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      MIT makes strides on climate action plan

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      Two recent online events related to MIT’s ambitious new climate action plan highlighted several areas of progress, including uses of the campus as a real-life testbed for climate impact research, the creation of new planning bodies with opportunities for input from all parts of the MIT community, and a variety of moves toward reducing the Institute’s own carbon footprint in ways that may also provide a useful model for others.

      On Monday, MIT’s Office of Sustainability held its seventh annual “Sustainability Connect” event, bringing together students, faculty, staff, and alumni to learn about and share ideas for addressing climate change. This year’s virtual event emphasized the work toward carrying out the climate plan, titled “Fast Forward: MIT’s Climate Action Plan for the Decade,” which was announced in May. An earlier event, the “MIT Climate Tune-in” on Nov. 3, provided an overview of the many areas of MIT’s work to tackle climate change and featured a video message from Maria Zuber, MIT’s vice president for research, who was attending the COP26 international climate meeting in Glasgow, Scotland, as part of an 18-member team from MIT.

      Zuber pointed out some significant progress that was made at the conference, including a broad agreement by over 100 nations to end deforestation by the end of the decade; she also noted that the U.S. and E.U. are leading a global coalition of countries committed to curbing methane emissions by 30 percent from 2020 levels by decade’s end. “It’s easy to be pessimistic,” she said, “but being here in Glasgow, I’m actually cautiously optimistic, seeing the thousands and thousands of people here who are working toward meaningful climate action. And I know that same spirit exists on our own campus also.”

      As for MIT’s own climate plan, Zuber emphasized three points: “We’re committed to action; second of all, we’re committed to moving fast; and third, we’ve organized ourselves better for success.” That organization includes the creation of the MIT Climate Steering Committee, to oversee and coordinate MIT’s strategies on climate change; the Climate Nucleus, to oversee the management and implementation of the new plan; and three working groups that are forming now, to involve all parts of the MIT community.

      The “Fast Forward” plan calls for reducing the campus’s net greenhouse gas emissions to zero by 2026 and eliminating all such emissions, including indirect ones, by 2050. At Monday’s event, Director of Sustainability Julie Newman pointed out that the climate plan includes no less than 14 specific commitments related to the campus itself. These can be grouped into five broad areas, she said: mitigation, resiliency, electric vehicle infrastructure, investment portfolio sustainability, and climate leadership. “Each of these commitments has due dates, and they range from the tactical to the strategic,” she said. “We’re in the midst of activating our internal teams” to address these commitments, she added, noting that there are 30 teams that involve 75 faculty and researcher members, plus up to eight student positions.

      One specific project that is well underway involves preparing a detailed map of the flood risks to the campus as sea levels rise and storm surges increase. While previous attempts to map out the campus flooding risks had treated buildings essentially as uniform blocks, the new project has already mapped out in detail the location, elevation, and condition of every access point — doors, windows, and drains — in every building in the main campus, and now plans to extend the work to the residence buildings and outlying parts of campus. The project’s methods for identifying and quantifying the risks to specific parts of the campus, Newman said, represents “part of our mission for leveraging the campus as a test bed” by creating a map that is “true to the nature of the topography and the infrastructure,” in order to be prepared for the effects of climate change.

      Also speaking at the Sustainability Connect event, Vice President for Campus Services and Stewardship Joe Higgins outlined a variety of measures that are underway to cut the carbon footprint of the campus as much as possible, as quickly as possible. Part of that, he explained, involves using the campus as a testbed for the development of the equivalent of a “smart thermostat” system for campus buildings. While such products exist commercially for homeowners, there is no such system yet for large institutional or commercial buildings.

      There is a team actively developing such a pilot program in some MIT buildings, he said, focusing on some large lab buildings that have especially high energy usage. They are examining the use of artificial intelligence to reduce energy consumption, he noted. By adding systems to monitor energy use, temperatures, occupancy, and so on, and to control heating, lighting and air conditioning systems, Higgins said at least a 3 to 5 percent reduction in energy use can be realized. “It may be well beyond that,” he added. “There’s a huge opportunity here.”

      Higgins also outlined the ongoing plan to convert the existing steam distribution system for campus heating into a hot water system. Though the massive undertaking may take decades to complete, he said that project alone may reduce campus carbon emissions by 10 percent. Other efforts include the installation of an additional 400 kilowatts of rooftop solar installations.

      Jeremy Gregory, executive director of MIT’s climate and sustainability consortium, described efforts to deal with the most far-reaching areas of greenhouse gas emission, the so-called Scope 3 emissions. He explained that Scope 1 is the direct emissions from the campus itself, from buildings and vehicles; Scope 2 includes indirect emissions from the generation of electricity; and Scope 3 is “everything else.” That includes employee travel, buildings that MIT leases from others and to others, and all goods and services, he added, “so it includes a lot of different categories of emissions.” Gregory said his team, including several student fellows, is actively investigating and quantifying these Scope 3 emissions at MIT, along with potential methods of reducing them.

      Professor Noelle Selin, who was recently named as co-chair of the new Climate Nucleus along with Professor Anne White, outlined their plans for the coming year, including the setting up of the three working groups.

      Selin said the nucleus consists of representatives of departments, labs, centers, and institutes that have significant responsibilities under the climate plan. That body will make recommendations to the steering committee, which includes the deans of all five of MIT’s schools and the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing, “about how to amplify MIT’s impact in the climate sphere. We have an implementation role, but we also have an accelerator pedal that can really make MIT’s climate impact more ambitious, and really push the buttons and make sure that the Institute’s commitments are actually borne out in reality.”

