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    Recovering from the past and transitioning to a better energy future

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    As the frequency and severity of extreme weather events grow, it may become increasingly necessary to employ a bolder approach to climate change, warned Emily A. Carter, the Gerhard R. Andlinger Professor in Energy and the Environment at Princeton University. Carter made her case for why the energy transition is no longer enough in the face of climate change while speaking at the MIT Energy Initiative (MITEI) Presents: Advancing the Energy Transition seminar on the MIT campus.“If all we do is take care of what we did in the past — but we don’t change what we do in the future — then we’re still going to be left with very serious problems,” she said. Our approach to climate change mitigation must comprise transformation, intervention, and adaption strategies, said Carter. Transitioning to a decarbonized electricity system is one piece of the puzzle. Growing amounts of solar and wind energy — along with nuclear, hydropower, and geothermal — are slowly transforming the energy electricity landscape, but Carter noted that there are new technologies farther down the pipeline.  “Advanced geothermal may come on in the next couple of decades. Fusion will only really start to play a role later in the century, but could provide firm electricity such that we can start to decommission nuclear,” said Carter, who is also a senior strategic advisor and associate laboratory director at the Department of Energy’s Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory. Taking this a step further, Carter outlined how this carbon-free electricity should then be used to electrify everything we can. She highlighted the industrial sector as a critical area for transformation: “The energy transition is about transitioning off of fossil fuels. If you look at the manufacturing industries, they are driven by fossil fuels right now. They are driven by fossil fuel-driven thermal processes.” Carter noted that thermal energy is much less efficient than electricity and highlighted electricity-driven strategies that could replace heat in manufacturing, such as electrolysis, plasmas, light-emitting diodes (LEDs) for photocatalysis, and joule heating. The transportation sector is also a key area for electrification, Carter said. While electric vehicles have become increasingly common in recent years, heavy-duty transportation is not as easily electrified. The solution? “Carbon-neutral fuels for heavy-duty aviation and shipping,” she said, emphasizing that these fuels will need to become part of the circular economy. “We know that when we burn those fuels, they’re going to produce CO2 [carbon dioxide] again. They need to come from a source of CO2 that is not fossil-based.” The next step is intervention in the form of carbon dioxide removal, which then necessitates methods of storage and utilization, according to Carter. “There’s a lot of talk about building large numbers of pipelines to capture the CO2 — from fossil fuel-driven power plants, cement plants, steel plants, all sorts of industrial places that emit CO2 — and then piping it and storing it in underground aquifers,” she explained. Offshore pipelines are much more expensive than those on land, but can mitigate public concerns over their safety. Europe is exclusively focusing their efforts offshore for this very reason, and the same could be true for the United States, Carter said.  Once carbon dioxide is captured, commercial utilization may provide economic leverage to accelerate sequestration, even if only a few gigatons are used per year, Carter noted. Through mineralization, CO2 can be converted into carbonates, which could be used in building materials such as concrete and road-paving materials.  There is another form of intervention that Carter currently views as a last resort: solar geoengineering, sometimes known as solar radiation management or SRM. In 1991, Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines erupted and released sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere, which caused a temporary cooling of the Earth by approximately 0.5 degree Celsius for over a year. SRM seeks to recreate that cooling effect by injecting particles into the atmosphere that reflect sunlight. According to Carter, there are three main strategies: stratospheric aerosol injection, cirrus cloud thinning (thinning clouds to let more infrared radiation emitted by the earth escape to space), and marine cloud brightening (brightening clouds with sea salt so they reflect more light).  “My view is, I hope we don’t ever have to do it, but I sure think we should understand what would happen in case somebody else just decides to do it. It’s a global security issue,” said Carter. “In principle, it’s not so difficult technologically, so we’d like to really understand and to be able to predict what would happen if that happened.” With any technology, stakeholder and community engagement is essential for deployment, Carter said. She emphasized the importance of both respectfully listening to concerns and thoroughly addressing them, stating, “Hopefully, there’s enough information given to assuage their fears. We have to gain the trust of people before any deployment can be considered.” A crucial component of this trust starts with the responsibility of the scientific community to be transparent and critique each other’s work, Carter said. “Skepticism is good. You should have to prove your proof of principle.” MITEI Presents: Advancing the Energy Transition is an MIT Energy Initiative speaker series highlighting energy experts and leaders at the forefront of the scientific, technological, and policy solutions needed to transform our energy systems. The series will continue in fall 2025. For more information on this and additional events, visit the MITEI website. More

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      “Each of us holds a piece of the solution”

