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      To improve solar and other clean energy tech, look beyond hardware

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      To continue reducing the costs of solar energy and other clean energy technologies, scientists and engineers will likely need to focus, at least in part, on improving technology features that are not based on hardware, according to MIT researchers. They describe this finding and the mechanisms behind it today in Nature Energy.

      While the cost of installing a solar energy system has dropped by more than 99 percent since 1980, this new analysis shows that “soft technology” features, such as the codified permitting practices, supply chain management techniques, and system design processes that go into deploying a solar energy plant, contributed only 10 to 15 percent of total cost declines. Improvements to hardware features were responsible for the lion’s share.

      But because soft technology is increasingly dominating the total costs of installing solar energy systems, this trend threatens to slow future cost savings and hamper the global transition to clean energy, says the study’s senior author, Jessika Trancik, a professor in MIT’s Institute for Data, Systems, and Society (IDSS).

      Trancik’s co-authors include lead author Magdalena M. Klemun, a former IDSS graduate student and postdoc who is now an assistant professor at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology; Goksin Kavlak, a former IDSS graduate student and postdoc who is now an associate at the Brattle Group; and James McNerney, a former IDSS postdoc and now senior research fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School.

      The team created a quantitative model to analyze the cost evolution of solar energy systems, which captures the contributions of both hardware technology features and soft technology features.

      The framework shows that soft technology hasn’t improved much over time — and that soft technology features contributed even less to overall cost declines than previously estimated.

      Their findings indicate that to reverse this trend and accelerate cost declines, engineers could look at making solar energy systems less reliant on soft technology to begin with, or they could tackle the problem directly by improving inefficient deployment processes.  

      “Really understanding where the efficiencies and inefficiencies are, and how to address those inefficiencies, is critical in supporting the clean energy transition. We are making huge investments of public dollars into this, and soft technology is going to be absolutely essential to making those funds count,” says Trancik.

      “However,” Klemun adds, “we haven’t been thinking about soft technology design as systematically as we have for hardware. That needs to change.”

      The hard truth about soft costs

      Researchers have observed that the so-called “soft costs” of building a solar power plant — the costs of designing and installing the plant — are becoming a much larger share of total costs. In fact, the share of soft costs now typically ranges from 35 to 64 percent.

      “We wanted to take a closer look at where these soft costs were coming from and why they weren’t coming down over time as quickly as the hardware costs,” Trancik says.

      In the past, scientists have modeled the change in solar energy costs by dividing total costs into additive components — hardware components and nonhardware components — and then tracking how these components changed over time.

      “But if you really want to understand where those rates of change are coming from, you need to go one level deeper to look at the technology features. Then things split out differently,” Trancik says.

      The researchers developed a quantitative approach that models the change in solar energy costs over time by assigning contributions to the individual technology features, including both hardware features and soft technology features.

      For instance, their framework would capture how much of the decline in system installation costs — a soft cost — is due to standardized practices of certified installers — a soft technology feature. It would also capture how that same soft cost is affected by increased photovoltaic module efficiency — a hardware technology feature.

      With this approach, the researchers saw that improvements in hardware had the greatest impacts on driving down soft costs in solar energy systems. For example, the efficiency of photovoltaic modules doubled between 1980 and 2017, reducing overall system costs by 17 percent. But about 40 percent of that overall decline could be attributed to reductions in soft costs tied to improved module efficiency.

      The framework shows that, while hardware technology features tend to improve many cost components, soft technology features affect only a few.

      “You can see this structural difference even before you collect data on how the technologies have changed over time. That’s why mapping out a technology’s network of cost dependencies is a useful first step to identify levers of change, for solar PV and for other technologies as well,” Klemun notes.  

      Static soft technology

      The researchers used their model to study several countries, since soft costs can vary widely around the world. For instance, solar energy soft costs in Germany are about 50 percent less than those in the U.S.

      The fact that hardware technology improvements are often shared globally led to dramatic declines in costs over the past few decades across locations, the analysis showed. Soft technology innovations typically aren’t shared across borders. Moreover, the team found that countries with better soft technology performance 20 years ago still have better performance today, while those with worse performance didn’t see much improvement.

      This country-by-country difference could be driven by regulation and permitting processes, cultural factors, or by market dynamics such as how firms interact with each other, Trancik says.

      “But not all soft technology variables are ones that you would want to change in a cost-reducing direction, like lower wages. So, there are other considerations, beyond just bringing the cost of the technology down, that we need to think about when interpreting these results,” she says.

      Their analysis points to two strategies for reducing soft costs. For one, scientists could focus on developing hardware improvements that make soft costs more dependent on hardware technology variables and less on soft technology variables, such as by creating simpler, more standardized equipment that could reduce on-site installation time.

      Or researchers could directly target soft technology features without changing hardware, perhaps by creating more efficient workflows for system installation or automated permitting platforms.

      “In practice, engineers will often pursue both approaches, but separating the two in a formal model makes it easier to target innovation efforts by leveraging specific relationships between technology characteristics and costs,” Klemun says.

      “Often, when we think about information processing, we are leaving out processes that still happen in a very low-tech way through people communicating with one another. But it is just as important to think about that as a technology as it is to design fancy software,” Trancik notes.

      In the future, she and her collaborators want to apply their quantitative model to study the soft costs related to other technologies, such as electrical vehicle charging and nuclear fission. They are also interested in better understanding the limits of soft technology improvement, and how one could design better soft technology from the outset.

