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    Bringing sustainable and affordable electricity to all

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    When MIT electrical engineer Reja Amatya PhD ’12 arrived in Rwanda in 2015, she was whisked off to a village. She saw that diesel generators provided power to the local health center, bank, and shops, but like most of rural Rwanda, Karambi’s 200 homes did not have electricity. Amatya knew the hilly terrain would make it challenging to connect the village to high-voltage lines from the capital, Kigali, 50 kilometers away.

    While many consider electricity a basic human right, there are places where people have never flipped a light switch. Among the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals is global access to affordable, reliable, and sustainable energy by 2030. Recently, the U.N. reported that progress in global electrification had slowed due to the challenge of reaching those hardest to reach.

    Researchers from the MIT Energy Initiative (MITEI) and Comillas Pontifical University in Madrid created Waya Energy Inc., a Cambridge, Massachusetts-based startup commercializing MIT-developed planning and analysis software, to help governments determine the most cost-effective ways to provide electricity to all their citizens.

    The researchers’ 2015 trip to Rwanda marked the beginning of four years of phone calls, Zoom meetings, and international travel to help the east African country — still reeling from the 1994 genocide that killed more than a million people — develop a national electrification strategy and extend its power infrastructure.

    Amatya, Waya president and one of five Waya co-founders, knew that electrifying Karambi and the rest of the country would provide new opportunities for work, education, and connections — and the ability to charge cellphones, often an expensive and inconvenient undertaking.

    To date, Waya — with funding from the Asian Development Bank, the African Development Bank, the Inter-American Development Bank for Latin America, and the World Bank — has helped governments develop electrification plans in 22 countries on almost every continent, including in refugee camps in sub-Saharan Africa’s Sahel and Chad regions, where violence has led to 3 million internally displaced people.

    “With a modeling and visualization tool like ours, we are able to look at the entire spectrum of need and demand and say, ‘OK, what might be the most optimized solution?’” Amatya says.

    More than 15 graduate students and researchers from MIT and Comillas contributed to the development of Waya’s software under the supervision of Robert Stoner, the interim director at MITEI, and Ignacio Pérez-Arriaga, a visiting professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management from Comillas. Pérez-Arriaga looks at how changing electricity use patterns have forced utilities worldwide to rethink antiquated business models.

    The team’s Reference Electrification Model (REM) software pulls information from population density maps, satellite images, infrastructure data, and geospatial points of interest to determine where extending the grid will be most cost-effective and where other solutions would be more practical.

    “I always say we are agnostic to the technology,” Amatya says. “Traditionally, the only way to provide long-term reliable access was through the grid, but that’s changing. In many developing countries, there are many more challenges for utilities to provide reliable service.”

    Off-grid solutions

    Waya co-founder Stoner, who is also the founding director of the MIT Tata Center for Technology and Design, recognized early on that connecting homes to existing infrastructure was not always economically feasible. What’s more, billions of people with grid connections had unreliable access due to uneven regulation and challenging terrain.

    With Waya co-founders Andres Gonzalez-Garcia, a MITEI affiliate researcher, and Professor Fernando de Cuadra Garcia of Comillas, Pérez-Arriaga and Stoner led a team that developed a set of principles to guide universal regional electrification. Their approach — which they dubbed the Integrated Distribution Framework — incorporates elements of optimal planning as well as novel business models and regulation. Getting all three right is “necessary,” Stoner says, “if you want a viable long-term outcome.”

    Amatya says, “Initially, we designed REM to understand what the level of demand is in these countries with very rural and poor populations, and what the system should look like to serve it. We took a lot of that input into developing the model.” In 2019, Waya was created to commercialize the software and add consulting to the package of services the team provides.

    Now, in addition to advising governments and regulators on how to expand existing grids, Waya proposes options such as a mini-grid, powered by renewables like wind, hydropower, or solar, to serve single villages or large-scale mini-grid solutions for larger areas. In some cases, an even more localized, scalable solution is a mesh grid, which might consist of a single solar panel for a few houses that, over time, can be expanded and ultimately connected to the main grid.