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      MIT has an unparalleled history of bringing together interdisciplinary teams to solve pressing problems — think of the development of radar during World War II, or leading the international coalition that cracked the code of the human genome — but the challenge of climate change could demand a scale of collaboration unlike any that’s come before at MIT.“Solving climate change is not just about new technologies or better models. It’s about forging new partnerships across campus and beyond — between scientists and economists, between architects and data scientists, between policymakers and physicists, between anthropologists and engineers, and more,” MIT Vice President for Energy and Climate Evelyn Wang told an energetic crowd of faculty, students, and staff on May 6. “Each of us holds a piece of the solution — but only together can we see the whole.”Undeterred by heavy rain, approximately 300 campus community members filled the atrium in the Tina and Hamid Moghadam Building (Building 55) for a spring gathering hosted by Wang and the Climate Project at MIT. The initiative seeks to direct the full strength of MIT to address climate change, which Wang described as one of the defining challenges of this moment in history — and one of its greatest opportunities.“It calls on us to rethink how we power our world, how we build, how we live — and how we work together,” Wang said. “And there is no better place than MIT to lead this kind of bold, integrated effort. Our culture of curiosity, rigor, and relentless experimentation makes us uniquely suited to cross boundaries — to break down silos and build something new.”The Climate Project is organized around six missions, thematic areas in which MIT aims to make significant impact, ranging from decarbonizing industry to new policy approaches to designing resilient cities. The faculty leaders of these missions posed challenges to the crowd before circulating among the crowd to share their perspectives and to discuss community questions and ideas.Wang and the Climate Project team were joined by a number of research groups, startups, and MIT offices conducting relevant work today on issues related to energy and climate. For example, the MIT Office of Sustainability showcased efforts to use the MIT campus as a living laboratory; MIT spinouts such as Forma Systems, which is developing high-performance, low-carbon building systems, and Addis Energy, which envisions using the earth as a reactor to produce clean ammonia, presented their technologies; and visitors learned about current projects in MIT labs, including DebunkBot, an artificial intelligence-powered chatbot that can persuade people to shift their attitudes about conspiracies, developed by David Rand, the Erwin H. Schell Professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management.Benedetto Marelli, an associate professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering who leads the Wild Cards Mission, said the energy and enthusiasm that filled the room was inspiring — but that the individual conversations were equally valuable.“I was especially pleased to see so many students come out. I also spoke with other faculty, talked to staff from across the Institute, and met representatives of external companies interested in collaborating with MIT,” Marelli said. “You could see connections being made all around the room, which is exactly what we need as we build momentum for the Climate Project.” More

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      Day of Climate inspires young learners to take action

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      “Close your eyes and imagine we are on the same team. Same arena. Same jersey. And the game is on the line,” Jaylen Brown, the 2024 NBA Finals MVP for the Boston Celtics, said to a packed room of about 200 people at the recent Day of Climate event at the MIT Museum.“Now think about this: We aren’t playing for ourselves; we are playing for the next generation,” Brown added, encouraging attendees to take climate action. The inaugural Day of Climate event brought together local learners, educators, community leaders, and the MIT community. Featuring project showcases, panels, and a speaker series, the event sparked hands-on learning and inspired climate action across all ages.The event marked the celebration of the first year of a larger initiative by the same name. Led by the pK-12 team at MIT Open Learning, Day of Climate has brought together learners and educators by offering free, hands-on curriculum lessons and activities designed to introduce learners to climate change, teach how it shapes their lives, and consider its effects on humanity. Cynthia Breazeal, dean of digital learning at MIT Open Learning, notes the breadth of engagement across MIT that made the event, and the larger initiative, possible with contributions from more than 10 different MIT departments, labs, centers, and initiatives. “MIT is passionate about K-12 education,” she says. “It was truly inspiring to witness how our entire community came together to demonstrate the power of collaboration and advocacy in driving meaningful change.”From education to action The event kicked off with a showcase, where the Day of Climate grantees and learners invited attendees to learn about their projects and meaningfully engage with lessons and activities. Aranya Karighattam, a local high school senior, adapted the curriculum Urban Heat Islands — developed by Lelia Hampton, a PhD student in electrical engineering and computer science at MIT, and Chris Rabe, program director at the MIT Environmental Solution Initiative — sharing how this phenomenon affects the Boston metropolitan area. 

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      Day of Climate inspires young learners to take actionVideo: MIT Open Learning

      Karighattam discussed what could be done to shield local communities from urban heat islands. They suggested doubling the tree cover in areas with the lowest quartile tree coverage as one mitigating strategy, but noted that even small steps, like building a garden and raising awareness for this issue, can help.Day of Climate echoed a consistent call to action, urging attendees to meaningfully engage in both education and action. Brown, who is an MIT Media Lab Director’s Fellow, spoke about how education and collective action will pave the way to tackle big societal challenges. “We need to invest in sustainability communities,” he said. “We need to invest in clean technology, and we need to invest in education that fosters environmental stewardship.”Part of MIT’s broader sustainability efforts, including The Climate Project, the event reflected a commitment to building a resilient and sustainable future for all. Influenced by the Climate Action Through Education (CATE), Day of Climate panelist Sophie Shen shared how climate education inspired her civic life. “Learning about climate change has inspired me to take action on a wider systemic level,” she said.Shen, a senior at Arlington High School and local elected official, emphasized how engagement and action looks different for everyone. “There are so many ways to get involved,” she said. “That could be starting a community garden — those can be great community hubs and learning spaces — or it could include advocating to your local or state governments.”Becoming a catalyst for change The larger Day of Climate initiative encourages young people to understand the interdisciplinary nature of climate change and consider how the changing climate impacts many aspects of life. With curriculum available for learners from ages 4 to 18, these free activities range from Climate Change Charades — where learners act out words like “deforestation” and “recycling” — to Climate Change Happens Below Water, where learners use sensors to analyze water quality data like pH and solubility.Many of the speakers at the event shared personal anecdotes from their childhood about how climate education, both in and out of the classroom, has changed the trajectory of their lives. Addaline Jorroff, deputy climate chief and director of mitigation and community resilience in the Office of Climate Resilience and Innovation for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, explained how resources from MIT were instrumental in her education as a middle and high schooler, while Jaylen Brown told how his grandmother helped him see the importance of taking care of the planet, through recycling and picking up trash together, when he was young.Claudia Urrea, director of the pK-12 team at Open Learning and director of Day of Climate, emphasizes how providing opportunities at schools — through new curriculum, classroom resources and mentorship — are crucial, but providing other educational opportunities also matter: in particular, opportunities that support learners in becoming strong leaders.“I strongly believe that this event not only inspired young learners to take meaningful action, both large and small, towards a better future, but also motivated all the stakeholders to continue to create opportunities for these young learners to emerge as future leaders,” Urrea says.The team plans to hold the Day of Climate event annually, bringing together young people, educators, and the MIT community. Urrea hopes the event will act as a catalyst for change — for everyone.“We hope Day of Climate serves as the opportunity for everyone to recognize the interconnectedness of our actions,” Urrea says. “Understanding this larger system is crucial for addressing current and future challenges, ultimately making the world a better place for all.”The Day of Climate event was hosted by the Day of Climate team in collaboration with MIT Climate Action Through Education (CATE) and Earth Day Boston. More