      This research is funded by the U.S. Department of Energy Solar Energy Technologies Office. More

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      A welcome new pipeline for students invested in clean energy

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      Akarsh Aurora aspired “to be around people who are actually making the global energy transition happen,” he says. Sam Packman sought to “align his theoretical and computational interests to a clean energy project” with tangible impacts. Lauryn Kortman says she “really liked the idea of an in-depth research experience focused on an amazing energy source.”

      These three MIT students found what they wanted in the Fusion Undergraduate Scholars (FUSars) program launched by the MIT Plasma Science and Fusion Center (PSFC) to make meaningful fusion energy research accessible to undergraduates. Aurora, Kortman, and Packman are members of a cohort of 10 for the program’s inaugural run, which began spring semester 2023.

      FUSars operates like a high-wattage UROP (MIT’s Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program). The program requires a student commitment of 10 to 12 hours weekly on a research project during the course of an academic year, as well as participation in a for-credit seminar providing professional development, communication, and wellness support. Through this class and with the mentorship of graduate students, postdocs, and research scientist advisors, students craft a publication-ready journal submission summarizing their research. Scholars who complete the entire year and submit a manuscript for review will receive double the ordinary UROP stipend — a payment that can reach $9,000.

      “The opportunity just jumped out at me,” says Packman. “It was an offer I couldn’t refuse,” adds Aurora.

      Building a workforce

      “I kept hearing from students wanting to get into fusion, but they were very frustrated because there just wasn’t a pipeline for them to work at the PSFC,” says Michael Short, Class of ’42 Associate Professor of Nuclear Science and Engineering and associate director of the PSFC. The PSFC bustles with research projects run by scientists and postdocs. But since the PSFC isn’t a university department with educational obligations, it does not have the regular machinery in place to integrate undergraduate researchers.

      This poses a problem not just for students but for the field of fusion energy, which holds the prospect of unlimited, carbon-free electricity. There are promising advances afoot: MIT and one of its partners, Commonwealth Fusion Systems, are developing a prototype for a compact commercial fusion energy reactor. The start of a fusion energy industry will require a steady infusion of skilled talent.

      “We have to think about the workforce needs of fusion in the future and how to train that workforce,” says Rachel Shulman, who runs the FUSars program and co-instructs the FUSars class with Short. “Energy education needs to be thinking right now about what’s coming after solar, and that’s fusion.”

      Short, who earned his bachelor’s, master’s, and doctoral degrees at MIT, was himself the beneficiary of the Undergraduate Research Opportunity Program (UROP) at the PSFC. As a faculty member, he has become deeply engaged in building transformative research experiences for undergraduates. With FUSars, he hopes to give students a springboard into the field — with an eye to developing a diverse, highly trained, and zealous employee pool for a future fusion industry.

      Taking a deep dive

      Although these are early days for this initial group of FUSars, there is already a shared sense of purpose and enthusiasm. Chosen from 32 applicants in a whirlwind selection process — the program first convened in early February after crafting the experience over Independent Activities Period — the students arrived with detailed research proposals and personal goals.

      Aurora, a first-year majoring in mechanical engineering and artificial intelligence, became fixed on fusion while still in high school. Today he is investigating methods for increasing the availability, known as capacity factor, of fusion reactors. “This is key to the commercialization of fusion energy,” he says.

      Packman, a first-year planning on a math and physics double major, is developing approaches to help simplify the computations involved in designing the complex geometries of solenoid induction heaters in fusion reactors. “This project is more immersive than my last UROP, and requires more time, but I know what I’m doing here and how this fits into the broader goals of fusion science,” he says. “It’s cool that our project is going to lead to a tool that will actually be used.”

      To accommodate the demands of their research projects, Shulman and Short discouraged students from taking on large academic loads.

      Kortman, a junior majoring in materials science and engineering with a concentration in mechanical engineering, was eager to make room in her schedule for her project, which concerns the effects of radiation damage on superconducting magnets. A shorter research experience with the PSFC during the pandemic fired her determination to delve deeper and invest more time in fusion.

      “It is very appealing and motivating to join people who have been working on this problem for decades, just as breakthroughs are coming through,” she says. “What I’m doing feels like it might be directly applicable to the development of an actual fusion reactor.”

      Camaraderie and support

      In the FUSar program, students aim to seize a sizeable stake in a multipronged research enterprise. “Here, if you have any hypotheses, you really get to pursue those because at the end of the day, the paper you write is yours,” says Aurora. “You can take ownership of what sort of discovery you’re making.”

      Enabling students to make the most of their research experiences requires abundant support — and not just for the students. “We have a whole separate set of programming on mentoring the mentors, where we go over topics with postdocs like how to teach someone to write a research paper, rather than write it for them, and how to help a student through difficulties,” Shulman says.

      The weekly student seminar, taught primarily by Short and Shulman, covers pragmatic matters essential to becoming a successful researcher — topics not always addressed directly or in the kind of detail that makes a difference. Topics include how to collaborate with lab mates, deal with a supervisor, find material in the MIT libraries, produce effective and persuasive research abstracts, and take time for self-care.

      Kortman believes camaraderie will help the cohort through an intense year. “This is a tight-knit community that will be great for keeping us all motivated when we run into research issues,” she says. “Meeting weekly to see what other students are able to accomplish will encourage me in my own project.”

      The seminar offerings have already attracted five additional participants outside the FUSars cohort. Adria Peterkin, a second-year graduate student in nuclear science and engineering, is sitting in to solidify her skills in scientific writing.

      “I wanted a structured class to help me get good at abstracts and communicating with different audiences,” says Peterkin, who is investigating radiation’s impact on the molten salt used in fusion and advanced nuclear reactors. “There’s a lot of assumed knowledge coming in as a PhD student, and a program like FUSars is really useful to help level out that playing field, regardless of your background.”