    The REM software has been used to design off-grid systems for remote and mountainous regions in Uganda, Peru, Nigeria, Cambodia, Indonesia, India, and elsewhere. When Tata Power, India’s largest integrated power company, saw how well mini-grids would serve parts of east India, the company created a mini-grid division called Tata Renewables.

    Amatya notes that the REM software enables her to come up with an entire national electrification plan from her workspace in Cambridge. But site visits and on-the-ground partners are critical in helping the Waya team understand existing systems, engage with clients to assess demand, and identify stakeholders. In Haiti, an energy consultant reported that the existing grid had typically been operational only six out of every 24 hours. In Karambi, University of Rwanda students surveyed the village’s 200 families and helped lead a community-wide meeting.

    Waya connects with on-the-ground experts and agencies “who can engage directly with the government and other stakeholders, because many times those are the doors that we knock on,” Amatya says. “Local energy ministries, utilities, and regulators have to be open to regulatory change. They have to be open to working with financial institutions and new technology.”

    The goals of regulators, energy providers, funding agencies, and government officials must align in real time “to provide reliable access to energy for a billion people,” she says.

    Moving past challenges

    Growing up in Kathmandu, Amatya used to travel to remote villages with her father, an electrical engineer who designed cable systems for landlines for Nepal Telecom. She remembers being fascinated by the high-voltage lines crisscrossing Nepal on these trips. Now, she points out utility poles to her children and explains how the distribution lines carry power from local substations to customers.

    After majoring in engineering science and physics at Smith College, Amatya completed her PhD in electrical engineering at MIT in 2012. Within two years, she was traveling to off-grid communities in India as a research scientist exploring potential technologies for providing access. There were unexpected challenges: At the time, digitized geospatial data didn’t exist for many regions. In India in 2013, the team used phones to take pictures of paper maps spread out on tables. Team members now scour digital data available through Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and other sources for useful geographical information. 

    It’s one thing to create a plan, Amatya says, but how it gets utilized and implemented becomes a big question. With all the players involved — funding agencies, elected officials, utilities, private companies, and regulators within the countries themselves — it’s sometimes hard to know who’s responsible for next steps.

    “Besides providing technical expertise, our team engages with governments to, let’s say, develop a financial plan or an implementation plan,” she says. Ideally, Waya hopes to stay involved with each project long enough to ensure that its proposal becomes the national electrification strategy of the country. That’s no small feat, given the multiple players, the opaque nature of government, and the need to enact a regulatory framework where none may have existed.

    For Rwanda, Waya identified areas without service, estimated future demand, and proposed the most cost-effective ways to meet that demand with a mix of grid and off-grid solutions. Based on the electrification plan developed by the Waya team, officials have said they hope to have the entire country electrified by 2024.

    In 2017, by the time the team submitted its master plan, which included an off-grid solution for Karambi, Amatya was surprised to learn that electrification in the village had already occurred — an example, she says, of the challenging nature of local planning.

    Perhaps because of Waya’s focus and outreach efforts, Karambi had become a priority. However it happened, Amatya is happy that Karambi’s 200 families finally have access to electricity. More

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      in Energy

      Alumnus’ thermal battery helps industry eliminate fossil fuels

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      The explosion of renewable energy projects around the globe is leading to a saturation problem. As more renewable power contributes to the grid, the value of electricity is plummeting during the times of day when wind and solar hit peak productivity. The problem is limiting renewable energy investments in some of the sunniest and windiest places in the world.

      Now Antora Energy, co-founded by David Bierman SM ’14, PhD ’17, is addressing the intermittent nature of wind and solar with a low-cost, highly efficient thermal battery that stores electricity as heat to allow manufacturers and other energy-hungry businesses to eliminate their use of fossil fuels.

      “We take electricity when it’s cheapest, meaning when wind gusts are strongest and the sun is shining brightest,” Bierman explains. “We run that electricity through a resistive heater to drive up the temperature of a very inexpensive material — we use carbon blocks, which are extremely stable, produced at incredible scales, and are some of the cheapest materials on Earth. When you need to pull energy from the battery, you open a large shutter to extract thermal radiation, which is used to generate process heat or power using our thermophotovoltaic, or TPV, technology. The end result is a zero-carbon, flexible, combined heat and power system for industry.”