      The MIT Climate Tune-In also featured Selin and White, as well as a presentation on MIT’s expanded educational offerings on climate and sustainability, from Sarah Meyers, ESI’s education program manager; students Derek Allmond and Natalie Northrup; and postdoc Peter Godart. Professor Dennis Whyte also spoke about MIT and Commonwealth Fusion Systems’ recent historical advance toward commercial fusion energy. Organizers said that the Climate Tune-In event is the first of what they hope will be many opportunities to hear updates on the wide range of work happening across campus to implement the Fast Forward plan, and to spark conversations within the MIT community. More

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      Radio-frequency wave scattering improves fusion simulations

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      In the quest for fusion energy, understanding how radio-frequency (RF) waves travel (or “propagate”) in the turbulent interior of a fusion furnace is crucial to maintaining an efficient, continuously operating power plant. Transmitted by an antenna in the doughnut-shaped vacuum chamber common to magnetic confinement fusion devices called tokamaks, RF waves heat the plasma fuel and drive its current around the toroidal interior. The efficiency of this process can be affected by how the wave’s trajectory is altered (or “scattered”) by conditions within the chamber.

      Researchers have tried to study these RF processes using computer simulations to match the experimental conditions. A good match would validate the computer model, and raise confidence in using it to explore new physics and design future RF antennas that perform efficiently. While the simulations can accurately calculate how much total current is driven by RF waves, they do a poor job at predicting where exactly in the plasma this current is produced.

      Now, in a paper published in the Journal of Plasma Physics, MIT researchers suggest that the models for RF wave propagation used for these simulations have not properly taken into account the way these waves are scattered as they encounter dense, turbulent filaments present in the edge of the plasma known as the “scrape-off layer” (SOL).

      Bodhi Biswas, a graduate student at the Plasma Science and Fusion Center (PSFC) under the direction of Senior Research Scientist Paul Bonoli, School of Engineering Distinguished Professor of Engineering Anne White, and Principal Research Scientist Abhay Ram, who is the paper’s lead author. Ram compares the scattering that occurs in this situation to a wave of water hitting a lily pad: “The wave crashing with the lily pad will excite a secondary, scattered wave that makes circular ripples traveling outward from the plant. The incoming wave has transferred energy to the scattered wave. Some of this energy is reflected backwards (in relation to the incoming wave), some travels forwards, and some is deflected to the side. The specifics all depend on the particular attributes of the wave, the water, and the lily pad. In our case, the lily pad is the plasma filament.”

      Until now, researchers have not properly taken these filaments and the scattering they provoke into consideration when modeling the turbulence inside a tokamak, leading to an underestimation of wave scattering. Using data from PSFC tokamak Alcator C-Mod, Biswas shows that using the new method of modeling RF-wave scattering from SOL turbulence provides results considerably different from older models, and a much better match to experiments. Notably, the “lower-hybrid” wave spectrum, crucial to driving plasma current in a steady-state tokamak, appears to scatter asymmetrically, an important effect not accounted for in previous models.

      Biswas’s advisor Paul Bonoli is well acquainted with traditional “ray-tracing” models, which evaluate a wave trajectory by dividing it into a series of rays. He has used this model, with its limitations, for decades in his own research to understand plasma behavior. Bonoli says he is pleased that “the research results in Bodhi’s doctoral thesis have refocused attention on the profound effect that edge turbulence can have on the propagation and absorption of radio-frequency power.”

      Although ray-tracing treatments of scattering do not fully capture all the wave physics, a “full-wave” model that does would be prohibitively expensive. To solve the problem economically, Biswas splits his analysis into two parts: (1) using ray tracing to model the trajectory of the wave in the tokamak assuming no turbulence, while (2) modifying this ray-trajectory with the new scattering model that accounts for the turbulent plasma filaments.

      “This scattering model is a full-wave model, but computed over a small region and in a simplified geometry so that it is very quick to do,” says Biswas. “The result is a ray-tracing model that, for the first time, accounts for full-wave scattering physics.”

      Biswas notes that this model bridges the gap between simple scattering models that fail to match experiment and full-wave models that are prohibitively expensive, providing reasonable accuracy at low cost.

      “Our results suggest scattering is an important effect, and that it must be taken into account when designing future RF antennas. The low cost of our scattering model makes this very doable.”

      “This is exciting progress,” says Syun’ichi Shiraiwa, staff research physicist at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory. “I believe that Bodhi’s work provides a clear path to the end of a long tunnel we have been in. His work not only demonstrates that the wave scattering, once accurately accounted for, can explain the experimental results, but also answers a puzzling question: why previous scattering models were incomplete, and their results unsatisfying.”

      Work is now underway to apply this model to more plasmas from Alcator C-Mod and other tokamaks. Biswas believes that this new model will be particularly applicable to high-density tokamak plasmas, for which the standard ray-tracing model has been noticeably inaccurate. He is also excited that the model could be validated by DIII-D National Fusion Facility, a fusion experiment on which the PSFC collaborates.

      “The DIII-D tokamak will soon be capable of launching lower hybrid waves and measuring its electric field in the scrape-off layer. These measurements could provide direct evidence of the asymmetric scattering effect predicted by our model.” More

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      Q&A: Options for the Diablo Canyon nuclear plant

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      The Diablo Canyon nuclear plant in California, the only one still operating in the state, is set to close in 2025. A team of researchers at MIT’s Center for Advanced Nuclear Energy Systems, Abdul Latif Jameel Water and Food Systems Lab, and Center for Energy and Environmental Policy Research; Stanford’s Precourt Energy Institute; and energy analysis firm LucidCatalyst LLC have analyzed the potential benefits the plant could provide if its operation were extended to 2030 or 2045.