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      Mary Robinson urges MIT School of Architecture and Planning graduates to “find a way to lead”

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      “Class of 2025, are you ready?”This was the question Hashim Sarkis, dean of the MIT School of Architecture and Planning, posed to the graduating class at the school’s Advanced Degree Ceremony at Kresge Auditorium on May 29. The response was enthusiastic applause and cheers from the 224 graduates from the departments of Architecture and Urban Studies and Planning, the Program in Media Arts and Sciences, and the Center for Real Estate.Following his welcome to an audience filled with family and friends of the graduates, Sarkis introduced the day’s guest speaker, whom he cited as the “perfect fit for this class.” Recognizing the “international rainbow of graduates,” Sarkis welcomed Mary Robinson, former president of Ireland and head of the Mary Robinson Foundation — Climate Justice to the podium. Robinson, a lawyer by training, has had a wide-ranging career that began with elected positions in Ireland followed by leadership roles in global causes for justice, human rights, and climate change.Robinson laced her remarks with personal anecdotes from her career, from with earning a master’s in law at nearby Harvard University in 1968 — a year of political unrest in the United States — to founding The Elders in 2007 with world leaders: former South African President Nelson Mandela, anti-apartheid and human rights activist Desmond Tutu, and former U.S. President Jimmy Carter.She described an “early lesson” in recounting her efforts to reform the laws of contraception in Ireland at the beginning of her career in the Irish legislature. Previously, women were not prescribed birth control unless they were married and had irregular menstrual cycles certified by their physicians. Robinson received thousands of letters of condemnation and threats that she would destroy the country of Ireland if she would allow contraception to be more broadly available. The legislation introduced was successful despite the “hate mail” she received, which was so abhorrent that her fiancé at the time, now her husband, burned it. That experience taught her to stand firm to her values.“If you really believe in something, you must be prepared to pay a price,” she told the graduates.In closing, Robinson urged the class to put their “skills and talent to work to address the climate crisis,” a problem she said she came late to in her career.“You have had the privilege of being here at the School of Architecture and Planning at MIT,” said Robinson. “When you leave here, find ways to lead.” More

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      Drug injection device wins MIT $100K Competition

