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      in Environment

      Surface coating designed to improve power plant efficiency wins 2022 Water Innovation Prize

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      The winner of this year’s Water Innovation Prize is a company commercializing a material that could dramatically improve the efficiency of power plants.

      The company, Mesophase, is developing a more efficient power plant steam condenser that leverages a surface coating developed in the lab of Evelyn Wang, MIT’s Ford Professor of Engineering and the head of the Department of Mechanical Engineering. Such condensers, which convert steam into water, sit at the heart of the energy extraction process in most of the world’s power plants.

      In the winning pitch, company founders said they believe their low-cost, durable coating will improve the heat transfer performance of such condensers.

      “What makes us excited about this technology is that in the condenser field, this is the first time we’ve seen a coating that can last long enough for industrial applications and be made with a high potential to scale up,” said Yajing Zhao SM ’18, who is currently a PhD candidate in mechanical engineering at MIT. “When compared to what’s available in academia and industry, we believe you’ll see record performance in terms of both heat transfer and lifetime.”

      In most power plants, condensers cool steam to turn it into water. The pressure change caused by that conversion creates a vacuum that pulls steam through a turbine. Mesophase’s patent-pending surface coating improves condensers’ ability to transfer heat, thus allowing operators to extract power more efficiently.

      Based on lab tests, the company predicts it can increase power plant output by up to 7 percent using existing infrastructure. Because steam condensers are used around the world, this advance could help increase global electricity production by 500 terawatt hours per year, which is equivalent to the electricity supply for about 1 billion people.

      The efficiency gains will also lead to less water use. Water sent from cooling towers is a common means of keeping condensers cool. The company estimates its system could reduce fresh water withdrawals by the equivalent of what is used by 50 million people per year.

      After running pilots, the company believes the new material could be installed in power plants during the regularly scheduled maintenance that occurs every two to five years. The company is also planning to work with existing condenser manufacturers to get to market faster.

      “This all works because a condenser with our technology in it has significantly more attractive economics than what you find in the market today,” says Mesophase’s Michael Gangemi, an MBA candidate at MIT’s Sloan School of Management.

      The company plans to start in the U.S. geothermal space, where Mesophase estimates its technology is worth about $800 million a year.

      “Much of the geothermal capacity in the U.S. was built in the ’50s and ’60s,” Gangemi said. “That means most of these plants are operating way below capacity, and they invest frequently in technology like ours just to maintain their power output.”

      The company will use the prize money, in part, to begin testing in a real power plant environment.

      “We are excited about these developments, but we know that they are only first steps as we move toward broader energy applications,” Gangemi said.

      MIT’s Water Innovation Prize helps translate water-related research and ideas into businesses and impact. Each year, student-led finalist teams pitch their innovations to students, faculty, investors, and people working in various water-related industries.

      This year’s event, held in a virtual hybrid format in MIT’s Media Lab, included five finalist teams. The second-place $15,000 award was given to Livingwater Systems, which provides portable rainwater collection and filtration systems to displaced and off-grid communities.

      The company’s product consists of a low-cost mesh that goes on roofs to collect the water and a collapsible storage unit that incorporates a sediment filter. The water becomes drinkable after applying chlorine tablets to the storage unit.

      “Perhaps the single greatest attraction of our units is their elegance and simplicity,” Livingwater CEO Joshua Kao said in the company’s pitch. “Anyone can take advantage of their easy, do-it-yourself setup without any preexisting knowhow.”

      The company says the system works on the pitched roofs used in many off-grid settlements, refugee camps, and slums. The entire unit fits inside a backpack.

      The team also notes existing collection systems cost thousands of dollars, require expert installation, and can’t be attached to surfaces like tents. Livingwater is aiming to partner with nongovernmental organizations and nonprofit entities to sell its systems for $60 each, which would represent significant cost savings when compared to alternatives like busing water into settlements.

      The company will be running a paid pilot with the World Food Program this fall.

      “Support from MIT will be crucial for building the core team on the ground,” said Livingwater’s Gabriela Saade, a master’s student in public policy at the University of Chicago. “Let’s begin to realize a new era of water security in Latin America and across the globe.”