      They found that this nuclear plant could simultaneously help to stabilize the state’s electric grid, provide desalinated water to supplement the state’s chronic water shortages, and provide carbon-free hydrogen fuel for transportation. MIT News asked report co-authors Jacopo Buongiorno, the TEPCO Professor of Nuclear Science and Engineering, and John Lienhard, the Jameel Professor of Water and Food, to discuss the group’s findings.

      Q: Your report suggests co-locating a major desalination plant alongside the existing Diablo Canyon power plant. What would be the potential benefits from operating a desalination plant in conjunction with the power plant?

      Lienhard: The cost of desalinated water produced at Diablo Canyon would be lower than for a stand-alone plant because the cost of electricity would be significantly lower and you could take advantage of the existing infrastructure for the intake of seawater and the outfall of brine. Electricity would be cheaper because the location takes advantage of Diablo Canyon’s unique capability to provide low cost, zero-carbon baseload power.

      Depending on the scale at which the desalination plant is built, you could make a very significant impact on the water shortfalls of state and federal projects in the area. In fact, one of the numbers that came out of this study was that an intermediate-sized desalination plant there would produce more fresh water than the highest estimate of the net yield from the proposed Delta Conveyance Project on the Sacramento River. You could get that amount of water at Diablo Canyon for an investment cost less than half as large, and without the associated impacts that would come with the Delta Conveyance Project.

      And the technology envisioned for desalination here, reverse osmosis, is available off the shelf. You can buy this equipment today. In fact, it’s already in use in California and thousands of other places around the world.

      Q: You discuss in the report three potential products from the Diablo Canyon plant:  desalinatinated water, power for the grid, and clean hydrogen. How well can the plant accommodate all of those efforts, and are there advantages to combining them as opposed to doing any one of them separately?

      Buongiorno: California, like many other regions in the world, is facing multiple challenges as it seeks to reduce carbon emissions on a grand scale. First, the wide deployment of intermittent energy sources such as solar and wind creates a great deal of variability on the grid that can be balanced by dispatchable firm power generators like Diablo. So, the first mission for Diablo is to continue to provide reliable, clean electricity to the grid.

      The second challenge is the prolonged drought and water scarcity for the state in general. And one way to address that is water desalination co-located with the nuclear plant at the Diablo site, as John explained.

      The third challenge is related to decarbonization the transportation sector. A possible approach is replacing conventional cars and trucks with vehicles powered by fuel cells which consume hydrogen. Hydrogen has to be produced from a primary energy source. Nuclear power, through a process called electrolysis, can do that quite efficiently and in a manner that is carbon-free.

      Our economic analysis took into account the expected revenue from selling these multiple products — electricity for the grid, hydrogen for the transportation sector, water for farmers or other local users — as well as the costs associated with deploying the new facilities needed to produce desalinated water and hydrogen. We found that, if Diablo’s operating license was extended until 2035, it would cut carbon emissions by an average of 7 million metric tons a year — a more than 11 percent reduction from 2017 levels — and save ratepayers $2.6 billion in power system costs.

      Further delaying the retirement of Diablo to 2045 would spare 90,000 acres of land that would need to be dedicated to renewable energy production to replace the facility’s capacity, and it would save ratepayers up to $21 billion in power system costs.

      Finally, if Diablo was operated as a polygeneration facility that provides electricity, desalinated water, and hydrogen simultaneously, its value, quantified in terms of dollars per unit electricity generated, could increase by 50 percent.

      Lienhard: Most of the desalination scenarios that we considered did not consume the full electrical output of that plant, meaning that under most scenarios you would continue to make electricity and do something with it, beyond just desalination. I think it’s also important to remember that this power plant produces 15 percent of California’s carbon-free electricity today and is responsible for 8 percent of the state’s total electrical production. In other words, Diablo Canyon is a very large factor in California’s decarbonization. When or if this plant goes offline, the near-term outcome is likely to be increased reliance on natural gas to produce electricity, meaning a rise in California’s carbon emissions.

      Q: This plant in particular has been highly controversial since its inception. What’s your assessment of the plant’s safety beyond its scheduled shutdown, and how do you see this report as contributing to the decision-making about that shutdown?

      Buongiorno: The Diablo Canyon Nuclear Power Plant has a very strong safety record. The potential safety concern for Diablo is related to its proximity to several fault lines. Being located in California, the plant was designed to withstand large earthquakes to begin with. Following the Fukushima accident in 2011, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission reviewed the plant’s ability to withstand external events (e.g., earthquakes, tsunamis, floods, tornadoes, wildfires, hurricanes) of exceptionally rare and severe magnitude. After nine years of assessment the NRC’s conclusion is that “existing seismic capacity or effective flood protection [at Diablo Canyon] will address the unbounded reevaluated hazards.” That is, Diablo was designed and built to withstand even the rarest and strongest earthquakes that are physically possible at this site.

      As an additional level of protection, the plant has been retrofitted with special equipment and procedures meant to ensure reliable cooling of the reactor core and spent fuel pool under a hypothetical scenario in which all design-basis safety systems have been disabled by a severe external event.