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      The winner of this year’s MIT $100K Entrepreneurship Competition is helping advanced therapies reach more patients faster with a new kind of drug-injection device.CoFlo Medical says its low-cost device can deliver biologic drugs more than 10 times faster than existing methods, accelerating the treatment of a range of conditions including cancers, autoimmune diseases, and infectious diseases.“For patients battling these diseases, every hour matters,” said Simon Rufer SM ’22 in the winning pitch. “Biologic drugs are capable of treating some of the most challenging diseases, but their administration is unacceptably time-consuming, infringing on the freedom of the patient and effectively leaving them tethered to their hospital beds. The requirement of a hospital setting also makes biologics all but impossible in remote and low-access areas.”Today, biologic drugs are mainly delivered through intravenous fusions, requiring patients to sit in hospital beds for hours during each delivery. That’s because many biologic drugs are too viscous to be pushed through a needle. CoFlo’s device enables quick injections of biologic drugs no matter how viscous. It works by surrounding the viscous drug with a second, lower-viscosity fluid.“Imagine trying to force a liquid as viscous as honey through a needle: It’s simply not possible,” said Rufer, who is currently a PhD candidate in the Department of Mechanical Engineering. “Over the course of six years of research and development at MIT, we’ve overcome a myriad of fluidic instabilities that have otherwise made this technology impossible. We’ve also patented the fundamental inner workings of this device.”Rufer made the winning pitch to a packed Kresge Auditorium that included a panel of judges on May 12. In a video, he showed someone injecting biologic drugs using CoFlo’s device using one hand.Rufer says the second fluid in the device could be the buffer of the drug solution itself, which wouldn’t alter the drug formulation and could potentially expedite the device’s approval in clinical trials. The device can also easily be made using existing mass manufacturing processes, which will keep the cost low.In laboratory experiments, CoFlo’s team has demonstrated injections that are up to 200 times faster.“CoFlo is the only technology that is capable of administering viscous drugs while simultaneously optimizing the patient experience, minimizing the clinical burden, and reducing device cost,” Rufer said.Celebrating entrepreneurshipThe MIT $100K Competition started more than 30 years ago, when students, along with the late MIT Professor Ed Roberts, raised $10,000 to turn MIT’s “mens et manus” (“mind and hand”) motto into a startup challenge. Over time, with sponsor support, the event grew into the renown, highly anticipated startup competition it is today, highlighting some of the most promising new companies founded by MIT community members each year.The Monday night event was the culmination of months of work and preparation by participating teams. The $100K program began with student pitches in December and was followed by mentorship, funding, and other support for select teams over the course of ensuing months.This year more than 50 teams applied for the $100K’s final event. A network of external judges whittled that down to the eight finalists that made their pitches.Other winnersIn addition to the grand prize, finalists were also awarded a $50,000 second-place prize, a $5,000 third-place prize, and a $5,000 audience choice award, which was voted on during the judge’s deliberations.The second-place prize went to Haven, an artificial intelligence-powered financial planning platform that helps families manage lifelong disability care. Haven’s pitch was delivered by Tej Mehta, a student in the MIT Sloan School of Management who explained the problem by sharing his own family’s experience managing his sister’s intellectual disability.“As my family plans for the future, a number of questions are keeping us up at night,” Mehta told the audience. “How much money do we need to save? What public benefits is she eligible for? How do we structure our private assets so she doesn’t lose those public benefits? Finally, how do we manage the funds and compliance over time?”Haven works by using family information and goals to build a personalized roadmap that can predict care needs and costs over more than 50 years.“We recommend to families the exact next steps they need to take, what to apply for, and when,” Mehta explained.The third-place prize went to Aorta Scope, which combines AI and ultrasound to provide augmented reality guidance during vascular surgery. Today, surgeons must rely on a 2-D X-ray image as they feed a large stent into patients’ body during a common surgery known as endovascular repair.Aorta Scope has developed a platform for real-time, 3-D implant alignment. The solution combines intravascular ultrasound technology with fiber optic shape sensing. Tom Dillon built the system that combines data from those sources as part of his ongoing PhD in MIT’s Department of Mechanical Engineering.Finally, the audience choice award went to Flood Dynamics, which provides real-time flood risk modeling to help cities, insurers, and developers adapt and protect urban communities from flooding.Although most urban flood damages are driven by rain today, flood models don’t account for rainfall, making cities less prepared for flooding risks.“Flooding, and especially rain-driven flooding, is the costliest natural hazard around the world today,” said Katerina Boukin SM ’20, PhD ’25, who developed the company’s technology at MIT. “The price of staying rain-blind is really steep. This is an issue that is costing the U.S. alone more than $30 billion a year.” More

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      Workshop explores new advanced materials for a growing world