      Fusion research for all

      Short would like FUSars to cast a wide net, capturing the interest of MIT undergraduates no matter their backgrounds or financial means. One way he hopes to achieve this end is with the support of private donors, who make possible premium stipends for fusion scholars.

      “Many of our students are economically disadvantaged, on financial aid or supporting family back home, and need work that pays more than $15 an hour,” he says. This generous stipend may be critical, he says, to “flipping students from something else to fusion.”

      Although this first FUSars class is composed of science and engineering students, Short envisions a cohort eventually drawn from the broad spectrum of MIT disciplines. “Fusion is not a nuclear-focused discipline anymore — it’s no longer just plasma physics and radiation,” he says. “We’re trying to make a power plant now, and it’s an all hands-on-deck kind of thing, involving policy and economics and other subjects.”

      Although many are just getting started on their academic journeys, FUSar students believe this year will give them a strong push toward potential energy careers. “Fusion is the future of the energy transition and how we’re going to defeat climate change,” says Aurora. “I joined the program for a deep dive into the field, to help me decide whether I should invest the rest of my life to it.” More

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      Embracing the future we need

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

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

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

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

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

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

      Successful operations

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

      Culture shift

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

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

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

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

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

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

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      MIT engineers create an energy-storing supercapacitor from ancient materials

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      Two of humanity’s most ubiquitous historical materials, cement and carbon black (which resembles very fine charcoal), may form the basis for a novel, low-cost energy storage system, according to a new study. The technology could facilitate the use of renewable energy sources such as solar, wind, and tidal power by allowing energy networks to remain stable despite fluctuations in renewable energy supply.

      The two materials, the researchers found, can be combined with water to make a supercapacitor — an alternative to batteries — that could provide storage of electrical energy. As an example, the MIT researchers who developed the system say that their supercapacitor could eventually be incorporated into the concrete foundation of a house, where it could store a full day’s worth of energy while adding little (or no) to the cost of the foundation and still providing the needed structural strength. The researchers also envision a concrete roadway that could provide contactless recharging for electric cars as they travel over that road.

      The simple but innovative technology is described this week in the journal PNAS, in a paper by MIT professors Franz-Josef Ulm, Admir Masic, and Yang-Shao Horn, and four others at MIT and at the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering.

      Capacitors are in principle very simple devices, consisting of two electrically conductive plates immersed in an electrolyte and separated by a membrane. When a voltage is applied across the capacitor, positively charged ions from the electrolyte accumulate on the negatively charged plate, while the positively charged plate accumulates negatively charged ions. Since the membrane in between the plates blocks charged ions from migrating across, this separation of charges creates an electric field between the plates, and the capacitor becomes charged. The two plates can maintain this pair of charges for a long time and then deliver them very quickly when needed. Supercapacitors are simply capacitors that can store exceptionally large charges.

      The amount of power a capacitor can store depends on the total surface area of its conductive plates. The key to the new supercapacitors developed by this team comes from a method of producing a cement-based material with an extremely high internal surface area due to a dense, interconnected network of conductive material within its bulk volume. The researchers achieved this by introducing carbon black — which is highly conductive — into a concrete mixture along with cement powder and water, and letting it cure. The water naturally forms a branching network of openings within the structure as it reacts with cement, and the carbon migrates into these spaces to make wire-like structures within the hardened cement. These structures have a fractal-like structure, with larger branches sprouting smaller branches, and those sprouting even smaller branchlets, and so on, ending up with an extremely large surface area within the confines of a relatively small volume. The material is then soaked in a standard electrolyte material, such as potassium chloride, a kind of salt, which provides the charged particles that accumulate on the carbon structures. Two electrodes made of this material, separated by a thin space or an insulating layer, form a very powerful supercapacitor, the researchers found.

      The two plates of the capacitor function just like the two poles of a rechargeable battery of equivalent voltage: When connected to a source of electricity, as with a battery, energy gets stored in the plates, and then when connected to a load, the electrical current flows back out to provide power.

      “The material is fascinating,” Masic says, “because you have the most-used manmade material in the world, cement, that is combined with carbon black, that is a well-known historical material — the Dead Sea Scrolls were written with it. You have these at least two-millennia-old materials that when you combine them in a specific manner you come up with a conductive nanocomposite, and that’s when things get really interesting.”

      As the mixture sets and cures, he says, “The water is systematically consumed through cement hydration reactions, and this hydration fundamentally affects nanoparticles of carbon because they are hydrophobic (water repelling).” As the mixture evolves, “the carbon black is self-assembling into a connected conductive wire,” he says. The process is easily reproducible, with materials that are inexpensive and readily available anywhere in the world. And the amount of carbon needed is very small — as little as 3 percent by volume of the mix — to achieve a percolated carbon network, Masic says.

      Supercapacitors made of this material have great potential to aid in the world’s transition to renewable energy, Ulm says. The principal sources of emissions-free energy, wind, solar, and tidal power, all produce their output at variable times that often do not correspond to the peaks in electricity usage, so ways of storing that power are essential. “There is a huge need for big energy storage,” he says, and existing batteries are too expensive and mostly rely on materials such as lithium, whose supply is limited, so cheaper alternatives are badly needed. “That’s where our technology is extremely promising, because cement is ubiquitous,” Ulm says.

      The team calculated that a block of nanocarbon-black-doped concrete that is 45 cubic meters (or yards) in size — equivalent to a cube about 3.5 meters across — would have enough capacity to store about 10 kilowatt-hours of energy, which is considered the average daily electricity usage for a household. Since the concrete would retain its strength, a house with a foundation made of this material could store a day’s worth of energy produced by solar panels or windmills and allow it to be used whenever it’s needed. And, supercapacitors can be charged and discharged much more rapidly than batteries.