      Lienhard: As for the potential impact of this report, PG&E [the California utility] has already made the decision to shut down the plant, and we and others hope that decision will be revisited and reversed. We believe that this report gives the relevant stakeholders and policymakers a lot of information about options and value associated with keeping the plant running, and about how California could benefit from clean water and clean power generated at Diablo Canyon. It’s not up to us to make the decision, of course — that is a decision that must be made by the people of California. All we can do is provide information.

      Q: What are the biggest challenges or obstacles to seeing these ideas implemented?

      Lienhard: California has very strict environmental protection regulations, and it’s good that they do. One of the areas of great concern to California is the health of the ocean and protection of the coastal ecosystem. As a result, very strict rules are in place about the intake and outfall of both power plants and desalination plants, to protect marine life. Our analysis suggests that this combined plant can be implemented within the parameters prescribed by the California Ocean Plan and that it can meet the regulatory requirements.

      We believe that deeper analysis would be needed before you could proceed. You would need to do site studies and really get out into the water and look in detail at what’s there. But the preliminary analysis is positive. A second challenge is that the discourse in California around nuclear power has generally not been very supportive, and similarly some groups in California oppose desalination. We expect that that both of those points of view would be part of the conversation about whether or not to procede with this project.

      Q: How particular is this analysis to the specifics of this location? Are there aspects of it that apply to other nuclear plants, domestically or globally?

      Lienhard: Hundreds of nuclear plants around the world are situated along the coast, and many are in water stressed regions. Although our analysis focused on Diablo Canyon, we believe that the general findings are applicable to many other seaside nuclear plants, so that this approach and these conclusions could potentially be applied at hundreds of sites worldwide. More

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      MIT Energy Night 2021: Connecting global innovators to local talent

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      On Oct. 29, leading clean technology innovators from around the world convened virtually and in-person on the MIT campus for the MIT Energy and Climate (MITEC) Club’s Energy Night 2021.

      The event featured an array of participants and attendees — from MIT students and faculty to investors, engineers, and established and early-stage companies — all committed to developing cutting-edge technologies to address climate and energy challenges.   

      The event began with a series of virtual presentations and panels that featured speakers from premier players in the climate and technology spheres. Those presenting included policymakers and market enablers, such as ARPA-E and Actuate, investors and accelerators, like TDK Ventures and Prime Coalition, along with numerous startups, including Commonwealth Fusion Systems and Infinite Cooling. The goal was to discuss how nascent technologies could crystalize into viable solutions.

      “A lot of project ideas have the potential to be commercialized,” explains Anne Liu, a research assistant at the MIT Materials Systems Lab and the event’s co-managing director. “So, the goal of our virtual session was to explore the business side of the energy ecosystem by inviting leaders to discuss how to turn ideas into successful companies.”

      While the virtual session explored commercialization, the poster session presented early-stage innovation. It featured more than 70 posters by scientists, startups, and engineers from across the MIT community and far beyond.

      “The poster session is one of the most exciting parts of Energy Night,” says Naomi Lutz, a fourth-year undergraduate in the Department of Mechanical Engineering. “It provides a great opportunity to step back and learn more about what others are doing in specific areas of energy.”

      The work featured spanned the climate and energy sphere, ranging from nuclear fusion to carbon capture — and even included a proposal for solar smokestacks.

      “There are so many topics in energy and climate. And, yet it’s common to only connect with those in your specific track,” says Alexandra Steckmest, one of the event’s organizers and an MBA candidate at MIT Sloan School of Management. “So, we designed the poster session as a platform for people to connect with those from different realms of the energy sector.”

      To the MITEC team, presenting this broader spectrum of research isn’t just exciting — it’s necessary.

      “This is such a rapidly changing industry,” says Steckmest. “So, it’s important to have so many industry experts share information about the changes that are going on in it.”

      The event’s hybrid format, therefore, responded to more than just the Covid-19 pandemic: it also catered to the global, collaborative, and continuously evolving nature of the energy and cleantech industries.

      “After some discussion, we decided on this hybrid format,” explains Liu. “We wanted to ensure that we could have the interactivity of an in-person event while also reaching the much broader audience we had cultivated during last year’s entirely remote format.”

      The new hybrid format helped the team cast a wide net. In total, 400 people attended the in-person poster session while nearly an additional 400 people attended virtually from around the world.

      Yet, despite an increasingly global scope, Energy Night still retained a distinctly local composition. Numerous companies present at the virtual session hailed from across Greater Boston, and, quite often, near MIT: Commonwealth Fusion Systems and Infinite Cooling retain offices within Somerville or Cambridge, and each spawned from MIT.

      “There are so many companies coming out of [MIT] that go on to establish themselves in Boston and Cambridge,” notes Steckmest. “That makes [Energy Night] well-positioned to build connections and generate value for local accelerators.”

      MITEC continues to cultivate these local connections while also contributing to Boston’s unique cleantech culture.

      “What sets Boston apart is its emphasis on long-term solutions that are not always easily achievable through conventional venture capital,” says Liu.

      When planning Energy Night, she and her team sought to invite both short- and long-term solutions to showcase Boston’s aspirational culture while also offering a venue for established investors to seek new, more readily deployable technologies.

      Perhaps the greatest testament to Energy Night’s ongoing success is its tendency to come full circle.

      “Over the past few years, we’ve featured serial presenters from MIT that have gone on to found their own companies,” explains Liu. “So, for a lot of projects, we see a transition from an idea to a successful business.”