      Antora’s battery could dramatically expand the application of renewable energy by enabling its use in industry, a sector of the U.S. economy that accounted for nearly a quarter of all greenhouse gas emissions in 2021.

      Antora says it is able to deliver on the long-sought promise of heat-to-power TPV technology because it has achieved new levels of efficiency and scalability with its cells. Earlier this year, Antora opened a new manufacturing facility that will be capable of producing 2 megawatts of its TPV cells each year — which the company says makes it the largest TPV production facility in the world.

      Antora’s thermal battery manufacturing facilities and demonstration unit are located in sun-soaked California, where renewables make up close to a third of all electricity. But Antora’s team says its technology holds promise in other regions as increasingly large renewable projects connect to grids across the globe.

      “We see places today [with high renewables] as a sign of where things are going,” Bierman says. “If you look at the tailwinds we have in the renewable industry, there’s a sense of inevitability about solar and wind, which will need to be deployed at incredible scales to avoid a climate catastrophe. We’ll see terawatts and terawatts of new additions of these renewables, so what you see today in California or Texas or Kansas, with significant periods of renewable overproduction, is just the tip of the iceberg.”

      Bierman has been working on thermal energy storage and thermophotovoltaics since his time at MIT, and Antora’s ties to MIT are especially strong because its progress is the result of two MIT startups becoming one.

      Alumni join forces

      Bierman did his masters and doctoral work in MIT’s Department of Mechanical Engineering, where he worked on solid-state solar thermal energy conversion systems. In 2016, while taking course 15.366 (Climate and Energy Ventures), he met Jordan Kearns SM ’17, then a graduate student in the Technology and Policy Program and the Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering. The two were studying renewable energy when they began to think about the intermittent nature of wind and solar as an opportunity rather than a problem.

      “There are already places in the U.S. where we have more wind and solar at times than we know what to do with,” Kearns says. “That is an opportunity for not only emissions reductions but also for reducing energy costs. What’s the application? I don’t think the overproduction of energy was being talked about as much as the intermittency problem.”

      Kearns did research through the MIT Energy Initiative and the researchers received support from MIT’s Venture Mentoring Service and the MIT Sandbox Innovation Fund to further explore ways to capitalize on fluctuating power prices.

      Kearns officially founded a company called Medley Thermal in 2017 to help companies that use natural gas switch to energy produced by renewables when the price was right. To accomplish that, he combined an off-the-shelf electric boiler with novel control software so the companies could switch energy sources seamlessly from fossil fuel to electricity at especially windy or sunny times. Medley went on to become a finalist for the MIT Clean Energy Prize, and Kearns wanted Bierman to join him as a co-founder, but Bierman had received a fellowship to commercialize a thermal energy storage solution and decided to pursue that after graduation.

      The split ended up working out for both alumni. In the ensuing years, Kearns led Medley Thermal through a number of projects in which gradually larger companies switched from relying on natural gas or propane sources to renewable electricity from the grid. The work culminated in an installment at the Jay Peak resort in Vermont that Kearns says is one of the largest projects in the U.S. using renewable energy to produce heat. The project is expected to reduce about 2,500 tons of carbon dioxide per year.

      Bierman, meanwhile, further developed a thermal energy storage solution for industrial decarbonization, which works by using renewable electricity to heat blocks of carbon, which are stored in insulation to retain energy for long periods of time. The heat from those blocks can then be used to deliver electricity or heat to customers, at temperatures that can exceed 1,500 C. When Antora raised a $50 million Series A funding round last year, Bierman asked Kearns if he could buy out Medley’s team, and the researchers finally became co-workers.

      “Antora and Medley Thermal have a similar value prop: There’s low-cost electricity, and we want to connect that to the industrial sector,” Kearns explains. “But whereas Medley used renewables on an as-available basis, and then when the winds stop we went back to burning fossil fuel with a boiler, Antora has a thermal battery that takes in the electricity, converts it to heat, but also stores it as heat so even when the wind stops blowing we have a reservoir of heat that we can continue to pull from to make steam or power or whatever the facility needs. So, we can now further reduce energy costs by offsetting more fuel and offer a 100 percent clean energy solution.”

      United we scale

      Today, Kearns runs the project development arm of Antora.