      After a series of tests used to determine the most effective ratios of cement, carbon black, and water, the team demonstrated the process by making small supercapacitors, about the size of some button-cell batteries, about 1 centimeter across and 1 millimeter thick, that could each be charged to 1 volt, comparable to a 1-volt battery. They then connected three of these to demonstrate their ability to light up a 3-volt light-emitting diode (LED). Having proved the principle, they now plan to build a series of larger versions, starting with ones about the size of a typical 12-volt car battery, then working up to a 45-cubic-meter version to demonstrate its ability to store a house-worth of power.

      There is a tradeoff between the storage capacity of the material and its structural strength, they found. By adding more carbon black, the resulting supercapacitor can store more energy, but the concrete is slightly weaker, and this could be useful for applications where the concrete is not playing a structural role or where the full strength-potential of concrete is not required. For applications such as a foundation, or structural elements of the base of a wind turbine, the “sweet spot” is around 10 percent carbon black in the mix, they found.

      Another potential application for carbon-cement supercapacitors is for building concrete roadways that could store energy produced by solar panels alongside the road and then deliver that energy to electric vehicles traveling along the road using the same kind of technology used for wirelessly rechargeable phones. A related type of car-recharging system is already being developed by companies in Germany and the Netherlands, but using standard batteries for storage.

      Initial uses of the technology might be for isolated homes or buildings or shelters far from grid power, which could be powered by solar panels attached to the cement supercapacitors, the researchers say.

      Ulm says that the system is very scalable, as the energy-storage capacity is a direct function of the volume of the electrodes. “You can go from 1-millimeter-thick electrodes to 1-meter-thick electrodes, and by doing so basically you can scale the energy storage capacity from lighting an LED for a few seconds, to powering a whole house,” he says.

      Depending on the properties desired for a given application, the system could be tuned by adjusting the mixture. For a vehicle-charging road, very fast charging and discharging rates would be needed, while for powering a home “you have the whole day to charge it up,” so slower-charging material could be used, Ulm says.

      “So, it’s really a multifunctional material,” he adds. Besides its ability to store energy in the form of supercapacitors, the same kind of concrete mixture can be used as a heating system, by simply applying electricity to the carbon-laced concrete.

      Ulm sees this as “a new way of looking toward the future of concrete as part of the energy transition.”

      The research team also included postdocs Nicolas Chanut and Damian Stefaniuk at MIT’s Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, James Weaver at the Wyss Institute, and Yunguang Zhu in MIT’s Department of Mechanical Engineering. The work was supported by the MIT Concrete Sustainability Hub, with sponsorship by the Concrete Advancement Foundation. More

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      3 Questions: What’s it like winning the MIT $100K Entrepreneurship Competition?

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      Solar power plays a major role in nearly every roadmap for global decarbonization. But solar panels are large, heavy, and expensive, which limits their deployment. But what if solar panels looked more like a yoga mat?

      Such a technology could be transported in a roll, carried to the top of a building, and rolled out across the roof in a matter of minutes, slashing installation costs and dramatically expanding the places where rooftop solar makes sense.

      That was the vision laid out by the MIT spinout Active Surfaces as part of the winning pitch at this year’s MIT $100K Entrepreneurship Competition, which took place May 15. The company is leveraging materials science and manufacturing innovations from labs across MIT to make ultra-thin, lightweight, and durable solar a reality.

      The $100K is one of MIT’s most visible entrepreneurship competitions, and past winners say the prize money is only part of the benefit that winning brings to a burgeoning new company. MIT News sat down with Active Surface founders Shiv Bhakta, a graduate student in MIT’s Leaders for Global Operations dual-degree program within the MIT Sloan School of Management and Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, and Richard Swartwout SM ’18 PhD ’21, an electrical engineering and computer science graduate and former Research Laboratory of Electronics postdoc and MIT.nano innovation fellow, to learn what the last couple of months have been like since they won.

      Q: What is Active Surfaces’ solution, and what is its potential?

      Bhakta: We’re commercializing an ultrathin film, flexible solar technology. Solar is one of the most broadly distributed resources in the world, but access is limited today. It’s heavy — it weighs 50 to 60 pounds a panel — it requires large teams to move around, and the form factor can only be deployed in specific environments.

      Our approach is to develop a solar technology for the built environment. In a nutshell, we can create flexible solar panels that are as thin as paper, just as efficient as traditional panels, and at unprecedented cost floors, all while being applied to any surface. Same area, same power. That’s our motto.

      When I came to MIT, my north star was to dive deeper in my climate journey and help make the world a better, greener place. Now, as we build Active Surfaces, I’m excited to see that dream taking shape. The prospect of transforming any surface into an energy source, thereby expanding solar accessibility globally, holds the promise of significantly reducing CO2 emissions at a gigaton scale. That’s what gets me out of bed in the morning.

      Swartwout: Solar and a lot of other renewables tend to be pretty land-inefficient. Solar 1.0 is using low hanging fruit: cheap land next to easy interconnects and new buildings designed to handle the weight of current panels. But as we ramp up solar, those things will run out. We need to utilize spaces and assets better. That’s what I think solar 2.0 will be: urban PV deployments, solar that’s closer to demand, and integrated into the built environment. These next-generation use cases aren’t just a racking system in the middle of nowhere.

      We’re going after commercial roofs, which would cover most [building] energy demand. Something like 80-90 percent of building electricity demands in the space can be met by rooftop solar.