      Form Energy, for instance, is an MIT spinoff founded in 2017 with the mission of creating low-cost, long-term energy storage. Its stature grew greatly following its presence at Energy Night in 2019, after which it attracted $40 million in venture capital funding.

      “Whether you’re a first-year undergraduate or a long-time member of the energy and cleantech industries, we want Energy Night to generate these driving connections that lead to professional growth, as well as successful partnerships,” says Steckmest. More

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      MIT Energy Initiative awards seven Seed Fund grants for early-stage energy research

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      The MIT Energy Initiative (MITEI) has awarded seven Seed Fund grants to support novel, early-stage energy research by faculty and researchers at MIT. The awardees hail from a range of disciplines, but all strive to bring their backgrounds and expertise to address the global climate crisis by improving the efficiency, scalability, and adoption of clean energy technologies.

      “Solving climate change is truly an interdisciplinary challenge,” says MITEI Director Robert C. Armstrong. “The Seed Fund grants foster collaboration and innovation from across all five of MIT’s schools and one college, encouraging an ‘all hands on deck approach’ to developing the energy solutions that will prove critical in combatting this global crisis.”

      This year, MITEI’s Seed Fund grant program received 70 proposals from 86 different principal investigators (PIs) across 25 departments, labs, and centers. Of these proposals, 31 involved collaborations between two or more PIs, including 24 that involved multiple departments.

      The winning projects reflect this collaborative nature with topics addressing the optimization of low-energy thermal cooling in buildings; the design of safe, robust, and resilient distributed power systems; and how to design and site wind farms with consideration of wind resource uncertainty due to climate change.

      Increasing public support for low-carbon technologies

      One winning team aims to leverage work done in the behavioral sciences to motivate sustainable behaviors and promote the adoption of clean energy technologies.

      “Objections to scalable low-carbon technologies such as nuclear energy and carbon sequestration have made it difficult to adopt these technologies and reduce greenhouse gas emissions,” says Howard Herzog, a senior research scientist at MITEI and co-PI. “These objections tend to neglect the sheer scale of energy generation required and the inability to meet this demand solely with other renewable energy technologies.”

      This interdisciplinary team — which includes researchers from MITEI, the Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering, and the MIT Sloan School of Management — plans to convene industry professionals and academics, as well as behavioral scientists, to identify common objections, design messaging to overcome them, and prove that these messaging campaigns have long-lasting impacts on attitudes toward scalable low-carbon technologies.

      “Our aim is to provide a foundation for shifting the public and policymakers’ views about these low-carbon technologies from something they, at best, tolerate, to something they actually welcome,” says co-PI David Rand, the Erwin H. Schell Professor and professor of management science and brain and cognitive sciences at MIT Sloan School of Management.

      Siting and designing wind farms

      Michael Howland, an assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering, will use his Seed Fund grant to develop a foundational methodology for wind farm siting and design that accounts for the uncertainty of wind resources resulting from climate change.

      “The optimal wind farm design and its resulting cost of energy is inherently dependent on the wind resource at the location of the farm,” says Howland. “But wind farms are currently sited and designed based on short-term climate records that do not account for the future effects of climate change on wind patterns.”

      Wind farms are capital-intensive infrastructure that cannot be relocated and often have lifespans exceeding 20 years — all of which make it especially important that developers choose the right locations and designs based not only on wind patterns in the historical climate record, but also based on future predictions. The new siting and design methodology has the potential to replace current industry standards to enable a more accurate risk analysis of wind farm development and energy grid expansion under climate change-driven energy resource uncertainty.

      Membraneless electrolyzers for hydrogen production

      Producing hydrogen from renewable energy-powered water electrolyzers is central to realizing a sustainable and low-carbon hydrogen economy, says Kripa Varanasi, a professor of mechanical engineering and a Seed Fund award recipient. The idea of using hydrogen as a fuel has existed for decades, but it has yet to be widely realized at a considerable scale. Varanasi hopes to change that with his Seed Fund grant.

      “The critical economic hurdle for successful electrolyzers to overcome is the minimization of the capital costs associated with their deployment,” says Varanasi. “So, an immediate task at hand to enable electrochemical hydrogen production at scale will be to maximize the effectiveness of the most mature, least complex, and least expensive water electrolyzer technologies.”

      To do this, he aims to combine the advantages of existing low-temperature alkaline electrolyzer designs with a novel membraneless electrolyzer technology that harnesses a gas management system architecture to minimize complexity and costs, while also improving efficiency. Varanasi hopes his project will demonstrate scalable concepts for cost-effective electrolyzer technology design to help realize a decarbonized hydrogen economy.

      Since its establishment in 2008, the MITEI Seed Fund Program has supported 194 energy-focused seed projects through grants totaling more than $26 million. This funding comes primarily from MITEI’s founding and sustaining members, supplemented by gifts from generous donors.