      The third-place $10,000 prize went to Algeon Materials, which is creating sustainable and environmentally friendly bioplastics from kelp. Algeon also won the $5,000 audience choice award for its system, which doesn’t require water, fertilizer, or land to produce.

      The other finalists were:

      Flowless, which uses artificial intelligence and an internet of things (IoT) platform to detect leaks and optimize water-related processes to reduce waste;
      Hydrologistics Africa Ltd, a platform to help consumers and utilities manage their water consumption; and
      Watabot, which is developing autonomous, artificial intelligence-powered systems to monitor harmful algae in real time and predict algae activity.

      Each year the Water Innovation Prize, hosted by the MIT Water Club, awards up to $50,000 in grants to teams from around the world. This year’s program received over 50 applications. A group of 20 semifinalist teams spent one month working with mentors to refine their pitches and business plans, and the final field of finalists received another month of mentorship.

      The Water Innovation Prize started in 2015 and has awarded more than $275,000 to 24 different teams to date. More

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      in Energy

      How can we reduce the carbon footprint of global computing?

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      The voracious appetite for energy from the world’s computers and communications technology presents a clear threat for the globe’s warming climate. That was the blunt assessment from presenters in the intensive two-day Climate Implications of Computing and Communications workshop held on March 3 and 4, hosted by MIT’s Climate and Sustainability Consortium (MCSC), MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab, and the Schwarzman College of Computing.

      The virtual event featured rich discussions and highlighted opportunities for collaboration among an interdisciplinary group of MIT faculty and researchers and industry leaders across multiple sectors — underscoring the power of academia and industry coming together.

      “If we continue with the existing trajectory of compute energy, by 2040, we are supposed to hit the world’s energy production capacity. The increase in compute energy and demand has been increasing at a much faster rate than the world energy production capacity increase,” said Bilge Yildiz, the Breene M. Kerr Professor in the MIT departments of Nuclear Science and Engineering and Materials Science and Engineering, one of the workshop’s 18 presenters. This computing energy projection draws from the Semiconductor Research Corporations’s decadal report.To cite just one example: Information and communications technology already account for more than 2 percent of global energy demand, which is on a par with the aviation industries emissions from fuel.“We are the very beginning of this data-driven world. We really need to start thinking about this and act now,” said presenter Evgeni Gousev, senior director at Qualcomm.  Innovative energy-efficiency optionsTo that end, the workshop presentations explored a host of energy-efficiency options, including specialized chip design, data center architecture, better algorithms, hardware modifications, and changes in consumer behavior. Industry leaders from AMD, Ericsson, Google, IBM, iRobot, NVIDIA, Qualcomm, Tertill, Texas Instruments, and Verizon outlined their companies’ energy-saving programs, while experts from across MIT provided insight into current research that could yield more efficient computing.Panel topics ranged from “Custom hardware for efficient computing” to “Hardware for new architectures” to “Algorithms for efficient computing,” among others.

      Visual representation of the conversation during the workshop session entitled “Energy Efficient Systems.”