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      It is clear that humankind needs increasingly more resources, from computing power to steel and concrete, to meet the growing demands associated with data centers, infrastructure, and other mainstays of society. New, cost-effective approaches for producing the advanced materials key to that growth were the focus of a two-day workshop at MIT on March 11 and 12.A theme throughout the event was the importance of collaboration between and within universities and industries. The goal is to “develop concepts that everybody can use together, instead of everybody doing something different and then trying to sort it out later at great cost,” said Lionel Kimerling, the Thomas Lord Professor of Materials Science and Engineering at MIT.The workshop was produced by MIT’s Materials Research Laboratory (MRL), which has an industry collegium, and MIT’s Industrial Liaison Program. The program included an address by Javier Sanfelix, lead of the Advanced Materials Team for the European Union. Sanfelix gave an overview of the EU’s strategy to developing advanced materials, which he said are “key enablers of the green and digital transition for European industry.”That strategy has already led to several initiatives. These include a material commons, or shared digital infrastructure for the design and development of advanced materials, and an advanced materials academy for educating new innovators and designers. Sanfelix also described an Advanced Materials Act for 2026 that aims to put in place a legislative framework that supports the entire innovation cycle.Sanfelix was visiting MIT to learn more about how the Institute is approaching the future of advanced materials. “We see MIT as a leader worldwide in technology, especially on materials, and there is a lot to learn about [your] industry collaborations and technology transfer with industry,” he said.Innovations in steel and concreteThe workshop began with talks about innovations involving two of the most common human-made materials in the world: steel and cement. We’ll need more of both but must reckon with the huge amounts of energy required to produce them and their impact on the environment due to greenhouse-gas emissions during that production.One way to address our need for more steel is to reuse what we have, said C. Cem Tasan, the POSCO Associate Professor of Metallurgy in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering (DMSE) and director of the Materials Research Laboratory.But most of the existing approaches to recycling scrap steel involve melting the metal. “And whenever you are dealing with molten metal, everything goes up, from energy use to carbon-dioxide emissions. Life is more difficult,” Tasan said.The question he and his team asked is whether they could reuse scrap steel without melting it. Could they consolidate solid scraps, then roll them together using existing equipment to create new sheet metal? From the materials-science perspective, Tasan said, that shouldn’t work, for several reasons.But it does. “We’ve demonstrated the potential in two papers and two patent applications already,” he said. Tasan noted that the approach focuses on high-quality manufacturing scrap. “This is not junkyard scrap,” he said.Tasan went on to explain how and why the new process works from a materials-science perspective, then gave examples of how the recycled steel could be used. “My favorite example is the stainless-steel countertops in restaurants. Do you really need the mechanical performance of stainless steel there?” You could use the recycled steel instead.Hessam Azarijafari addressed another common, indispensable material: concrete. This year marks the 16th anniversary of the MIT Concrete Sustainability Hub (CSHub), which began when a set of industry leaders and politicians reached out to MIT to learn more about the benefits and environmental impacts of concrete.The hub’s work now centers around three main themes: working toward a carbon-neutral concrete industry; the development of a sustainable infrastructure, with a focus on pavement; and how to make our cities more resilient to natural hazards through investment in stronger, cooler construction.Azarijafari, the deputy director of the CSHub, went on to give several examples of research results that have come out of the CSHub. These include many models to identify different pathways to decarbonize the cement and concrete sector. Other work involves pavements, which the general public thinks of as inert, Azarijafari said. “But we have [created] a state-of-the-art model that can assess interactions between pavement and vehicles.” It turns out that pavement surface characteristics and structural performance “can influence excess fuel consumption by inducing an additional rolling resistance.”Azarijafari emphasized  the importance of working closely with policymakers and industry. That engagement is key “to sharing the lessons that we have learned so far.”Toward a resource-efficient microchip industryConsider the following: In 2020 the number of cell phones, GPS units, and other devices connected to the “cloud,” or large data centers, exceeded 50 billion. And data-center traffic in turn is scaling by 1,000 times every 10 years.But all of that computation takes energy. And “all of it has to happen at a constant cost of energy, because the gross domestic product isn’t changing at that rate,” said Kimerling. The solution is to either produce much more energy, or make information technology much more energy-efficient. Several speakers at the workshop focused on the materials and components behind the latter.Key to everything they discussed: adding photonics, or using light to carry information, to the well-established electronics behind today’s microchips. “The bottom line is that integrating photonics with electronics in the same package is the transistor for the 21st century. If we can’t figure out how to do that, then we’re not going to be able to scale forward,” said Kimerling, who is director of the MIT Microphotonics Center.MIT has long been a leader in the integration of photonics with electronics. For example, Kimerling described the Integrated Photonics System Roadmap – International (IPSR-I), a global network of more than 400 industrial and R&D partners working together to define and create photonic integrated circuit technology. IPSR-I is led by the MIT Microphotonics Center and PhotonDelta. Kimerling began the organization in 1997.Last year IPSR-I released its latest roadmap for photonics-electronics integration, “which  outlines a clear way forward and specifies an innovative learning curve for scaling performance and applications for the next 15 years,” Kimerling said.Another major MIT program focused on the future of the microchip industry is FUTUR-IC, a new global alliance for sustainable microchip manufacturing. Begun last year, FUTUR-IC is funded by the National Science Foundation.“Our goal is to build a resource-efficient microchip industry value chain,” said Anuradha Murthy Agarwal, a principal research scientist at the MRL and leader of FUTUR-IC. That includes all of the elements that go into manufacturing future microchips, including workforce education and techniques to mitigate potential environmental effects.FUTUR-IC is also focused on electronic-photonic integration. “My mantra is to use electronics for computation, [and] shift to photonics for communication to bring this energy crisis in control,” Agarwal said.But integrating electronic chips with photonic chips is not easy. To that end, Agarwal described some of the challenges involved. For example, currently it is difficult to connect the optical fibers carrying communications to a microchip. That’s because the alignment between the two must be almost perfect or the light will disperse. And the dimensions involved are minuscule. An optical fiber has a diameter of only millionths of a meter. As a result, today each connection must be actively tested with a laser to ensure that the light will come through.That said, Agarwal went on to describe a new coupler between the fiber and chip that could solve the problem and allow robots to passively assemble the chips (no laser needed). The work, which was conducted by researchers including MIT graduate student Drew Wenninger, Agarwal, and Kimerling, has been patented, and is reported in two papers. A second recent breakthrough in this area involving a printed micro-reflector was described by Juejun “JJ” Hu, John F. Elliott Professor of Materials Science and Engineering.FUTUR-IC is also leading educational efforts for training a future workforce, as well as techniques for detecting — and potentially destroying — the perfluroalkyls (PFAS, or “forever chemicals”) released during microchip manufacturing. FUTUR-IC educational efforts, including virtual reality and game-based learning, were described by Sajan Saini, education director for FUTUR-IC. PFAS detection and remediation were discussed by Aristide Gumyusenge, an assistant professor in DMSE, and Jesus Castro Esteban, a postdoc in the Department of Chemistry.Other presenters at the workshop included Antoine Allanore, the Heather N. Lechtman Professor of Materials Science and Engineering; Katrin Daehn, a postdoc in the Allanore lab; Xuanhe Zhao, the Uncas (1923) and Helen Whitaker Professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering; Richard Otte, CEO of Promex; and Carl Thompson, the Stavros V. Salapatas Professor in Materials Science and Engineering. More

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      Enabling energy innovation at scale