      The goal is to do the manufacturing in-house. We use roll-to-roll manufacturing, so we can buy tons of equipment off the shelf, but most roll-to-roll manufacturing is made for things like labeling and tape, and not a semiconductor, so our plan is to be the core of semiconductor roll-to-roll manufacturing. There’s never been roll-to-roll semiconductor manufacturing before.

      Q: What have the last few months been like since you won the $100K competition?

      Bhakta: After winning the $100K, we’ve gotten a lot of inbound contact from MIT alumni. I think that’s my favorite part about the MIT community — people stay connected. They’ve been congratulating us, asking to chat, looking to partner, deploy, and invest.

      We’ve also gotten contacted by previous $100K competition winners and other startups that have spun out of MIT that are a year or two or three ahead of us in terms of development. There are a lot of startup scaling challenges that other startup founders are best equipped to answer, and it’s been huge to get guidance from them.

      We’ve also gotten into top accelerators like Cleantech Open, Venture For Climatetech, and ACCEL at Greentown Labs. We also onboarded two rockstar MIT Sloan interns for the summer. Now we’re getting to the product-development phase, building relationships with potential pilot partners, and scaling up the area of our technology.      

      Swartwout: Winning the $100K competition was a great point of validation for the company, because the judges themselves are well known in the venture capital community as well as people who have been in the startup ecosystem for a long time, so that has really propelled us forward. Ideally, we’ll be getting more MIT alumni to join us to fulfill this mission.

      Q: What are your plans for the next year or so?

      Swartwout: We’re planning on leveraging open-access facilities like those at MIT.nano and the University of Massachusetts Amherst. We’re pretty focused now on scaling size. Out of the lab, [the technology] is a 4-inch by 4-inch solar module, and the goal is to get up to something that’s relevant for the industry to offset electricity for building owners and generate electricity for the grid at a reasonable cost.

      Bhakta: In the next year, through those open-access facilities, the goal is to go from 100-millimeter width to 300-millimeter width and a very long length using a roll-to-roll manufacturing process. That means getting through the engineering challenges of scaling technology and fine tuning the performance.

      When we’re ready to deliver a pilotable product, it’s my job to have customers lined up ready to demonstrate this works on their buildings, sign longer term contracts to get early revenue, and have the support we need to demonstrate this at scale. That’s the goal. More

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      Panel addresses technologies needed for a net-zero future

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      Five speakers at a recent public panel discussion hosted by the MIT Energy Initiative (MITEI) and introduced by Deputy Director for Science and Technology Robert Stoner tackled one of the thorniest, yet most critical, questions facing the world today: How can we achieve the ambitious goals set by governments around the globe, including the United States, to reach net zero emissions of greenhouse gases by mid-century?

      While the challenges are great, the panelists agreed, there is reason for optimism that these technological challenges can be solved. More uncertain, some suggested, are the social, economic, and political hurdles to bringing about the needed innovations.

      The speakers addressed areas where new or improved technologies or systems are needed if these ambitious goals are to be achieved. Anne White, aassociate provost and associate vice president for research administration and a professor of nuclear science and engineering at MIT, moderated the panel discussion. She said that achieving the ambitious net-zero goal “has to be accomplished by filling some gaps, and going after some opportunities.” In addressing some of these needs, she said the five topics chosen for the panel discussion were “places where MIT has significant expertise, and progress is already ongoing.”

      First of these was the heating and cooling of buildings. Christoph Reinhart, a professor of architecture and director of the Building Technology Program, said that currently about 1 percent of existing buildings are being retrofitted each year for energy efficiency and conversion from fossil-fuel heating systems to efficient electric ones — but that is not nearly enough to meet the 2050 net-zero target. “It’s an enormous task,” he said. To meet the goals, he said, would require increasing the retrofitting rate to 5 percent per year, and to require all new construction to be carbon neutral as well.

      Reinhart then showed a series of examples of how such conversions could take place using existing solar and heat pump technology, and depending on the configuration, how they could provide a payback to the homeowner within 10 years or less. However, without strong policy incentives the initial cost outlay for such a system, on the order of $50,000, is likely to put conversions out of reach of many people. Still, a recent survey found that 30 percent of homeowners polled said they would accept installation at current costs. While there is government money available for incentives for others, “we have to be very clever on how we spend all this money … and make sure that everybody is basically benefiting.”

      William Green, a professor of chemical engineering, spoke about the daunting challenge of bringing aviation to net zero. “More and more people like to travel,” he said, but that travel comes with carbon emissions that affect the climate, as well as air pollution that affects human health. The economic costs associated with these emissions, he said, are estimated at $860 per ton of jet fuel used — which is very close to the cost of the fuel itself. So the price paid by the airlines, and ultimately by the passengers, “is only about half of the true cost to society, and the other half is being borne by all of us, by the fact that it’s affecting the climate and it’s causing medical problems for people.”

      Eliminating those emissions is a major challenge, he said. Virtually all jet fuel today is fossil fuel, but airlines are starting to incorporate some biomass-based fuel, derived mostly from food waste. But even these fuels are not carbon-neutral, he said. “They actually have pretty significant carbon intensity.”

      But there are possible alternatives, he said, mostly based on using hydrogen produced by clean electricity, and making fuels out of that hydrogen by reacting it, for example, with carbon dioxide. This could indeed produce a carbon-neutral fuel that existing aircraft could use, but the process is costly, requiring a great deal of hydrogen, and ways of concentrating carbon dioxide. Other viable options also exist, but all would add significant expense, at least with present technology. “It’s going to cost a lot more for the passengers on the plane,” Green said, “But the society will benefit from that.”