      Image: Haley McDevitt

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      The goal, said Yildiz, is to improve energy efficiency associated with computing by more than a million-fold.“I think part of the answer of how we make computing much more sustainable has to do with specialized architectures that have very high level of utilization,” said Darío Gil, IBM senior vice president and director of research, who stressed that solutions should be as “elegant” as possible.  For example, Gil illustrated an innovative chip design that uses vertical stacking to reduce the distance data has to travel, and thus reduces energy consumption. Surprisingly, more effective use of tape — a traditional medium for primary data storage — combined with specialized hard drives (HDD), can yield a dramatic savings in carbon dioxide emissions.Gil and presenters Bill Dally, chief scientist and senior vice president of research of NVIDIA; Ahmad Bahai, CTO of Texas Instruments; and others zeroed in on storage. Gil compared data to a floating iceberg in which we can have fast access to the “hot data” of the smaller visible part while the “cold data,” the large underwater mass, represents data that tolerates higher latency. Think about digital photo storage, Gil said. “Honestly, are you really retrieving all of those photographs on a continuous basis?” Storage systems should provide an optimized mix of of HDD for hot data and tape for cold data based on data access patterns.Bahai stressed the significant energy saving gained from segmenting standby and full processing. “We need to learn how to do nothing better,” he said. Dally spoke of mimicking the way our brain wakes up from a deep sleep, “We can wake [computers] up much faster, so we don’t need to keep them running in full speed.”Several workshop presenters spoke of a focus on “sparsity,” a matrix in which most of the elements are zero, as a way to improve efficiency in neural networks. Or as Dally said, “Never put off till tomorrow, where you could put off forever,” explaining efficiency is not “getting the most information with the fewest bits. It’s doing the most with the least energy.”Holistic and multidisciplinary approaches“We need both efficient algorithms and efficient hardware, and sometimes we need to co-design both the algorithm and the hardware for efficient computing,” said Song Han, a panel moderator and assistant professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) at MIT.Some presenters were optimistic about innovations already underway. According to Ericsson’s research, as much as 15 percent of the carbon emissions globally can be reduced through the use of existing solutions, noted Mats Pellbäck Scharp, head of sustainability at Ericsson. For example, GPUs are more efficient than CPUs for AI, and the progression from 3G to 5G networks boosts energy savings.“5G is the most energy efficient standard ever,” said Scharp. “We can build 5G without increasing energy consumption.”Companies such as Google are optimizing energy use at their data centers through improved design, technology, and renewable energy. “Five of our data centers around the globe are operating near or above 90 percent carbon-free energy,” said Jeff Dean, Google’s senior fellow and senior vice president of Google Research.Yet, pointing to the possible slowdown in the doubling of transistors in an integrated circuit — or Moore’s Law — “We need new approaches to meet this compute demand,” said Sam Naffziger, AMD senior vice president, corporate fellow, and product technology architect. Naffziger spoke of addressing performance “overkill.” For example, “we’re finding in the gaming and machine learning space we can make use of lower-precision math to deliver an image that looks just as good with 16-bit computations as with 32-bit computations, and instead of legacy 32b math to train AI networks, we can use lower-energy 8b or 16b computations.”

      Visual representation of the conversation during the workshop session entitled “Wireless, networked, and distributed systems.”

      Image: Haley McDevitt

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      Other presenters singled out compute at the edge as a prime energy hog.“We also have to change the devices that are put in our customers’ hands,” said Heidi Hemmer, senior vice president of engineering at Verizon. As we think about how we use energy, it is common to jump to data centers — but it really starts at the device itself, and the energy that the devices use. Then, we can think about home web routers, distributed networks, the data centers, and the hubs. “The devices are actually the least energy-efficient out of that,” concluded Hemmer.Some presenters had different perspectives. Several called for developing dedicated silicon chipsets for efficiency. However, panel moderator Muriel Medard, the Cecil H. Green Professor in EECS, described research at MIT, Boston University, and Maynooth University on the GRAND (Guessing Random Additive Noise Decoding) chip, saying, “rather than having obsolescence of chips as the new codes come in and in different standards, you can use one chip for all codes.”Whatever the chip or new algorithm, Helen Greiner, CEO of Tertill (a weeding robot) and co-founder of iRobot, emphasized that to get products to market, “We have to learn to go away from wanting to get the absolute latest and greatest, the most advanced processor that usually is more expensive.” She added, “I like to say robot demos are a dime a dozen, but robot products are very infrequent.”Greiner emphasized consumers can play a role in pushing for more energy-efficient products — just as drivers began to demand electric cars.Dean also sees an environmental role for the end user.“We have enabled our cloud customers to select which cloud region they want to run their computation in, and they can decide how important it is that they have a low carbon footprint,” he said, also citing other interfaces that might allow consumers to decide which air flights are more efficient or what impact installing a solar panel on their home would have.However, Scharp said, “Prolonging the life of your smartphone or tablet is really the best climate action you can do if you want to reduce your digital carbon footprint.”Facing increasing demandsDespite their optimism, the presenters acknowledged the world faces increasing compute demand from machine learning, AI, gaming, and especially, blockchain. Panel moderator Vivienne Sze, associate professor in EECS, noted the conundrum.“We can do a great job in making computing and communication really efficient. But there is this tendency that once things are very efficient, people use more of it, and this might result in an overall increase in the usage of these technologies, which will then increase our overall carbon footprint,” Sze said.Presenters saw great potential in academic/industry partnerships, particularly from research efforts on the academic side. “By combining these two forces together, you can really amplify the impact,” concluded Gousev.Presenters at the Climate Implications of Computing and Communications workshop also included: Joel Emer, professor of the practice in EECS at MIT; David Perreault, the Joseph F. and Nancy P. Keithley Professor of EECS at MIT; Jesús del Alamo, MIT Donner Professor and professor of electrical engineering in EECS at MIT; Heike Riel, IBM Fellow and head science and technology at IBM; and Takashi Ando, principal research staff member at IBM Research. The recorded workshop sessions are available on YouTube. More