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      Enabling and sustaining a clean energy transition depends not only on groundbreaking technology to redefine the world’s energy systems, but also on that innovation happening at scale. As a part of an ongoing speaker series, the MIT Energy Initiative (MITEI) hosted Emily Knight, the president and CEO of The Engine, a nonprofit incubator and accelerator dedicated to nurturing technology solutions to the world’s most urgent challenges. She explained how her organization is bridging the gap between research breakthroughs and scalable commercial impact.“Our mission from the very beginning was to support and accelerate what we call ‘tough tech’ companies — [companies] who had this vision to solve some of the world’s biggest problems,” Knight said.The Engine, a spinout of MIT, coined the term “tough tech” to represent not only the durability of the technology, but also the complexity and scale of the problems it will solve. “We are an incubator and accelerator focused on building a platform and creating what I believe is an open community for people who want to build tough tech, who want to fund tough tech, who want to work in a tough tech company, and ultimately be a part of this community,” said Knight.According to Knight, The Engine creates “an innovation orchard” where early-stage research teams have access to the infrastructure and resources needed to take their ideas from lab to market while maximizing impact. “We use this pathway — from idea to investment, then investment to impact — in a lot of the work that we do,” explained Knight.She said that tough tech exists at the intersection of several risk factors: technology, market and customer, regulatory, and scaling. Knight highlighted MIT spinout Commonwealth Fusion Systems (CFS) — one of many MIT spinouts within The Engine’s ecosystem that focus on energy — as an example of how The Engine encourages teams to work through these risks.In the early days, the CFS team was told to assume their novel fusion technology would work. “If you’re only ever worried that your technology won’t work, you won’t pick your head up and have the right people on your team who are building the public affairs relationships so that, when you need it, you can get your first fusion reactor sited and done,” explained Knight. “You don’t know where to go for the next round of funding, and you don’t know who in government is going to be your advocates when you need them to be.”“I think [CFS’s] eighth employee was a public affairs person,” Knight said. With the significant regulatory, scaling, and customer risks associated with fusion energy, building their team wisely was essential. Bringing on a public affairs person helped CFS build awareness and excitement around fusion energy in the local community and build the community programs necessary for grant funding.The Engine’s growing ecosystem of entrepreneurs, researchers, institutions, and government agencies is a key component of the support offered to early-stage researchers. The ecosystem creates a space for sharing knowledge and resources, which Knight believes is critical for navigating the unique challenges associated with Tough Tech.This support can be especially important for new entrepreneurs: “This leader that is going from PhD student to CEO — that is a really, really big journey that happens the minute you get funding,” said Knight. “Knowing that you’re in a community of people who are on that same journey is really important.”The Engine also extends this support to the broader community through educational programs that walk participants through the process of translating their research from lab to market. Knight highlighted two climate and energy startups that joined The Engine through one such program geared toward graduate students and postdocs: Lithios, which is producing sustainable, low-cost lithium, and Lydian, which is developing sustainable aviation fuels.The Engine also offers access to capital from investors with an intimate understanding of tough tech ventures. She said that government agency partners can offer additional support through public funding opportunities and highlighted that grants from the U.S. Department of Energy were key in the early funding of another MIT spinout within their ecosystem, Sublime Systems.In response to the current political shift away from climate investments, as well as uncertainty surrounding government funding, Knight believes that the connections within their ecosystem are more important than ever as startups explore alternative funding. “We’re out there thinking about funding mechanisms that could be more reliable. That’s our role as an incubator.”Being able to convene the right people to address a problem is something that Knight attributes to her education at Cornell University’s School of Hotel Administration. “My ethos across all of this is about service,” stated Knight. “We’re constantly evolving our resources and how we help our teams based on the gaps they’re facing.”MITEI Presents: Advancing the Energy Transition is an MIT Energy Initiative speaker series highlighting energy experts and leaders at the forefront of the scientific, technological, and policy solutions needed to transform our energy systems. The next seminar in this series will be April 30 with Manish Bapna, president and CEO of the Natural Resources Defense Council. Visit MITEI’s Events page for more information on this and additional events. More

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      Taking the “training wheels” off clean energy