      Recipients of the 2021 MITEI Seed Fund grants are:

      “Design automation of safe, robust, and resilient distributed power systems” — Chuchu Fan of the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics
      “Advanced MHD topping cycles: For fission, fusion, solar power plants” — Jeffrey Freidberg of the Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering and Dennis Whyte of the Plasma Science and Fusion Center
      “Robust wind farm siting and design under climate-change‐driven wind resource uncertainty” — Michael Howland of the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering
      “Low-energy thermal comfort for buildings in the Global South: Optimal design of integrated structural-thermal systems” — Leslie Norford of the Department of Architecture and Caitlin Mueller of the departments of Architecture and Civil and Environmental Engineering
      “New low-cost, high energy-density boron-based redox electrolytes for nonaqueous flow batteries” — Alexander Radosevich of the Department of Chemistry
      “Increasing public support for scalable low-carbon energy technologies using behavorial science insights” — David Rand of the MIT Sloan School of Management, Koroush Shirvan of the Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering, Howard Herzog of the MIT Energy Initiative, and Jacopo Buongiorno of the Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering
      “Membraneless electrolyzers for efficient hydrogen production using nanoengineered 3D gas capture electrode architectures” — Kripa Varanasi of the Department of Mechanical Engineering More

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      Coupling power and hydrogen sector pathways to benefit decarbonization

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      Governments and companies worldwide are increasing their investments in hydrogen research and development, indicating a growing recognition that hydrogen could play a significant role in meeting global energy system decarbonization goals. Since hydrogen is light, energy-dense, storable, and produces no direct carbon dioxide emissions at the point of use, this versatile energy carrier has the potential to be harnessed in a variety of ways in a future clean energy system.

      Often considered in the context of grid-scale energy storage, hydrogen has garnered renewed interest, in part due to expectations that our future electric grid will be dominated by variable renewable energy (VRE) sources such as wind and solar, as well as decreasing costs for water electrolyzers — both of which could make clean, “green” hydrogen more cost-competitive with fossil-fuel-based production. But hydrogen’s versatility as a clean energy fuel also makes it an attractive option to meet energy demand and to open pathways for decarbonization in hard-to-abate sectors where direct electrification is difficult, such as transportation, buildings, and industry.

      “We’ve seen a lot of progress and analysis around pathways to decarbonize electricity, but we may not be able to electrify all end uses. This means that just decarbonizing electricity supply is not sufficient, and we must develop other decarbonization strategies as well,” says Dharik Mallapragada, a research scientist at the MIT Energy Initiative (MITEI). “Hydrogen is an interesting energy carrier to explore, but understanding the role for hydrogen requires us to study the interactions between the electricity system and a future hydrogen supply chain.”

      In a recent paper, researchers from MIT and Shell present a framework to systematically study the role and impact of hydrogen-based technology pathways in a future low-carbon, integrated energy system, taking into account interactions with the electric grid and the spatio-temporal variations in energy demand and supply. The developed framework co-optimizes infrastructure investment and operation across the electricity and hydrogen supply chain under various emissions price scenarios. When applied to a Northeast U.S. case study, the researchers find this approach results in substantial benefits — in terms of costs and emissions reduction — as it takes advantage of hydrogen’s potential to provide the electricity system with a large flexible load when produced through electrolysis, while also enabling decarbonization of difficult-to-electrify, end-use sectors.

      The research team includes Mallapragada; Guannan He, a postdoc at MITEI; Abhishek Bose, a graduate research assistant at MITEI; Clara Heuberger-Austin, a researcher at Shell; and Emre Gençer, a research scientist at MITEI. Their findings are published in the journal Energy & Environmental Science.

      Cross-sector modeling

      “We need a cross-sector framework to analyze each energy carrier’s economics and role across multiple systems if we are to really understand the cost/benefits of direct electrification or other decarbonization strategies,” says He.

      To do that analysis, the team developed the Decision Optimization of Low-carbon Power-HYdrogen Network (DOLPHYN) model, which allows the user to study the role of hydrogen in low-carbon energy systems, the effects of coupling the power and hydrogen sectors, and the trade-offs between various technology options across both supply chains — spanning production, transport, storage, and end use, and their impact on decarbonization goals.

      “We are seeing great interest from industry and government, because they are all asking questions about where to invest their money and how to prioritize their decarbonization strategies,” says Gençer. Heuberger-Austin adds, “Being able to assess the system-level interactions between electricity and the emerging hydrogen economy is of paramount importance to drive technology development and support strategic value chain decisions. The DOLPHYN model can be instrumental in tackling those kinds of questions.”

      For a predefined set of electricity and hydrogen demand scenarios, the model determines the least-cost technology mix across the power and hydrogen sectors while adhering to a variety of operation and policy constraints. The model can incorporate a range of technology options — from VRE generation to carbon capture and storage (CCS) used with both power and hydrogen generation to trucks and pipelines used for hydrogen transport. With its flexible structure, the model can be readily adapted to represent emerging technology options and evaluate their long-term value to the energy system.

      As an important addition, the model takes into account process-level carbon emissions by allowing the user to add a cost penalty on emissions in both sectors. “If you have a limited emissions budget, we are able to explore the question of where to prioritize the limited emissions to get the best bang for your buck in terms of decarbonization,” says Mallapragada.

      Insights from a case study

      To test their model, the researchers investigated the Northeast U.S. energy system under a variety of demand, technology, and carbon price scenarios. While their major conclusions can be generalized for other regions, the Northeast proved to be a particularly interesting case study. This region has current legislation and regulatory support for renewable generation, as well as increasing emission-reduction targets, a number of which are quite stringent. It also has a high demand for energy for heating — a sector that is difficult to electrify and could particularly benefit from hydrogen and from coupling the power and hydrogen systems.