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      in Energy

      MIT Energy Conference focuses on climate’s toughest challenges

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      This year’s MIT Energy Conference, the largest student-led event of its kind, included keynote talks and panels that tackled some of the thorniest remaining challenges in the global effort to cut back on climate-altering emissions. These include the production of construction materials such as steel and cement, and the role of transportation including aviation and shipping. While the challenges are formidable, approaches incorporating methods such as fusion, heat pumps, energy efficiency, and the use of hydrogen hold promise, participants said.

      The two-day conference, held on March 31 and April 1 for more than 900 participants, included keynote lectures, 14 panel discussions, a fireside chat, networking events, and more. The event this year included the final round of the annual MIT Climate and Energy Prize, whose winning team receives $100,000 and other support. The prize, awarded since 2007, has led to the creation of more than 220 companies and $1.1 billion in investments.

      This year’s winner is a project that hopes to provide an innovative, efficient waterless washing machine aimed at the vast majority of the world’s people, who still do laundry by hand.

      “A truly consequential moment in history”

      In his opening keynote address Fatih Birol, executive director of the International Energy Agency, noted that this year’s conference was taking place during the unprovoked invasion of Ukraine by Russia, a leading gas and oil exporter. As a result, “global oil markets are going through a major turmoil,” he said.

      He said that Russian oil exports are expected to drop by 3 million barrels a day, and that international efforts to release reserves and promote increased production elsewhere will help, but will not suffice. “We have to look to other measures” to make up the shortfall, he said, noting that his agency has produced a 10-point plan of measures to help reduce global demand for oil.

      Europe gets 45 percent of its natural gas from Russia, and the agency also has developed a 10-point plan to help alleviate expected shortages there, including measures to improve energy efficiency in homes and industries, promote renewable heating sources, and postpone retirement of some nuclear plants. But he emphasized that “our goals to reach our climate targets should not be yet another victim of Mr. Putin and his allies.”  Unfortunately, Birol said, “I see that addressing climate change is sliding down in the policy agenda of many governments.”

      But he sees reasons for optimism as well, in terms of the feasibility of achieving the global emissions reduction target, agreed to by countries representing 80 percent of the global economy, of reaching net zero carbon dioxide emissions by 2050. The IEA has developed a roadmap for the entire energy sector to get there, which is now used by many governments as a benchmark, according to Birol.

      In addition, the trend is already clear, he said. “More than 90 percent of all power plants installed in the world [last year] were renewable energy,” mainly solar and wind. And 10 percent of cars sold worldwide last year, and 20 percent in Europe, were electric cars. “Please remember that in 2019 it was only 2 percent!” he said. He also predicted that “nuclear is going to make a comeback in many countries,” both in terms of large plants and newer small modular reactors.

      Birol said that “I hope that the current crisis gives governments the impetus to address the energy security concerns, to reach our climate goals, and … [to] choose the right direction at this very important turning point.”

      The conference’s second day began with keynote talks by Gina McCarthy, national climate advisor at the White House Office of Domestic Climate Policy, and Maria Zuber, MIT’s vice president for research. In her address, Zuber said, “This conference comes at a truly consequential moment in history — a moment that puts into stark relief the enormous risks created by our current fossil-fuel based energy system — risks we cannot continue to accept.”