      Increased electrification of heating and transportation in order to avoid the use of fossil fuels will place major demands on the existing electric grid systems, which have to perform a constant delicate balancing of production with demand. Anuradha Annaswamy, a senior research scientist in MIT’s mechanical engineering department, said “the electric grid is an engineering marvel.” In the United States it consists of 300,000 miles of transmission lines capable of carrying 470,000 megawatts of power.

      But with a projected doubling of energy from renewable sources entering the grid by 2030, and with a push to electrify everything possible — from transportation to buildings to industry — the load is not only increasing, but the patterns of both energy use and production are changing. Annaswamy said that “with all these new assets and decision-makers entering the picture, the question is how you can use a more sophisticated information layer that coordinates how all these assets are either consuming or producing or storing energy, and have that information layer coexist with the physical layer to make and deliver electricity in all these ways. It’s really not a simple problem.”

      But there are ways of addressing these complexities. “Certainly, emerging technologies in power electronics and control and communication can be leveraged,” she said. But she added that “This is not just a technology problem, really, it is something that requires technologists, economists, and policymakers to all come together.”

      As for industrial processes, Bilge Yildiz, a professor of nuclear science and engineering and materials science and engineering, said that “the synthesis of industrial chemicals and materials constitutes about 33 percent of global CO2 emissions at present, and so our goal is to decarbonize this difficult sector.” About half of all these industrial emissions come from the production of just four materials: steel, cement, ammonia, and ethylene, so there is a major focus of research on ways to reduce their emissions.

      Most of the processes to make these materials have changed little for more than a century, she said, and they are mostly heat-based processes that involve burning a lot of fossil fuel. But the heat can instead be provided from renewable electricity, which can also be used to drive electrochemical reactions in some cases as a substitute for the thermal reactions. Already, there are processes for making cement and steel that produce only about half the present carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions.

      The production of ammonia, which is widely used in fertilizer and other bulk chemicals, accounts for more greenhouse gas emissions than any other industrial source. The present thermochemical process could be replaced by an electrochemical process, she said. Similarly, the production of ethylene, as a feedstock for plastics and other materials, is the second-highest emissions producer, with three tons of carbon dioxide released for every ton of ethylene produced. Again, an electrochemical alternative method exists, but needs to be improved to be cost competitive.

      As the world moves toward electrification of industrial processes to eliminate fossil fuels, the need for emissions-free sources of electricity will continue to increase. One very promising potential addition to the range of carbon-free generation sources is fusion, a field in which MIT is a leader in developing a particularly promising technology that takes advantage of the unique properties of high-temperature superconducting (HTS) materials.

      Dennis Whyte, the director of MIT’s Plasma Science and Fusion Center, pointed out that despite global efforts to reduce CO2 emissions, “we use exactly the same percentage of carbon-based products to generate energy as 10 years ago, or 20 years ago.” To make a real difference in global emissions, “we need to make really massive amounts of carbon-free energy.”

      Fusion, the process that powers the sun, is a particularly promising pathway, because the fuel, derived from water, is virtually inexhaustible. By using recently developed HTS material to generate the powerful magnetic fields needed to produce a sustained fusion reaction, the MIT-led project, which led to a spinoff company called Commonwealth Fusion Systems, was able to radically reduce the required size of a fusion reactor, Whyte explained. Using this approach, the company, in collaboration with MIT, expects to have a fusion system that produces net energy by the middle of this decade, and be ready to build a commercial plant to produce power for the grid early in the next. Meanwhile, at least 25 other private companies are also attempting to commercialize fusion technology. “I think we can take some credit for helping to spawn what is essentially now a new industry in the United States,” Whyte said.

      Fusion offers the potential, along with existing solar and wind technologies, to provide the emissions-free power the world needs, Whyte says, but that’s only half the problem, the other part being how to get that power to where it’s needed, when it’s needed. “How do we adapt these new energy sources to be as compatible as possible with everything that we have already in terms of energy delivery?”

      Part of the way to find answers to that, he suggested, is more collaborative work on these issues that cut across disciplines, as well as more of the kinds of cross-cutting conversations and interactions that took place in this panel discussion. More

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      A new mathematical “blueprint” is accelerating fusion device development

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      Developing commercial fusion energy requires scientists to understand sustained processes that have never before existed on Earth. But with so many unknowns, how do we make sure we’re designing a device that can successfully harness fusion power?

      We can fill gaps in our understanding using computational tools like algorithms and data simulations to knit together experimental data and theory, which allows us to optimize fusion device designs before they’re built, saving much time and resources.

      Currently, classical supercomputers are used to run simulations of plasma physics and fusion energy scenarios, but to address the many design and operating challenges that still remain, more powerful computers are a necessity, and of great interest to plasma researchers and physicists.

      Quantum computers’ exponentially faster computing speeds have offered plasma and fusion scientists the tantalizing possibility of vastly accelerated fusion device development. Quantum computers could reconcile a fusion device’s many design parameters — for example, vessel shape, magnet spacing, and component placement — at a greater level of detail, while also completing the tasks faster. However, upgrading to a quantum computer is no simple task.

      In a paper, “Dyson maps and unitary evolution for Maxwell equations in tensor dielectric media,” recently published in Physics Review A, Abhay K. Ram, a research scientist at the MIT Plasma Science and Fusion Center (PSFC), and his co-authors Efstratios Koukoutsis, Kyriakos Hizanidis, and George Vahala present a framework that would facilitate the use of quantum computers to study electromagnetic waves in plasma and its manipulation in magnetic confinement fusion devices.

      Quantum computers excel at simulating quantum physics phenomena, but many topics in plasma physics are predicated on the classical physics model. A plasma (which is the “dielectric media” referenced in the paper’s title) consists of many particles — electrons and ions — the collective behaviors of which are effectively described using classic statistical physics. In contrast, quantum effects that influence atomic and subatomic scales are averaged out in classical plasma physics.  