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      Renewable power sources have seen unprecedented levels of investment in recent years. But with political uncertainty clouding the future of subsidies for green energy, these technologies must begin to compete with fossil fuels on equal footing, said participants at the 2025 MIT Energy Conference.“What these technologies need less is training wheels, and more of a level playing field,” said Brian Deese, an MIT Institute Innovation Fellow, during a conference-opening keynote panel.The theme of the two-day conference, which is organized each year by MIT students, was “Breakthrough to deployment: Driving climate innovation to market.” Speakers largely expressed optimism about advancements in green technology, balanced by occasional notes of alarm about a rapidly changing regulatory and political environment.Deese defined what he called “the good, the bad, and the ugly” of the current energy landscape. The good: Clean energy investment in the United States hit an all-time high of $272 billion in 2024. The bad: Announcements of future investments have tailed off. And the ugly: Macro conditions are making it more difficult for utilities and private enterprise to build out the clean energy infrastructure needed to meet growing energy demands.“We need to build massive amounts of energy capacity in the United States,” Deese said. “And the three things that are the most allergic to building are high uncertainty, high interest rates, and high tariff rates. So that’s kind of ugly. But the question … is how, and in what ways, that underlying commercial momentum can drive through this period of uncertainty.”A shifting clean energy landscapeDuring a panel on artificial intelligence and growth in electricity demand, speakers said that the technology may serve as a catalyst for green energy breakthroughs, in addition to putting strain on existing infrastructure. “Google is committed to building digital infrastructure responsibly, and part of that means catalyzing the development of clean energy infrastructure that is not only meeting the AI need, but also benefiting the grid as a whole,” said Lucia Tian, head of clean energy and decarbonization technologies at Google.Across the two days, speakers emphasized that the cost-per-unit and scalability of clean energy technologies will ultimately determine their fate. But they also acknowledged the impact of public policy, as well as the need for government investment to tackle large-scale issues like grid modernization.Vanessa Chan, a former U.S. Department of Energy (DoE) official and current vice dean of innovation and entrepreneurship at the University of Pennsylvania School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, warned of the “knock-on” effects of the move to slash National Institutes of Health (NIH) funding for indirect research costs, for example. “In reality, what you’re doing is undercutting every single academic institution that does research across the nation,” she said.During a panel titled “No clean energy transition without transmission,” Maria Robinson, former director of the DoE’s Grid Deployment Office, said that ratepayers alone will likely not be able to fund the grid upgrades needed to meet growing power demand. “The amount of investment we’re going to need over the next couple of years is going to be significant,” she said. “That’s where the federal government is going to have to play a role.”David Cohen-Tanugi, a clean energy venture builder at MIT, noted that extreme weather events have changed the climate change conversation in recent years. “There was a narrative 10 years ago that said … if we start talking about resilience and adaptation to climate change, we’re kind of throwing in the towel or giving up,” he said. “I’ve noticed a very big shift in the investor narrative, the startup narrative, and more generally, the public consciousness. There’s a realization that the effects of climate change are already upon us.”“Everything on the table”The conference featured panels and keynote addresses on a range of emerging clean energy technologies, including hydrogen power, geothermal energy, and nuclear fusion, as well as a session on carbon capture.Alex Creely, a chief engineer at Commonwealth Fusion Systems, explained that fusion (the combining of small atoms into larger atoms, which is the same process that fuels stars) is safer and potentially more economical than traditional nuclear power. Fusion facilities, he said, can be powered down instantaneously, and companies like his are developing new, less-expensive magnet technology to contain the extreme heat produced by fusion reactors.By the early 2030s, Creely said, his company hopes to be operating 400-megawatt power plants that use only 50 kilograms of fuel per year. “If you can get fusion working, it turns energy into a manufacturing product, not a natural resource,” he said.Quinn Woodard Jr., senior director of power generation and surface facilities at geothermal energy supplier Fervo Energy, said his company is making the geothermal energy more economical through standardization, innovation, and economies of scale. Traditionally, he said, drilling is the largest cost in producing geothermal power. Fervo has “completely flipped the cost structure” with advances in drilling, Woodard said, and now the company is focused on bringing down its power plant costs.“We have to continuously be focused on cost, and achieving that is paramount for the success of the geothermal industry,” he said.One common theme across the conference: a number of approaches are making rapid advancements, but experts aren’t sure when — or, in some cases, if — each specific technology will reach a tipping point where it is capable of transforming energy markets.“I don’t want to get caught in a place where we often descend in this climate solution situation, where it’s either-or,” said Peter Ellis, global director of nature climate solutions at The Nature Conservancy. “We’re talking about the greatest challenge civilization has ever faced. We need everything on the table.”The road aheadSeveral speakers stressed the need for academia, industry, and government to collaborate in pursuit of climate and energy goals. Amy Luers, senior global director of sustainability for Microsoft, compared the challenge to the Apollo spaceflight program, and she said that academic institutions need to focus more on how to scale and spur investments in green energy.“The challenge is that academic institutions are not currently set up to be able to learn the how, in driving both bottom-up and top-down shifts over time,” Luers said. “If the world is going to succeed in our road to net zero, the mindset of academia needs to shift. And fortunately, it’s starting to.”During a panel called “From lab to grid: Scaling first-of-a-kind energy technologies,” Hannan Happi, CEO of renewable energy company Exowatt, stressed that electricity is ultimately a commodity. “Electrons are all the same,” he said. “The only thing [customers] care about with regards to electrons is that they are available when they need them, and that they’re very cheap.”Melissa Zhang, principal at Azimuth Capital Management, noted that energy infrastructure development cycles typically take at least five to 10 years — longer than a U.S. political cycle. However, she warned that green energy technologies are unlikely to receive significant support at the federal level in the near future. “If you’re in something that’s a little too dependent on subsidies … there is reason to be concerned over this administration,” she said.World Energy CEO Gene Gebolys, the moderator of the lab-to-grid panel, listed off a number of companies founded at MIT. “They all have one thing in common,” he said. “They all went from somebody’s idea, to a lab, to proof-of-concept, to scale. It’s not like any of this stuff ever ends. It’s an ongoing process.” More

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      The role of modeling in the energy transition