      She added that “time is not on our side.” To meet global commitments for limiting climate impacts, the world needs to reduce emissions by about half by 2030, and get to net zero by 2050. “In other words, we need to transform our entire global energy system in a few decades,” she said. She cited MIT’s “Fast Forward” climate action plan, issued last year, as presenting the two tracks that the world needs to pursue simultaneously: going as far as possible, as fast as possible, with the tools that exist now, while also innovating and investing in new ideas, technologies, practices, and institutions that may be needed to reach the net-zero goal.

      On the first track, she said, citing an IEA report, “from here until 2040, we can get most of the emissions reductions we need with technologies that are currently available or on the verge of becoming commercially available.” These include electrifying and boosting efficiency in buildings, industry, and transportation; increasing the portion of electricity coming from emissions-free sources; and investing in new infrastructure such as electric vehicle charging stations.

      But more than that is needed, she pointed out. For example, the amount of methane that leaks away into the atmosphere from fossil fuel operations is equivalent to all the natural gas used in Europe’s power sector, Zuber said. Recovering and selling that methane can dramatically reduce global methane emissions, often at little or no cost.

      For the longer run, “we need track-two solutions to decarbonize tough industries like aviation, shipping, chemicals, concrete, and steel,” and to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. She described some of the promising technologies that are in the pipeline. Fusion, for example, has moved from being a scientific challenge to an engineering problem whose solution seems well underway, she said.

      Another important area is food-related systems, which currently account for a third of all global emissions. For example, fertilizer production uses a very energy-intensive process, but work on plants engineered to fix nitrogen directly could make a significant dent.

      These and several other advanced research areas may not all pan out, but some undoubtedly will, and will help curb climate change as well as create new jobs and reduce pollution.

      Though the problems we face are complex, they are not insurmountable, Zuber said. “We don’t need a miracle. What we need is to move along the two tracks I’ve outlined with determination, ingenuity, and fierce urgency.”

      The promise and challenges of hydrogen

      Other conference speakers took on some of the less-discussed but crucial areas that also need to be addressed in order to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees. Heavy transportation, and aviation in particular, have been considered especially challenging. In his keynote address, Glenn Llewellyn, vice president for zero-emission aircraft at Airbus, outlined several approaches his company is working on to develop competitive midrange alternative airliners by 2035 that use either batteries or fuel cells powered by hydrogen. The early-stage designs demonstrate that, contrary to some projections, there is a realistic pathway to weaning that industry from its present reliance on fossil fuel, chiefly kerosene.

      Hydrogen has real potential as an aviation fuel, he said, either directly for use in fuel cells for power or burned directly for propulsion, or indirectly as a feedstock for synthetic fuels. Both are being studied by the company, he said, including a hybrid model that uses both hydrogen fuel cells and hydrogen-fueled jet engines. The company projects a range of 2,000 nautical miles for a jet carrying 200 to 300 passengers, he said — all with no direct emissions and no contrails.

      But this vision will not be practical, Llewellyn said, unless economies of scale help to significantly lower the cost of hydrogen production. “Hydrogen is at the hub of aviation decarbonization,” he said. But that kind of price reduction seems quite feasible, he said, given that other major industries are also seriously looking at the use of hydrogen for their own decarbonization plans, including the production of steel and cement.

      Such uses were the subject of a panel discussion entitled “Deploying the Hydrogen Economy.” Hydrogen production technology exists, but not nearly at the scale that’s needed, which is about 500 million tons a year, pointed out moderator Dharik Mallapragada of the MIT Energy Initiative.

      Yet in some applications, the use of hydrogen both reduces emissions and is economically competitive. Preeti Pande of Plug Power said that her company, which produces hydrogen fuel cells, has found a significant market in an unexpected place: fork lifts, used in warehouses and factories worldwide. It turns out that replacing current battery-operated versions with fuel cell versions is a win-win for the companies that use them, saving money while helping to meet decarbonization goals.