      The researchers find that when combining the power and hydrogen sectors through electrolysis or hydrogen-based power generation, there is more operational flexibility to support VRE integration in the power sector and a reduced need for alternative grid-balancing supply-side resources such as battery storage or dispatchable gas generation, which in turn reduces the overall system cost. This increased VRE penetration also leads to a reduction in emissions compared to scenarios without sector-coupling. “The flexibility that electricity-based hydrogen production provides in terms of balancing the grid is as important as the hydrogen it is going to produce for decarbonizing other end uses,” says Mallapragada. They found this type of grid interaction to be more favorable than conventional hydrogen-based electricity storage, which can incur additional capital costs and efficiency losses when converting hydrogen back to power. This suggests that the role of hydrogen in the grid could be more beneficial as a source of flexible demand than as storage.

      The researchers’ multi-sector modeling approach also highlighted that CCS is more cost-effective when utilized in the hydrogen supply chain, versus the power sector. They note that counter to this observation, by the end of the decade, six times more CCS projects will be deployed in the power sector than for use in hydrogen production — a fact that emphasizes the need for more cross-sectoral modeling when planning future energy systems.

      In this study, the researchers tested the robustness of their conclusions against a number of factors, such as how the inclusion of non-combustion greenhouse gas emissions (including methane emissions) from natural gas used in power and hydrogen production impacts the model outcomes. They find that including the upstream emissions footprint of natural gas within the model boundary does not impact the value of sector coupling in regards to VRE integration and cost savings for decarbonization; in fact, the value actually grows because of the increased emphasis on electricity-based hydrogen production over natural gas-based pathways.

      “You cannot achieve climate targets unless you take a holistic approach,” says Gençer. “This is a systems problem. There are sectors that you cannot decarbonize with electrification, and there are other sectors that you cannot decarbonize without carbon capture, and if you think about everything together, there is a synergistic solution that significantly minimizes the infrastructure costs.”

      This research was supported, in part, by Shell Global Solutions International B.V. in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, and MITEI’s Low-Carbon Energy Centers for Electric Power Systems and Carbon Capture, Utilization, and Storage. More

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      in Environment

      New “risk triage” platform pinpoints compounding threats to US infrastructure

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      Over a 36-hour period in August, Hurricane Henri delivered record rainfall in New York City, where an aging storm-sewer system was not built to handle the deluge, resulting in street flooding. Meanwhile, an ongoing drought in California continued to overburden aquifers and extend statewide water restrictions. As climate change amplifies the frequency and intensity of extreme events in the United States and around the world, and the populations and economies they threaten grow and change, there is a critical need to make infrastructure more resilient. But how can this be done in a timely, cost-effective way?

      An emerging discipline called multi-sector dynamics (MSD) offers a promising solution. MSD homes in on compounding risks and potential tipping points across interconnected natural and human systems. Tipping points occur when these systems can no longer sustain multiple, co-evolving stresses, such as extreme events, population growth, land degradation, drinkable water shortages, air pollution, aging infrastructure, and increased human demands. MSD researchers use observations and computer models to identify key precursory indicators of such tipping points, providing decision-makers with critical information that can be applied to mitigate risks and boost resilience in infrastructure and managed resources.

      At MIT, the Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change has since 2018 been developing MSD expertise and modeling tools and using them to explore compounding risks and potential tipping points in selected regions of the United States. In a two-hour webinar on Sept. 15, MIT Joint Program researchers presented an overview of the program’s MSD research tool set and its applications.  

      MSD and the risk triage platform

      “Multi-sector dynamics explores interactions and interdependencies among human and natural systems, and how these systems may adapt, interact, and co-evolve in response to short-term shocks and long-term influences and stresses,” says MIT Joint Program Deputy Director C. Adam Schlosser, noting that such analysis can reveal and quantify potential risks that would likely evade detection in siloed investigations. “These systems can experience cascading effects or failures after crossing tipping points. The real question is not just where these tipping points are in each system, but how they manifest and interact across all systems.”

      To address that question, the program’s MSD researchers have developed the MIT Socio-Environmental Triage (MST) platform, now publicly available for the first time. Focused on the continental United States, the first version of the platform analyzes present-day risks related to water, land, climate, the economy, energy, demographics, health, and infrastructure, and where these compound to create risk hot spots. It’s essentially a screening-level visualization tool that allows users to examine risks, identify hot spots when combining risks, and make decisions about how to deploy more in-depth analysis to solve complex problems at regional and local levels. For example, MST can identify hot spots for combined flood and poverty risks in the lower Mississippi River basin, and thereby alert decision-makers as to where more concentrated flood-control resources are needed.

      Successive versions of the platform will incorporate projections based on the MIT Joint Program’s Integrated Global System Modeling (IGSM) framework of how different systems and stressors may co-evolve into the future and thereby change the risk landscape. This enhanced capability could help uncover cost-effective pathways for mitigating and adapting to a wide range of environmental and economic risks.  

      MSD applications

      Five webinar presentations explored how MIT Joint Program researchers are applying the program’s risk triage platform and other MSD modeling tools to identify potential tipping points and risks in five key domains: water quality, land use, economics and energy, health, and infrastructure. 

      Joint Program Principal Research Scientist Xiang Gao described her efforts to apply a high-resolution U.S. water-quality model to calculate a location-specific, water-quality index over more than 2,000 river basins in the country. By accounting for interactions among climate, agriculture, and socioeconomic systems, various water-quality measures can be obtained ranging from nitrate and phosphate levels to phytoplankton concentrations. This modeling approach advances a unique capability to identify potential water-quality risk hot spots for freshwater resources.

      Joint Program Research Scientist Angelo Gurgel discussed his MSD-based analysis of how climate change, population growth, changing diets, crop-yield improvements and other forces that drive land-use change at the global level may ultimately impact how land is used in the United States. Drawing upon national observational data and the IGSM framework, the analysis shows that while current U.S. land-use trends are projected to persist or intensify between now and 2050, there is no evidence of any concerning tipping points arising throughout this period.  