      “There are other, much larger projects in the pipeline,” Kearns says. “The Jay Peak project is about 3 megawatts of power, but some of the ones we’re working on now are 30, 60 megawatt projects. Those are more industrial focused, and they’re located in places where we have a strong industrial base and an abundance of renewables, everywhere from Texas to Kansas to the Dakotas — that heart of the country that our team lovingly calls the Wind Belt.”

      Antora’s future projects will be with companies in the chemicals, mining, food and beverage, and oil and gas industries. Some of those projects are expected to come online as early as 2025.          

      The company’s scaling strategy is centered on the inexpensive production process for its batteries.

      “We constantly ask ourselves, ‘What is the best product we can make here?’” Bierman says. “We landed on a compact, containerized, modular system that gets shipped to sites and is easily integrated into industrial processes. It means we don’t have huge construction projects, timelines, and budget overruns. Instead, it’s all about scaling up the factory that builds these thermal batteries and just churning them out.”

      It was a winding journey for Kearns and Bierman, but they now believe they’re positioned to help huge companies become carbon-free while promoting the growth of the solar and wind industries.

      “The more I dig into this, the more shocked I am at how important a piece of the decarbonization puzzle this is today,” Bierman says. “The need has become super real since we first started talking about this in 2016. The economic opportunity has grown, but more importantly the awareness from industries that they need to decarbonize is totally different. Antora can help with that, so we’re scaling up as rapidly as possible to meet the demand we see in the market.” More

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      in Energy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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      in Environment

      Harnessing synthetic biology to make sustainable alternatives to petroleum products

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      Reducing our reliance on fossil fuels is going to require a transformation in the way we make things. That’s because the hydrocarbons found in fuels like crude oil, natural gas, and coal are also in everyday items like plastics, clothing, and cosmetics.

      Now Visolis, founded by Deepak Dugar SM ’11, MBA ’13, PhD ’13, is combining synthetic biology with chemical catalysis to reinvent the way the world makes things — and reducing gigatons of greenhouse gas emissions in the process.

      The company — which uses a microbe to ferment biomass waste like wood chips and create a molecular building block called mevalonic acid — is more sustainably producing everything from car tires and cosmetics to aviation fuels by tweaking the chemical processes involved to make different byproducts.

      “We started with [the rubber component] isoprene as the main molecule we produce [from mevalonic acid], but we’ve expanded our platform with this unique combination of chemistry and biology that allows us to decarbonize multiple supply chains very rapidly and efficiently,” Dugar explains. “Imagine carbon-negative yoga pants. We can make that happen. Tires can be carbon-negative, personal care can lower its footprint — and we’re already selling into personal care. So in everything from personal care to apparel to industrial goods, our platform is enabling decarbonization of manufacturing.”

      “Carbon-negative” is a term Dugar uses a lot. Visolis has already partnered with some of the world’s largest consumers of isoprene, a precursor to rubber, and now Dugar wants to prove out the company’s process in other emissions-intensive industries.

      “Our process is carbon-negative because plants are taking CO2 from the air, and we take that plant matter and process it into something structural, like synthetic rubber, which is used for things like roofing, tires, and other applications,” Dugar explains. “Generally speaking, most of that material at the end of its life gets recycled, for example to tarmac or road, or, worst-case scenario, it ends up in a landfill, so the CO2 that was captured by the plant matter stays captured in the materials. That means our production can be carbon-negative depending on the emissions of the production process. That allows us to not only reduce climate change but start reversing it. That was an insight I had about 10 years ago at MIT.”

      Finding a path

      For his PhD, Dugar explored the economics of using microbes to make high-octane gas additives. He also took classes at the MIT Sloan School of Management on sustainability and entrepreneurship, including the particularly influential course 15.366 (Climate and Energy Ventures). The experience inspired him to start a company.

      “I wanted to work on something that could have the largest climate impact, and that was replacing petroleum,” Dugar says. “It was about replacing petroleum not just as a fuel but as a material as well. Everything from the clothes we wear to the furniture we sit on is often made using petroleum.”

      By analyzing recent advances in synthetic biology and making some calculations from first principles, Dugar decided that a microbial approach to cleaning up the production of rubber was viable. He participated in the MIT Clean Energy Prize and worked with others at MIT to prove out the idea. But it was still just an idea. After graduation, he took a consulting job at a large company, spending his nights and weekends renting lab space to continue trying to make his sustainable rubber a reality.