      Furthermore, the descriptive limitations of quantum mechanics aren’t suited to plasma. In a fusion device, plasmas are heated and manipulated using electromagnetic waves, which are one of the most important and ubiquitous occurrences in the universe. The behaviors of electromagnetic waves, including how waves are formed and interact with their surroundings, are described by Maxwell’s equations — a foundational component of classical plasma physics, and of general physics as well. The standard form of Maxwell’s equations is not expressed in “quantum terms,” however, so implementing the equations on a quantum computer is like fitting a square peg in a round hole: it doesn’t work.

      Consequently, for plasma physicists to take advantage of quantum computing’s power for solving problems, classical physics must be translated into the language of quantum mechanics. The researchers tackled this translational challenge, and in their paper, they reveal that a Dyson map can bridge the translational divide between classical physics and quantum mechanics. Maps are mathematical functions that demonstrate how to take an input from one kind of space and transform it to an output that is meaningful in a different kind of space. In the case of Maxwell’s equations, a Dyson map allows classical electromagnetic waves to be studied in the space utilized by quantum computers. In essence, it reconfigures the square peg so it will fit into the round hole without compromising any physics.

      The work also gives a blueprint of a quantum circuit encoded with equations expressed in quantum bits (“qubits”) rather than classical bits so the equations may be used on quantum computers. Most importantly, these blueprints can be coded and tested on classical computers.

      “For years we have been studying wave phenomena in plasma physics and fusion energy science using classical techniques. Quantum computing and quantum information science is challenging us to step out of our comfort zone, thereby ensuring that I have not ‘become comfortably numb,’” says Ram, quoting a Pink Floyd song.

      The paper’s Dyson map and circuits have put quantum computing power within reach, fast-tracking an improved understanding of plasmas and electromagnetic waves, and putting us that much closer to the ideal fusion device design.    More

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      Powering the future in Mongolia

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      Nestled within the Tuul River valley and embraced by the southern Khentii Mountain Range, Ulaanbaatar (UB), Mongolia’s largest city, presents itself as an arena where nature’s forces wage an unrelenting battle against human resilience. The capital city is an icy crucible, with bone-chilling winters that plummet temperatures to an astonishing -40 degrees Fahrenheit (-40 degrees Celsius). Mongolia, often hailed with the celestial moniker of “The Land of the Eternal Blue Sky,” paradoxically succumbs to a veil of pollution and energy struggles during the winter months, obscuring the true shade of the cherished vista.

      To understand the root of these issues, MIT students from classes 22.S094 (Climate and Sustainability Systems: Decarbonizing Ulaanbaatar at Scale) and 21A.S01 (Anthro-Engineering: Decarbonization at the Million-Person Scale) visited Mongolia to conduct on-site surveys, diving into the diverse tapestry of local life as they gleaned insight from various stakeholder groups. Setting foot on Mongolian soil on a crisp day in January, they wasted no time in shaking off the weariness of their arduous 17-hour flight, promptly embarking on a waiting bus. As they traversed the vast expanse of the countryside, their eyes were captivated by snow-laden terrain.

      That is, until a disconcerting sight unfolded — thick smog, akin to ethereal pillars, permeated the cityscape ahead. These imposing plumes emanated from the colossal smokestacks of Ulaanbaatar’s coal-fired power plants, steadfastly churning electricity and heat to fuel Mongolia’s central and district energy systems. Over 93 percent of the nation’s energy comes from coal-fired power plants, where the most considerable load is caused by household consumption. Nevertheless, with nearly half of Ulaanbaatar’s population disconnected from the central heating networks, one of Mongolia’s most significant sources of pollution comes from coal-burning stoves in the residential settlements known as the ger districts. Over the past three decades, since the democratic revolution in 1990, Mongolians have grappled with escalating concerns surrounding energy provision, accessibility, and sustainability.

      Engineers who think like anthropologists

      “We find ourselves compelled to venture on-site, engaging in direct conversations with the locals, and immersing ourselves in the fabric of daily life to uncover what we don’t know,” emphasized Michael Short, professor in MIT’s Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering and faculty lead of MIT’s NEET Climate and Sustainability Systems thread, shortly before heading to Mongolia.

      The Ulaanbaatar Project sprang from a multiyear collaboration between MIT and the National University of Mongolia (NUM). Shedding light on the matter, Professor Munkhbat Byambajav of the Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering at NUM underscored the paramount importance of mitigating environmental pollution at an economic scale to alleviate the heavy burden borne by the people.

      Class 22.S094 is offered through MIT’s New Engineering Education Transformation (NEET) program, which allows students with multidisciplinary interests to collaborate across departments within four different subject areas, or threads. In this capstone project, students consider ways to decarbonize a city like Ulaanbaatar, transitioning from burning coal briquettes to a more sustainable, energy-efficient solution, given several parameters and constraints set by the local context.

      One of the ideas students have recently explored is a thermal battery made with molten salt that can store enough energy to heat a ger for up to 12 hours with added insulation for cooling curve regulation. The Mongolian ger, meaning home, is a dome-like portable dwelling covered in felt and canvas, held together by ropes traditionally crafted of animal hair or wool. Over several semesters, students have been testing a version of their proposed idea on campus, working with a prototype that weighs around 35 pounds.