      MIT Joint Program Research Scientist Jennifer Morris presented several examples of how the risk triage platform can be used to combine existing U.S. datasets and the IGSM framework to assess energy and economic risks at the regional level. For example, by aggregating separate data streams on fossil-fuel employment and poverty, one can target selected counties for clean energy job training programs as the nation moves toward a low-carbon future. 

      “Our modeling and risk triage frameworks can provide pictures of current and projected future economic and energy landscapes,” says Morris. “They can also highlight interactions among different human, built, and natural systems, including compounding risks that occur in the same location.”  

      MIT Joint Program research affiliate Sebastian Eastham, a research scientist at the MIT Laboratory for Aviation and the Environment, described an MSD approach to the study of air pollution and public health. Linking the IGSM with an atmospheric chemistry model, Eastham ultimately aims to better understand where the greatest health risks are in the United States and how they may compound throughout this century under different policy scenarios. Using the risk triage tool to combine current risk metrics for air quality and poverty in a selected county based on current population and air-quality data, he showed how one can rapidly identify cardiovascular and other air-pollution-induced disease risk hot spots.

      Finally, MIT Joint Program research affiliate Alyssa McCluskey, a lecturer at the University of Colorado at Boulder, showed how the risk triage tool can be used to pinpoint potential risks to roadways, waterways, and power distribution lines from flooding, extreme temperatures, population growth, and other stressors. In addition, McCluskey described how transportation and energy infrastructure development and expansion can threaten critical wildlife habitats.

      Enabling comprehensive, location-specific analyses of risks and hot spots within and among multiple domains, the Joint Program’s MSD modeling tools can be used to inform policymaking and investment from the municipal to the global level.

      “MSD takes on the challenge of linking human, natural, and infrastructure systems in order to inform risk analysis and decision-making,” says Schlosser. “Through our risk triage platform and other MSD models, we plan to assess important interactions and tipping points, and to provide foresight that supports action toward a sustainable, resilient, and prosperous world.”

      This research is funded by the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science as an ongoing project. More

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      in Energy

      Institute Professor Paula Hammond named to White House science council

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      Paula Hammond, an MIT Institute Professor and head of MIT’s Department of Chemical Engineering, has been chosen to serve on the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST), the White House announced today.

      The council advises the president on matters involving science, technology, education, and innovation policy. It also provides the White House with scientific and technical information that is needed to inform public policy relating to the U.S. economy, U.S. workers, and national security.

      “For me, this is an exciting opportunity,” Hammond says. “I have always been interested in considering how science can solve important problems in our community, in our country, and globally. It’s very meaningful for me to have a chance to have an advisory role at that level.”

      Hammond is one of 30 members named to the council, which is co-chaired by Frances Arnold, a professor at Caltech, and Maria Zuber, MIT’s vice president for research.

      “Paula is an extraordinary engineer, teacher, and colleague, and President Biden’s decision to appoint her to the council is an excellent one,” Zuber says. “I think about the work ahead of us — not just to restore science and technology to their proper place in policymaking, but also to make sure that they lead to real improvements in the lives of everyone in our country — and I can’t think of anyone better suited to the challenge than Paula.”

      Hammond, whose research as a chemical engineer touches on the fields of both medicine and energy, said she hopes to help address critical issues such as equal access to health care and efforts to mitigate climate change.

      “I’m very excited about the opportunities presented at the interface of engineering and health, and in particular, how we might be able to expand the benefits that we gain from our work to a broader set of communities, so that we’re able to address some of the disparities we see in health, which have been so obvious during the pandemic,” says Hammond, who is also a member of MIT’s Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research. “How we might be able to use everything from computational modeling and data science to technological innovation to equalize access to health is one area that I care a lot about.”

      Hammond’s research focuses on developing novel polymers and nanomaterials for a variety of applications in drug delivery, noninvasive imaging, solar cells, and battery technology. Using techniques for building polymers with highly controlled architectures, she has designed drug-delivering nanoparticles that can home in on tumors, as well as polymer films that dramatically improve the efficiency of methanol fuel cells.

      As an MIT faculty member and mentor to graduate students, Hammond has worked to increase opportunities for underrepresented minorities in science and engineering fields. That is a goal she also hopes to pursue in her new role.

      “There’s a lot of work to be done when we look at the low numbers of students of color who are actually going on to science and engineering fields,” she says. “When I think about my work related to increasing diversity in those areas, part of the reason I do it is because that’s where we gain excellence, and where we gain solutions and the foresight to work on the right problems. I also think that it’s important for there to be broad access to the power that science brings.”

      Hammond, who earned both her bachelor’s degree and PhD from MIT, has been a member of the faculty since 1995. She has been a full professor since 2006 and has chaired the Department of Chemical Engineering since 2015. Earlier this year, she was named an Institute Professor, MIT’s highest faculty honor. She is also one of only 25 people who have been elected to all three National Academies — Engineering, Science, and Medicine.

      She has previously served on the U.S. Secretary of Energy Scientific Advisory Board, the NIH Center for Scientific Review Advisory Council, and the Board of Directors of the American Institute of Chemical Engineers. She also chaired or co-chaired two committees that contributed landmark reports on gender and race at MIT: the Initiative for Faculty Race and Diversity, and the Academic and Organizational Relationships Working Group. More