      Lindsay Ashby of Avangrid Renewables said that the company has installed fuel-cell buses in Barcelona that run entirely on hydrogen generated by solar panels. The company is also building a 100-megawatt solar facility to produce hydrogen for the production of fertilizer, another major industry in need of decarbonization because of its large emissions footprint. And Brett Perleman of the Center for Houston’s Future said of his city that “we’re already a hydrogen hub today, just not green hydrogen” since the gas is currently mostly produced as a byproduct of fossil fuels. But that is changing rapidly, he said, and Houston, along with several other cities, aims to be a center of activity for hydrogen produced from renewable, non-carbon-emitting sources. They aim to be producing 1,000 tons a day by 2028, “and I think we’ll end up exceeding that,” he said.

      For industries that can switch to renewably generated electricity, that is typically the best choice, Perleman said. “But for those that can’t, hydrogen is a great option,” and that includes aviation, shipping, and rail. “The big oil companies all have plans in place” to develop clean hydrogen production, he said. “It’s not just a dream, but a reality.”

      For shipping, which tends to rely on bunker fuel, a particularly high-emissions fossil fuel, another potential option could be a new generation of small nuclear plants, said Jeff Navin of Terrapower, a company currently developing such units. “Finding replacements for coal, oil, or natural gas for industrial purposes is very hard,” he said, but often what these processes require is consistent high heat, which nuclear can deliver, as long as costs and regulatory issues can be resolved.  

      MIT professor of nuclear engineering Jacopo Buongiorno pointed out that the primary reasons for delays and cost overruns in nuclear plants have had to do with issues at the construction site, many of which could be alleviated by having smaller, factory-built modular plants, or by building multiple units at a time of a standardized design. If the government would take on the nuclear waste disposal, as some other countries have done, then nuclear power could play an important part in the decarbonization of many industries, he said.

      Student-led startups

      The two-day conference concluded with the final round of the annual MIT Climate and Energy Prize, consisting of the five finalist teams presenting brief pitches for their startup company ideas, followed by questions from the panel of judges. This year’s finalists included a team called Muket, dedicated to finding ways of reducing methane emissions from cattle and dairy farms. Feed additives or other measures could cut the emissions by 50 percent, the team estimates.

      A team called Ivu Biologics described a system for incorporating nitrogen-fixing microbes into the coatings of seeds, thereby reducing the need for added fertilizers, whose production is a major greenhouse gas source. The company is making use of seed-coating technology developed at MIT over the last few years. Another team, called Mesophase, also based on MIT-developed technology, aims to replace the condensers used in power plants and other industrial systems with much more efficient versions, thus increasing the energy output from a given amount of fuel or other heat source.

      A team called TerraTrade aims to facilitate the adoption of power purchase agreements by companies, institutions and governments, by acting as a kind of broker to create and administer such agreements, making it easier for even smaller entities to take part in these plans, which help to enable rapid development of renewable fossil-fuel-free energy production.

      The grand prize of $100,000 was awarded to a team called Ultropia, which is developing a combined clothes washer and drier that uses ultrasound instead of water for its cleaning. The system does use a small amount of water, but this can be recycled, making these usable even in areas where water availability is limited. The devices could have a great impact on the estimated 6 billion people in the world today who are still limited to washing clothes by hand, the team says, and because the machines would be so efficient, they would require very little energy to run — a significant improvement over the wider adoption of conventional washers and driers. More

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      in Energy

      Investors awaken to the risks of climate change

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

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

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

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

      A changing landscape

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

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

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

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

      Divestment versus engagement

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

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

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

      Challenges and opportunities         

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

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

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

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

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

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

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      in Environment

      New visions for better transportation

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      We typically experience transportation problems from the ground up. Waiting for a delayed bus, packing ourselves into a subway car, or crawling along in traffic, it is common to see such systems struggling at close range.

      Yet sometimes transportation solutions come from a high-level, top-down approach. That was the theme of the final talk in MIT’s Mobility Forum series, delivered on Friday by MIT Professor Thomas Magnanti, which centered on applying to transportation the same overarching analytical framework used in other domains, such as bioengineering.

      Magnanti’s remarks focused on a structured approach to problem-solving known as the 4M method — which stands for measuring, mining, modeling, and manipulating. In urban transportation planning, for instance, measuring and mining might involve understanding traffic flows. Modeling might simulate those traffic flows, and manipulating would mean engineering interventions: tolls, one-way streets, or other changes.