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      Joseph F. DeCarolis, administrator for the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA), has one overarching piece of advice for anyone poring over long-term energy projections.“Whatever you do, don’t start believing the numbers,” DeCarolis said at the MIT Energy Initiative (MITEI) Fall Colloquium. “There’s a tendency when you sit in front of the computer and you’re watching the model spit out numbers at you … that you’ll really start to believe those numbers with high precision. Don’t fall for it. Always remain skeptical.”This event was part of MITEI’s new speaker series, MITEI Presents: Advancing the Energy Transition, which connects the MIT community with the energy experts and leaders who are working on scientific, technological, and policy solutions that are urgently needed to accelerate the energy transition.The point of DeCarolis’s talk, titled “Stay humble and prepare for surprises: Lessons for the energy transition,” was not that energy models are unimportant. On the contrary, DeCarolis said, energy models give stakeholders a framework that allows them to consider present-day decisions in the context of potential future scenarios. However, he repeatedly stressed the importance of accounting for uncertainty, and not treating these projections as “crystal balls.”“We can use models to help inform decision strategies,” DeCarolis said. “We know there’s a bunch of future uncertainty. We don’t know what’s going to happen, but we can incorporate that uncertainty into our model and help come up with a path forward.”Dialogue, not forecastsEIA is the statistical and analytic agency within the U.S. Department of Energy, with a mission to collect, analyze, and disseminate independent and impartial energy information to help stakeholders make better-informed decisions. Although EIA analyzes the impacts of energy policies, the agency does not make or advise on policy itself. DeCarolis, who was previously professor and University Faculty Scholar in the Department of Civil, Construction, and Environmental Engineering at North Carolina State University, noted that EIA does not need to seek approval from anyone else in the federal government before publishing its data and reports. “That independence is very important to us, because it means that we can focus on doing our work and providing the best information we possibly can,” he said.Among the many reports produced by EIA is the agency’s Annual Energy Outlook (AEO), which projects U.S. energy production, consumption, and prices. Every other year, the agency also produces the AEO Retrospective, which shows the relationship between past projections and actual energy indicators.“The first question you might ask is, ‘Should we use these models to produce a forecast?’” DeCarolis said. “The answer for me to that question is: No, we should not do that. When models are used to produce forecasts, the results are generally pretty dismal.”DeCarolis pointed to wildly inaccurate past projections about the proliferation of nuclear energy in the United States as an example of the problems inherent in forecasting. However, he noted, there are “still lots of really valuable uses” for energy models. Rather than using them to predict future energy consumption and prices, DeCarolis said, stakeholders should use models to inform their own thinking.“[Models] can simply be an aid in helping us think and hypothesize about the future of energy,” DeCarolis said. “They can help us create a dialogue among different stakeholders on complex issues. If we’re thinking about something like the energy transition, and we want to start a dialogue, there has to be some basis for that dialogue. If you have a systematic representation of the energy system that you can advance into the future, we can start to have a debate about the model and what it means. We can also identify key sources of uncertainty and knowledge gaps.”Modeling uncertaintyThe key to working with energy models is not to try to eliminate uncertainty, DeCarolis said, but rather to account for it. One way to better understand uncertainty, he noted, is to look at past projections, and consider how they ended up differing from real-world results. DeCarolis pointed to two “surprises” over the past several decades: the exponential growth of shale oil and natural gas production (which had the impact of limiting coal’s share of the energy market and therefore reducing carbon emissions), as well as the rapid rise in wind and solar energy. In both cases, market conditions changed far more quickly than energy modelers anticipated, leading to inaccurate projections.“For all those reasons, we ended up with [projected] CO2 [carbon dioxide] emissions that were quite high compared to actual,” DeCarolis said. “We’re a statistical agency, so we’re really looking carefully at the data, but it can take some time to identify the signal through the noise.”Although EIA does not produce forecasts in the AEO, people have sometimes interpreted the reference case in the agency’s reports as predictions. In an effort to illustrate the unpredictability of future outcomes in the 2023 edition of the AEO, the agency added “cones of uncertainty” to its projection of energy-related carbon dioxide emissions, with ranges of outcomes based on the difference between past projections and actual results. One cone captures 50 percent of historical projection errors, while another represents 95 percent of historical errors.“They capture whatever bias there is in our projections,” DeCarolis said of the uncertainty cones. “It’s being captured because we’re comparing actual [emissions] to projections. The weakness of this, though, is: who’s to say that those historical projection errors apply to the future? We don’t know that, but I still think that there’s something useful to be learned from this exercise.”The future of energy modelingLooking ahead, DeCarolis said, there is a “laundry list of things that keep me up at night as a modeler.” These include the impacts of climate change; how those impacts will affect demand for renewable energy; how quickly industry and government will overcome obstacles to building out clean energy infrastructure and supply chains; technological innovation; and increased energy demand from data centers running compute-intensive workloads.“What about enhanced geothermal? Fusion? Space-based solar power?” DeCarolis asked. “Should those be in the model? What sorts of technology breakthroughs are we missing? And then, of course, there are the unknown unknowns — the things that I can’t conceive of to put on this list, but are probably going to happen.”In addition to capturing the fullest range of outcomes, DeCarolis said, EIA wants to be flexible, nimble, transparent, and accessible — creating reports that can easily incorporate new model features and produce timely analyses. To that end, the agency has undertaken two new initiatives. First, the 2025 AEO will use a revamped version of the National Energy Modeling System that includes modules for hydrogen production and pricing, carbon management, and hydrocarbon supply. Second, an effort called Project BlueSky is aiming to develop the agency’s next-generation energy system model, which DeCarolis said will be modular and open source.DeCarolis noted that the energy system is both highly complex and rapidly evolving, and he warned that “mental shortcuts” and the fear of being wrong can lead modelers to ignore possible future developments. “We have to remain humble and intellectually honest about what we know,” DeCarolis said. “That way, we can provide decision-makers with an honest assessment of what we think could happen in the future.”  More