      After 18 months, by applying engineering concepts like design-for-scale to synthetic biology, Dugar was able to develop a microbe that met 80 percent of his criteria for making an intermediate molecule called mevalonic acid. From there, he developed a chemical catalysis process that converted mevalonic acid to isoprene, the main component of natural rubber. Visolis has since patented other chemical conversion processes that turn mevalonic acid to aviation fuel, polymers, and fabrics.

      Dugar left his consulting job in 2014 and was awarded a fellowship to work on Visolis full-time at the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab via Activate, an incubator empowering scientists to reinvent the world.

      From rubber to jet fuels

      Today, in addition to isoprene, Visolis is selling skin care products through the brand Ameva Bio, which produces mevalonic acid-based creams by recycling plant byproducts created in other processes. The company offers refillable bottles and even offsets emissions from the shipping of its products.

      “We are working throughout the supply chain,” Dugar says. “It made sense to clean up the isoprene part of the rubber supply chain rather than the entire supply chain. But we’re also producing molecules for skin that are better for you, so you can put something much more sustainable and healthier on your body instead of petrochemicals. We launched Ameva to demonstrate that brands can leverage synthetic biology to turn carbon-negative ingredients into high-performing products.”

      Visolis is also starting the process of gaining regulatory approval for its sustainable aviation fuel, which Dugar believes could have the biggest climate impact of any of the company’s products by cleaning up the production of fuels for commercial flight.

      “We’re working with leading companies to help them decarbonize aviation” Dugar says. “If you look at the lifecycle of fuel, the current petroleum-based approach is we dig out hydrocarbons from the ground and burn it, emitting CO2 into the air. In our process, we take plant matter, which affixes to CO2 and captures renewable energy in those bonds, and then we transfer that into aviation fuel plus things like synthetic rubber, yoga pants, and other things that continue to hold the carbon. So, our factories can still operate at net zero carbon emissions.”

      Visolis is already generating millions of dollars in revenue, and Dugar says his goal is to scale the company rapidly now that its platform molecule has been validated.

      “We have been scaling our technology by 10 times every two to three years and are now looking to increase deployment of our technology at the same pace, which is very exciting.” Dugar says. “If you extrapolate that, very quickly you get to massive impact. That’s our goal.” More

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      in Environment

      MIT speaker series taps into students’ passion for entrepreneurship and social impact.

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      Last summer, leaders of MIT’s Venture Mentoring Service (VMS) noticed a growing trend in entrepreneur applications to the program: An increasing number of aspiring founders were expressing a passion for social impact.

      VMS, which connects students and alumni with teams of mentors, hosts bootcamps, holds expert office hours, and offers an annual Demo Day, did not previously have offerings to help founders focused on this type of impact, so its leaders decided to pilot an Impact Speaker Series.

      The series, which featured experienced early-stage entrepreneurs from the MIT community and took place throughout the year, was a smashing success. In total, more than 1,200 MIT community members registered across eight events, including students at all stages of their education as well as alumni interested in making a positive impact on the world through entrepreneurship.

      “We felt an intense desire from attendees to explore entrepreneurship as a path to solve our most pressing problems,” VMS mentor and series co-Lead Paul Bosco says. “The degree to which students identified with challenges such as climate, health, sustainability, and education, rather than their major, was striking. Our goal was to help them see a path as first-time founders.”

      Now VMS is riding the momentum from the speaker series by rolling out more support services for impact-driven students, including hosting additional events, adding experienced impact entrepreneurs and social enterprise experts to its network of mentors, and connecting with more funders and executives with experience leading organizations focused on impact.

      Ultimately, VMS believes these new efforts will bolster MIT’s broader mission of translating science and innovation from its labs and classrooms into positive advances around the world.

      “Our pivot to strengthen support for founders with a passion for impact is absolutely aligned with the mission of MIT,” Bosco says. “Pursuing research and ideas with a passion for world-changing impact has always been in the DNA of MIT. A new generation of entrepreneurs is challenging us to help them hone their skills and lead organizations to build a better world.”