      “These are four things that interact quite a bit with each other,” said Magnanti, who is an Institute Professor — MIT’s highest faculty distinction — and a professor of operations research at the MIT Sloan School of Management. “And they provide us with a sense of how you can gather data and understand a system, but also how you can improve it.”

      Magnanti, a leading expert in operations research, pointed out that the 4M method can be applied to systems from physics to biomedical research. He outlined how it might be used to analyze transportations-related systems such as supply chains and warehouse movements.

      In all cases, he noted, applying the 4M concept to a system is an iterative process: Making changes to a system will likely produce new flows — of traffic and goods — and thus be subject to a new set of measurements.

      “One thing to notice here, once you manipulate the system, it changes the data,” Magnanti observed. “You’re doing this so you can hopefully improve operations, but it creates new data. So, you want to measure that new data again, you want to mine it, you want to model it again, and then manipulate it. … This is a continuing loop that we use in these systems.”

      Magnanti’s talk, “Understanding and Improving Transportation Systems,” was delivered online to a public audience of about 175 people. It was the 12th and final event of the MIT Mobility Forum in the fall 2021 semester. The event series is organized by the MIT Mobility Initiative, an Institute-wide effort to research and accelerate the evolution of transportation, at a time when decarbonization in the sector is critical.

      Other MIT Mobility Forum talks have focused on topics such as zero-environmental-impact aviation, measuring pedestrian flows in cities, autonomous vehicles, the impact of high-speed rail and subways on cities, values and equity in mobility design, and more.

      Overall, the forum “offers an opportunity to showcase the groundbreaking transportation research occurring across the Institute,” says Jinhua Zhao, an associate professor of transportation and city planning in MIT’s Department of Urban Studies and Planning, and director of the MIT Mobility Initiative.

      The initiative has held 39 such talks since it launched in 2020, and the series will continue again in the spring semester of 2022.

      One of the principal features of the forum, like the MIT Mobility Initiative in general, is that it “facilitates cross-disciplinary exchanges both within MIT and without,” Zhao says. Faculty and students from every school at MIT have participated in the forum, lending intellectual and methodological diversity to a broad field.

      For his part, Magnanti, who is both an engineer and operations researcher by training, embraced that interdisciplinary approach in his remarks, fielding a variety of audience questions after his talk, about research methods and other issues. Magnanti, who served from 2009 to 2017 as the founding president of the Singapore University of Technology and Design (with which MIT has had research collaborations), noted that the setting can heavily influence transportation research and progress.

      In Singapore, he noted, “They measure everything. They measure how people access the subway … and they use their data.” Of course, Singapore’s status as a city-state of modest size, among other factors, makes comprehensive transportation planning more feasible there. Still, Magnanti also noted that the infrastructure bill recently passed by the U.S. federal government is “going to provide lots of opportunities” for transportation improvements.

      And in general, Magnanti added, one of the best things academic leaders and research communities can do is to “continue to create a sense of excitement. Even when things are tough, the problems are going to be interesting.” More

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      in Environment

      Scientists and musicians tackle climate change together

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      Audiences may travel long distances to see their favorite musical acts in concert or to attend large music festivals, which can add to their personal carbon footprint of emissions that are steadily warming the planet. But these same audiences, and the performers they follow, are often quite aware of the dangers of climate change and eager to contribute to ways of curbing those emissions.

      How should the industry reconcile these two perspectives, and how should it harness the enormous influence that musicians have on their fans to help promote action on climate change?

      That was the focus of a wide-ranging discussion on Monday hosted by MIT’s Environmental Solutions Initiative, titled “Artists and scientists together on climate solutions.” The event, which was held live at the Media Lab’s Bartos Theater and streamed online, featured John Fernandez, director of ESI; Dava Newman, director of the Media Lab; Tony McGuinness, a musician with the group Above and Beyond; and Anna Johnson, the sustainability and environment officer at Involved Group, an organization dedicated to embedding sustainability in business operations in the arts and culture fields.

      Fernandez pointed out in opening the discussion that when it comes to influencing people’s attitudes and behavior, changes tend to come about not just through information from a particular field, but rather from a whole culture. “We started thinking about how we might work with artists, how to have scientists and engineers, inventors, and designers working with artists on the challenges that we really need to face,” he said.

