy supply and demand. The center conducts integrative analysis of the entire energy system — a holistic approach essential to understanding the cross-sectorial impact of the energy transition.

      “We must act quickly to get to net-zero greenhouse gas emissions. At the same time, we have a billion people around the world with inadequate access, or no access, to electricity — and we need to deliver it to them,” says MITEI Director Robert C. Armstrong, the Chevron Professor of Chemical Engineering. “The Future Energy Systems Center combines MIT’s deep knowledge of energy science and technology with advanced tools for systems analysis to examine how advances in technology and system economics may respond to various policy scenarios.”  

      The overarching focus of the center is integrative analysis of the entire energy system, providing insights into the complex multi-sectorial transformations needed to alter the three major energy-consuming sectors of the economy — transportation, industry, and buildings — in conjunction with three major decarbonization-enabling technologies — electricity, energy storage and low-carbon fuels, and carbon management. “Deep decarbonization of our energy system requires an economy-wide perspective on the technology options, energy flows, materials flows, life-cycle emissions, costs, policies, and socioeconomics consequences,” says Randall Field, the center’s executive director. “A systems approach is essential in enabling cross-disciplinary teams to work collaboratively together to address the existential crisis of climate change.”

      Through techno-economic and systems-oriented research, the center analyzes these important interactions. For example:

      •  Increased reliance on variable renewable energy, such as wind and solar, and greater electrification of transportation, industry, and buildings will require expansion of demand management and other solutions for balancing of electricity supply and demand across these areas.

      •  Likewise, balancing supply and demand will require deploying grid-scale energy storage and converting the electricity to low-carbon fuels (hydrogen and liquid fuels), which can in turn play a vital role in the energy transition for hard-to-decarbonize segments of transportation, industry, and buildings.

      •  Carbon management (carbon dioxide capture from industry point sources and from air and oceans; utilization/conversion to valuable products; transport; storage) will also play a critical role in decarbonizing industry, electricity, and fuels — both as carbon-mitigation and negative-carbon solutions.

      As a member-supported research consortium, the center collaborates with industrial experts and leaders — from both energy’s consumer and supplier sides — to gain insights to help researchers anticipate challenges and opportunities of deploying technology at the scale needed to achieve decarbonization. “The Future Energy Systems Center gives us a powerful way to engage with industry to accelerate the energy transition,” says Armstrong. “Working together, we can better understand how our current technology toolbox can be more effectively put to use now to reduce emissions, and what new technologies and policies will ultimately be needed to reach net-zero.”

      A steering committee, made up of 11 MIT professors and led by Armstrong, selects projects to create a research program with high impact on decarbonization, while leveraging MIT strengths and addressing interests of center members in pragmatic and scalable solutions. “MIT — through our recently released climate action plan — is committed to moving with urgency and speed to help wring carbon dioxide emissions out the global economy to resolve the growing climate crisis,” says Armstrong. “We have no time to waste.”

      The center members to date are: AECI, Analog Devices, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, Copec, Dominion, Duke Energy, Enerjisa, Eneva, Eni, Equinor, Eversource, Exelon, ExxonMobil, Ferrovial, Iberdrola, IHI, National Grid, Raizen, Repsol, Rio Tinto, Shell, Tata Power, Toyota Research Institute, and Washington Gas. More

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      in Energy

      Bringing climate reporting to local newsrooms

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      Last summer, Nora Hertel, a reporter for the St. Cloud Times in central Minnesota, visited a farm just northeast of the Twin Cities run by the Native American-led nonprofit Dream of Wild Health. The farm raises a mix of vegetables and flowering plants, and has a particular focus on cultivating rare heirloom varieties. It’s also dealing with severely depleted soil, inherited from previous owners who grew corn on the same land. Hertel had come to learn about the techniques the farm was using to restore its soil, many of which were traditional parts of Indigenous farming practice, including planting cover crops over the winter and incorporating burnt wood and manure into the earth.

      The trip was part of a multi-part reporting project that Hertel undertook as an inaugural fellow in a new program from the MIT Environmental Solutions Initiative (ESI). The ESI Journalism Fellowship was created to help local reporters around the United States connect climate change science and solutions with issues that are already of importance to their audiences — particularly in areas where many people are still unclear or unsure about climate change. For Hertel, that meant visiting 10 farms and forest lands across Minnesota to understand how natural climate solutions are taking shape in her state. The practices she saw at the Dream of Wild Health farm not only helped to restore soil, but also helped slow climate change by taking carbon dioxide out of the air and storing it in soils and plants.

      “There is enthusiasm for natural climate solutions,” Hertel says, but these practices can be expensive and difficult to adopt. She wanted to explain the benefits and the hurdles, especially for farmers and land managers considering new agricultural techniques.

      Hertel produced six news pieces for the St. Cloud Times as part of her project, as well as a six-episode podcast series and two videos. To conclude the series, she ran a public event where 130 attendees — including conventional farmers, regenerative farmers, state senators, the St. Cloud mayor, and other community stakeholders — gathered outside in the 40-degree Fahrenheit cold to discuss carbon markets in Minnesota. The stories were republished in 12 additional outlets, including USA Today, Associated Press, Yahoo News, and US News & World Report. 

      “I had been hoping to write about cover crops and carbon markets for about two years before I pitched my project to ESI,” says Hertel. “I hadn’t been able to take the time and resources with all my other responsibilities. Joining the fellowship allowed me to focus on those topics and dive in deep to understand how much is uncertain and changing in the field right now.”

      Supporting local climate reporting

      In today’s news landscape, local coverage is dwindling, which has major effects on the ways people hear about climate change. At times, the only in-depth climate coverage available is covered by specialty or national publications, which can miss the opportunity to understand the nuances of the communities they are parachuting into.