      Striking a chord

      Each one of VMS’ events had a different theme, from addressing general founder challenges, like first time pre-seed or nondilutive fundraising to building startup ventures in sectors like climate, health care, and education. One panel focused on helping entrepreneurs find their personal paths to success and impact, featuring founders leading impactful companies at different stages of development. Another panel discussion, titled Funding Your Path to Impact and Success, featured investors and directors of programs funding ventures delivering impact.

      “I want to encourage founders to consider driving toward a new ‘unicorn success’ model, where success is not measured in $1-billion-dollar valuations, but is based on world-changing carbon reductions, water cleanliness, lives saved, students inspired, etc.,” Ela Mirowski, a program director with the National Science Foundation, told the audience at one event.

      In total, the events featured 24 expert speakers, early-stage founders, and funders. Impact driven businesses, speakers emphasized, can take many forms. Bosco, who moderated one of the panels, says he’s heard from students and alumni interested in starting for-profit companies focused on profit and impact, what he called “dual bottom lines,” as well as students interested in starting public benefit companies, social enterprises, and traditional nonprofit organizations.

      “VMS is getting better at tapping into the different types of entrepreneurs at different stages of their journeys,” says Akshit Singla SM ’22. “It’s exactly what’s needed, and I know that because there was a huge waitlist for these events.”

      Zahra Kanji, who attended VMS’s most recent event in May and is currently director of MIT Hacking Medicine, sees the speaker series as a natural response to evolving student needs.

      “For students, I think the focus has changed a lot over the years,” Kanji said. “There used to be a lot more interest in entrepreneurship with making money as the final goal, and now it’s turned into more of a triple goal, like a public benefit corporation or something that has more impact. So, hearing key lessons learned from experts is really important — these aren’t answers you can get in a textbook.”

      Listening to the community

      Many of next year’s VMS events will be similar to the events that most resonated with the MIT community this year. VMS will also be adding an event on entrepreneurship in artificial intelligence and computing for impact. VMS is hoping to continue expanding student connections to recent founders, or what Bosco refers to as “near-peer founders,” that can relate more closely with first-time founders navigating the current startup environment.

      “Given that many new entrepreneurs are shifting to focus on impact, we need to evolve,” says VMS mentor Matt Cherian SM ’11. “I’m glad students are starting to think differently, and I’m really glad VMS is making this programming to help people think in this new way.”

      “The most notable aspect of our series was the commitment of students, including undergrads, graduates, and postdocs, pursuing their passion for impact through entrepreneurship,” Bosco says. “Many students we met exploring entrepreneurship for impact have exceptional job offers from top employers, or if they are alums they’re leaving significant positions to pursue a greater purpose in their lives. It is profoundly inspiring and an honor to help each of these founders.” More

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      in Environment

      A clean alternative to one of the world’s most common ingredients

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      Never underestimate the power of a time crunch.

      In 2016, MIT classmates David Heller ’18, Shara Ticku, and Harry McNamara PhD ’19 were less than two weeks away from the deadline to present a final business plan as part of their class MAS.883 (Revolutionary Ventures: How to Invent and Deploy Transformative Technologies). The students had connected over a shared passion for using biology to solve climate challenges, but their first few ideas didn’t pan out, so they went back to the drawing board.

      In a brainstorming session, Ticku began to reminisce about a trip to Singapore she’d taken where the burning of forests had cast a dark haze over the city. The story sparked a memory from halfway across the world in Costa Rica, where McNamara had traveled and noticed endless rows of palm plantations, which are used to harvest palm oil.

      “Besides Shara’s experience in Singapore and Harry’s in Costa Rica, palm was a material none of us had seriously thought about,” Heller recalls. “That conversation made us realize it was a big, big industry, and there’s major issues to the way that palm is produced.”

      The classmates decided to try using synthetic biology to create a sustainable alternative to palm oil. The idea was the beginning of C16 Biosciences. Today C16 is fulfilling that mission at scale with a palm oil alternative it harvests from oil-producing yeast, which ferment sugars in a process similar to brewing beer.

      The company’s product, which it sells to personal care brands and directly to consumers, holds enormous potential to improve the sustainability of the personal care and food industries because, as it turns out, the classmates had stumbled onto a massive problem.