      Dealing with the climate change issue, he said, “is not about 2050 or 2100. This is about 2030. This is about this decade. This is about the next two or three years, really shifting that curve” to lowering the world’s greenhouse gas emissions. “It’s not going to be done just with science and engineering,” he added. “It’s got to be done with artists and business and everyone else. It’s not only ‘all of the above’ solutions, it’s ‘all of the above’ people, coming together to solve this problem.”

      Newman, who is also a professor in MIT’s Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics and has served as a NASA deputy administrator, said that while scientists and engineers can produce vast amounts of useful data that clearly demonstrate the dramatic changes the Earth’s climate is undergoing, communicating that information effectively is often a challenge for these specialists. “That data is just the data, but that doesn’t change the hearts and minds,” she said.

      “As scientists, having the data from our satellites, looking down, but also flying airplanes into the atmosphere, … we have the sensors, and then what can we do with it all? … How do we change human behavior? That’s the part I don’t know how to do,” Newman said. “I can have the technology, I can get precision measurements, I can study it, but really at the end of the day, we have to change human behavior, and that is so hard.”

      And that’s where the world of art and music can play a part, she said. “The best way that I know how to do it is with artistic experiences. You can have one moving experience and when you wake up tomorrow, maybe you’re going to do something a little different.” To help generate the compassion and empathy needed to affect behavior positively, she said, “that’s where we turn to the storytellers. We turn to the visionaries.”

      McGuinness, whose electronic music trio has performed for millions of people around the world, said that his own awareness of the urgency of the climate issue came from his passion for scuba diving, and the dramatic changes he has seen over the last two decades. In diving at a coral reef off Palau in the South Pacific, he returned to what had been a lush, brightly colored ecosystem, and found that “immediately when you put your face under the water, you’re looking at the surface of the moon. It was a horrible shock to see this.”

      After this and other similar diving experiences, he said, “I just came away shocked and stunned,” and realizing the kinds of underwater experiences he had enjoyed would no longer exist for his children. After reading more on the subject of global warming,  “that really sort of tipped me over the edge. And I was like, this is probably the most important thing for living beings now. And that’s sort of where I’ve remained ever since.”

      While his group Above and Beyond has performed one song specifically related to global warming, he doesn’t expect that to be the most impactful way of using their influence. Rather, they’re trying to lead by example, he said, by paying more attention to everything from the supply chains of the merchandise sold at concerts to the emissions generated by travel to the concerts. They’re also being selective about concert venues and making an effort to find performance spaces that are making a significant effort to curb their emissions.

      “If people start voting with their wallets,” McGuinness said, “and there are companies that are doing better than others and are doing the right thing, maybe it’ll catch on. I guess that’s what we can hope for.”

      Understanding these kinds of issues, involving supply chains, transportation, and facilities associated within the music industry, has been the focus of much of Johnson’s work, through the organization Involved Group, which has entered into a collaboration with MIT through the Environmental Solutions Initiative. “It’s these kinds of novel partnerships that have so much potential to catalyze the change that we need to see at an incredible pace,” she said. Already, her group has worked with MIT on mapping out where emissions occur throughout the various aspects of the music industry.

      At a recent music festival in London, she said, the group interviewed hundreds of participants, including audience members, band members, and the crew. “We explored people’s level of awareness of the issues around climate change and environmental degradation,” she said. “And what was really interesting was that there was clearly a lot of awareness of the issue across those different stakeholders, and what felt like a real, genuine level of concern and also of motivation, to want to deepen their understanding of what their contribution on a personal level really meant.”

      Working together across the boundaries of different disciplines and areas of expertise could be crucial to winning the battle against global warming, Newman said. “That’s usually how breakthroughs work,” she said. “If we’re really looking to have impact, it’s going to be from teams of people who are trained across the disciplines.” She pointed out that 90 percent of MIT students are also musicians: “It does go together!” she said. “I think going forward, we have to create new academia, new opportunities that are truly multidisciplinary.” More

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      in Energy

      MIT makes strides on climate action plan

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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      in Energy

      MIT Energy Night 2021: Connecting global innovators to local talent

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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