      “Climate change is or will impact all of us, but many Americans don’t see it as relevant to their lives,” says Laur Hesse Fisher, program director at the ESI, who created and manages the fellowship program. “We’re working to help change that.”

      In this first year of the fellowship, five local journalists were selected from around the country to pursue long-form or serial climate-focused reporting. Fellows received funding and stipends to help them dedicate extra time and resources to their projects. They gathered virtually for workshops and were connected with MIT experts in a variety of relevant fields: scientists such as Adam Schlosser, senior research scientist and deputy director for science research at the MIT Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change; economists and policy experts such as Joshua Hodge, executive director of the MIT Center for Energy and Environmental Policy Research (CEEPR); and journalism experts from the MIT Knight Science Journalism Program.

      Fellows were also given full access to MIT’s extensive library databases and geographic data visualization tools, along with tools focused specifically on climate science and policy like the MIT Socio-Environmental Triage platform and CEEPR’s working papers. All these resources aimed to give the journalism fellows the backing they needed to undertake ambitious projects on climate issues their audiences might otherwise never have known were playing out right in their backyards.

      Stories around the country

      The result was five distinct reporting projects spread across the United States.

      ESI Fellow Tristan Baurick is an environment reporter for the Times Picayune | New Orleans Advocate, Louisiana’s largest newspaper. His multi-part series, “Wind of Change: How the Gulf of Mexico could be the next offshore wind powerhouse,” ran on the front page of the Thanksgiving print edition of the paper. It explores how the state’s offshore oil companies are pivoting to support the emerging wind energy industry, as well as the outcomes of the U.S.’s first offshore wind farm in Rhode Island, which Baurick visited on an extended reporting trip. The series looks at the history of Louisiana, which, despite being a hub for wind engineering technology production, has seen most of that technology exported. “The project relied on experts from the oil and gas industry to introduce the idea of offshore wind energy and the opportunities it could offer the region,” says Baurick. “This approach made readers who are skeptical of climate change and renewable energy let their guard down and consider these topics with a more open mind.”

      Oregon-based environmental journalist Alex Schwartz explored water rights and climate change within the Klamath River Basin for the Herald & News. The result was a five-part digital series that examines the many stakeholders, including Indigenous groups, farmers, fishers, and park managers, who depend on the Klamath River for water even as the region enters a period of extended climate change-induced drought. “The fellowship provided me with financial resources to be able to execute a project at this scale,” says Schwartz. “We never would have been able to take the time off and travel throughout the basin without the support of the fellowship.”

      Melba Newsome is a North Carolina-based independent reporter. Her two-part series for NC Health News focuses on Smithfield’s Foods, whose hog houses continue to have lasting health and environmental implications for majority Black communities in the southeastern part of the state. The series, which has been republished by Indy Weekly, the Daily Yonder, and others, interviews residents and activists to untangle a history of legal battles, neglect, and accusations of environmental racism — while noting that sea-level rise has made the region increasingly vulnerable to dangerous releases of waste from its growing factory farms.

      The final project supported by the fellowship came from Wyoming, famous for its vast outdoors and coal industry. In his three-part series for WyoFile, journalist Dustin Bleizeffer — whose beat shifted from education to energy and climate in part as a result of his fellowship — spoke to local residents to capture their personal experiences of warming temperatures and changing landscapes. “[Of] the people I interviewed and featured in my reporting … all but one are climate skeptics, but they spoke in detail about climate changes they’ve observed, and very eloquently described their concerns,” says Bleizeffer. “I’m still receiving comments and enthusiasm to keep the conversation going.” He also looked at how two Wyoming counties, Gillette and Campbell, are faring through the coal industry’s decline. His series provided a boost to efforts by grassroots organizations and conservation groups that are trying to open “the climate conversation” in the state.

      Lessons for climate conversations

      All five fellows joined ESI for a wrap-up event on Nov. 4, Connecting with Americans on Climate Change, which both showcased their work and gave them the opportunity to publicly discuss ways to engage Americans across the political spectrum on climate change.

      The event was joined by sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild, author of the bestselling “Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right,” who had earlier joined the fellows in one of their workshops to offer her own experience engaging with people who feel ill-served by the national media. Her book, which followed members of the Tea Party in Louisiana for five years, illustrates the importance of deep listening to bridging America’s social and political divides. Hochschild applied this insight to climate change in talking with the fellows and event attendees about strategies to understand and respond to local perspectives on what is often framed as a contentious political issue. “Sociology gives us forgiveness; [it] gets blame and guilt out of the picture,” said Hochschild.

      That was an insight echoed by several of the journalism fellows. “I think rural people feel blamed a lot for every problem,” said Schwartz. “If we were to take the carbon footprint of the Klamath River Basin, it would be minuscule compared to any corporation, right? … We have to create that safety net for our communities to be able to bear the brunt of these cascading disasters that are already occurring and are just going to get worse in the future. Focusing on the adaptation side was really helpful in terms of just getting people to talk about climate change.”

      Other fellows had their own strategies for opening conversations about climate change — and by responding to their audiences’ concerns, they did see opportunities for change in their reporting. In Wyoming, Bleizeffer talked about the need to retain young people in the state, and about changes to landscapes residents loved. Newsome emphasized that people need to see climate change as not someone else’s problem — for her audience, it illustrated and exacerbated injustices they were already feeling.

      And Hertel, speaking of the conventional farmers, everyday people, and local government officials featured in her series, left event attendees with one more insight about effective climate reporting. “Don’t expect people to change on a dime,” she said. “You must bring people [along] on the journey.”

      ESI will be opening journalism fellowship applications for its second cohort later this year. Experienced reporters are encouraged to apply. If you are interested in supporting this fellowship or are curious about opportunities for partnerships, please contact Laur Hesse Fisher. More