      Nathan Melenbrink, the lead instructor of NEET’s Climate and Sustainability Systems (CSS) thread, believes that the complexity of the Ulaanbaatar capstone project allows students to reject the one-way solution approach and instead consider challenges with a nonprescriptive mindset. The uniqueness of the CSS thread is that students are asked to build on the previous findings from the past cohort and iterate on their designs each year. This workflow has allowed the project to mature and advance in ways that may not be feasible within a semester schedule. When asked how the recent trip impacted the ongoing research back on campus, Melenbrink states, “In light of the recent trip to Mongolia, students are beginning to see the impact of cultural immersion and social awareness leveraging the technical scope and rigor of their work.”

      Course 21A.S01, taught by Professor Manduhai Buyandelger of the MIT Anthropology Section, proved instrumental in deepening students’ understanding of the intricate dynamics at play. She asks, “The prototype works in the lab, but does it work in real life once you factor in the challenges in the larger structures of delivery, production, and implementation in Mongolia?”

      This recognition of the social dimensions of engineering permeated the early stages of the UB project, engaging all participants, including students from MIT and NUM, professionals residing in Mongolia, and local nongovernmental organizations, fostering what Buyandelger aptly describes as “a collaboration on multiple scales: trans-disciplinary and transcontinental.” Lauren Bonilla, co-lecturer for the anthropology course, was crucial in devising the first onsite trip to Mongolia. Drawing upon her extensive ethnographic research in Mongolia that spans decades, Bonilla remarks, “To me, engineering is a highly social discipline.” She further stresses how anthro-engineering elevates the social dimensions of engineering by critically questioning the framing of problems and solutions, stating, “It draws on anthropological insights and methods, like ethnography, to bring a human face to the users of a technology and adds complexity and nuance to the social constraints that limit designs.”

      Making of khorkhog

      Amidst the frigid atmosphere, a traditional Mongolian ger stands in front of the Nuclear Science Laboratory at the National University of Mongolia, emitting warm steam from its roof. The faculty and students of NUM organize a welcoming event inside the ger, inviting everyone to partake in a khorkhog cookout. Earlier that week, a remark from the Mongolian energy representative stood out during one of the presentations: “We need powerful heat. Solar is not enough, and electricity is not enough. Mongolians need fire,” he had emphasized.

      Indeed, the culinary delight known as khorkhog demands the relentless embrace of scorching flames. The process involves a large metal jug, stones, fire, and lamb. With skillful precision, the volunteer chef places the fire-heated stones and large pieces of lamb into the cooking container, triggering a cascade of steam that fills the ger, accompanied by the sounds of sizzling and hissing. Everyone waits patiently as the cook carefully inspects the dish, keenly listening for signs of readiness. And when the time comes, a feast is shared among all, complemented by steam-cooked potatoes, freshly sliced onions, and vegetables. In this moment, the presence of fire symbolizes a profound connection with the heart of Mongolian culture, evoking a deep resonance among the gathered crowd as they partake in this cherished staple meal.

      The distance between two points

      Familiar faces form a grid on the computer screen as the standing meeting between the students in Massachusetts and Ulaanbaatar begins. Sharing the morning (evening in Mongolia) for updates has been a critical effort by both sides to stay engaged and make decisions together. NEET CSS students in Cambridge proceeded to share their latest findings.

      Lucy Nester, a nuclear science and engineering major, has been diligently working on developing a high-efficiency electrical heating solution for individual consumers. Her primary focus is leveraging the discounted electricity rates available in the ger districts and utilize existing infrastructure. Recognizing the importance of maximum flexibility in heating the brick, Nester emphasizes the “no one-size-fits-all” solution. She shares the results of her test trials, which involve both inductive and resistive heating methods, outlining the advantages and disadvantages of each approach. Despite her limited experience in electrical engineering and circuit building, Nester has impressively overcome the steep learning curve. She enthusiastically describes her UB trip as “one of the most remarkable experiences I’ve had during my time at MIT.”

      Darshdeep Grewal, a dedicated materials science and engineering major with a strong passion for data science and computation, has been diligently conducting research on convection heating using COMSOL Multiphysics. In his investigation, Grewal explores the correlation between air temperature and heating, investigates the impact of convecting air arrangement on the heating process, and examines the conditions that may contribute to overheating. Leveraging his expertise in computational workflows, Grewal presents an impressive collection of heatmap simulations derived from the extensive data accumulated by his team throughout the project. Recognizing the immense value of these simulations in modeling complex scenarios, he highlights the importance of running experiments concurrently with simulations to ensure accurate calibration of results, stating, “It’s important to stay rooted in reality.”

      Arina Khotimsky, another materials science and engineering major, has actively engaged in NEET’s Climate and Sustainability Systems thread since her sophomore year. Balancing the demands of her final semester at MIT and the upcoming review of 22.S094, Khotimsky reveals how she has seamlessly integrated her project involvement into her energy studies minor. Reflecting on her journey, she remarks, “Working on the Ulaanbaatar project has taught me the significance of taking local context into account while suggesting solutions as an engineer.” Khotimsky has been tirelessly iterating and refining the insulation box prototype, which holds the thermal battery and controls the rate at which the battery releases heat. In addition, the on-site observations have unveiled another design challenge — ensuring the insulation box functions as a secure and dependable means of transportation. 

      To “engineer” means to contrive through one’s deliberate use of skills. What confronted the UB Project team on site was not the limitations of skill or technology, but the real-world constraints often amiss in the early equation: the people and their everyday lives. With over 6,195 miles of distance between the two groups, it takes more than just dedication to make a collaboration blossom. That may be the desire for a positive impact. Moreover, it may be the goal of cultivating a healthier relationship with energy that spans a million-person scale. No matter where you are, there is no one solution to the complex story of energy. This progressive realization brings the two teams together every two weeks in virtual space, bridging the distance between the two points.  More