      Palm oil is the most popular vegetable oil in the world. It’s used in everything from soaps and cosmetics to sauces, rolls, and crackers. But palm oil can only be harvested from palm trees near the equator, so producers often burn down tropical rainforests and swamps in those regions to make way for plantations, decimating wildlife habitats and producing a staggering amount of greenhouse gas emissions. One recent study found palm expansion in Southeast Asia could account for 0.75 percent of the world’s total greenhouse gas emissions. That’s not even including the palm expansion happening across west Africa and South America. Among familiar creatures threatened by palm oil deforestation are orangutans, all three species of which are now listed as “critically endangered” — the most urgent status on the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species, a global endangered species list.

      “To respond to increasing demand over the last few decades, large palm producers usually inappropriately seize land,” Heller explains. “They’ll literally slash and burn tropical rainforests to the ground, drive out indigenous people, they’ll kill or drive out local wildlife, and they’ll replace everything with hectares and hectares of palm oil plantations. That land conversion process has been emitting something like a gigaton of CO2 per year, just for the expansion of palm oil.”

      From milliliters to metric tons

      Heller took Revolutionary Ventures his junior year as one of the few undergraduates in the Media Lab-based class, which is also open to students from nearby colleges. On one of the first days, students were asked to stand in front of the class and explain their passions, or “what makes them tick,” as Heller recalls. He focused on climate tech.

      McNamara, who was a PhD candidate in the Harvard-MIT Program in Health Sciences and Technology at the time, talked about his interest in applying new technology to global challenges in biotech and biophysics. Ticku, who was attending Harvard Business School, discussed her experience working in fertility health and her passion for global health initiatives. The three decided to team up.

      “The core group is very, very passionate about using biology to solve major climate problems,” says Heller, who majored in biological engineering while at MIT.

      After a successful final presentation in the class, the founders received a small amount of funding by participating in the MIT $100K Pitch Competition and from the MIT Sandbox Innovation Fund.

      “MIT Sandbox was one of our first bits of financial support,” Heller says. “We also received great mentorship. We learned from other startups at MIT and made connections with professors whom we learned a lot from.”

      By the time Heller graduated in 2018, the team had experimented with different yeast strains and produced a few milliliters of oil. The process has gradually been optimized and scaled up from there. Today C16 is producing metric tons of oil in 50,000-liter tanks and has launched a consumer cosmetic brand called Palmless.

      Heller says C16 started its own brand as a way to spread the word about the harms associated with palm oil and to show larger companies it was ready to be a partner.

      “The oil palm tree is amazing in terms of the yields it generates, but the location needed for the crop is in conflict with what’s essential in our ecosystem: tropical rainforests,” Heller says. “There’s a lot of excitement when it comes to microbial palm alternatives. A lot of brands have been under pressure from consumers and even governments who are feeling the urgency around climate and are feeling the urgency from consumers to make changes to get away from an oil ingredient that is incredibly destructive.”

      Scaling with biology

      C16’s first offering, which it calls Torula Oil, is a premium product compared to traditional palm oil, but Heller notes the cost of palm oil today is deflated because companies don’t factor in its costs to the planet and society. He also notes that C16 has a number of advantages in its quest to upend the $60 billion palm oil industry: It’s far easier to improve the productivity of C16’s precision fermentation process than it is to improve agricultural processes. C16 also expects its costs to plummet as it continues to grow.

      “What’s exciting for us is we have these economies of scale,” Heller says. “We have the opportunity to expand vertically, in large stainless steel tanks, as opposed to horizontally on land, so we can drive down our cost curve by increasing the size of the infrastructure and improving the optimization of our strain. The timelines for improvement in a precision fermentation process are a fraction of the time it takes in an agricultural context.”

      Heller says C16 is currently focused on partnering with large personal care brands and expects to announce some important deals in coming months. Further down the line, C16 also hopes to use its product to replace the palm oil in food products, although additional regulations mean that dream is still a few years away.

      With all of its efforts, C16 tries to shine a light on the problems associated with the palm industry, which the company feels are underappreciated despite palm oil’s ubiquitous presence in our society.

      “We need to find a way to reduce our reliance on deforestation products,” Heller says. “We do a lot of work to help educate people on the palm oil industry. Just because something has palm oil in it doesn’t mean you should stop using it, but you should understand what that means for the world.” More

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      Will the charging networks arrive in time?

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      For many owners of electric vehicles (EVs), or for prospective EV owners, a thorny problem is where to charge them. Even as legacy automakers increasingly invest in manufacturing more all-electric cars and trucks, there is not a dense network of charging stations serving many types of vehicles, which would make EVs more convenient to use.

      “We’re going to have the ability to produce and deliver millions of EVs,” said MIT Professor Charles Fine at the final session this semester of the MIT Mobility Forum. “It’s not clear we’re going to have the ability to charge them. That’s a huge, huge mismatch.”

      Indeed, making EV charging stations as ubiquitous as gas stations could spur a major transition within the entire U.S. vehicle fleet. While the automaker Tesla has built a network of almost 2,000 charging stations across the U.S., and might make some interoperable with other makes of vehicles, independent companies trying to develop a business out of it are still trying to gain significant traction.

      “They don’t have a business model that works yet,” said Fine, the Chrysler Leaders for Global Operations Professor of Management at the MIT Sloan School of Management, speaking of startup firms. “They haven’t figured out their supply chains. They haven’t figured out the customer value proposition. They haven’t figured out their technology standards. It’s a very, very immature domain.”

      The May 12 event drew nearly 250 people as well as an online audience. The MIT Mobility Forum is a weekly set of talks and discussions during the academic year, ranging widely across the field of transportation and design. It is hosted by the MIT Mobility Initiative, which works to advance sustainable, accessible, and safe forms of transportation.

      Fine is a prominent expert in the areas of operations strategy, entrepreneurship, and supply chain management. He has been at MIT Sloan for over 30 years; from 2015 to 2022, he also served as the founding president, dean, and CEO of the Asia School of Business in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, a collaboration between MIT Sloan and Bank Negara Malaysia. Fine is also author of “Faster, Smarter, Greener: The Future of the Car and Urban Mobility” (MIT Press, 2017).

      In Fine’s remarks, he discussed the growth stages of startup companies, highlighting three phases where firms try to “nail it, scale it, and sail it” — that is, figure out the concept and workability of their enterprise, try to expand it, and then operate as a larger company. The charging-business startups are still somewhere within the first of these phases.

      At the same time, the established automakers have announced major investments in EVs — a collective $860 billion over the next decade, Fine noted. Among others, Ford says it will invest $50 billion in EV production by 2026; General Motors plans to spend $35 billion on EVs by 2025; and Toyota has announced it will invest $35 billion in EV manufacturing by 2030.

      With all these vehicles potentially coming to market, Fine suggested, the crux of the issue is a kind of “chicken and egg” problem between EVs and the network needed to support them.

      “If you’re a startup company in the charging business, if there aren’t many EVs out there, you’re not going to be making much money, and that doesn’t give you the capital to continue to invest and grow,” Fine said. “So, they need to wait until they have revenue before they can grow further. On the other hand, why should anybody buy an electric car if they don’t think they’re going to be able to charge it?”

      Those living in single-family homes can install chargers. But many others are not in that situation, Fine noted: “For people who don’t have fixed parking spaces and have to rely on the public network, there is this chicken-and-egg problem. They can’t buy an EV unless they know how they’re going to be able to charge it, and charging companies can’t build out their networks unless they know how they’re going to get their revenue.”

      The event featured a question-and-answer session and audience discussion, with a range of questions, and comments from some industry veterans, including Robin Chase SM ’86, the co-founder and former CEO of Zipcar. She expressed some optimism that startup charging companies will be able to get traction in the nascent market before long.

      “The right companies can learn very fast,” Chase said. “There’s no reason why they can’t correct those scaling problems in short-ish order.”

      In answer to other audience questions, Fine noted some of the challenges that will have to be addressed by independent charging firms, such as unified standards and interoperability among automakers and charging stations.

      “For a driver to have to have six different apps, or [their] car doesn’t fit in the plug here or there, or my software doesn’t talk to my credit card … connectivity, standards, technical issues need to be worked out as well,” Fine said.

      There are also varying regulatory issues, including grid policies and what consumers can be billed for, which have to be worked out on a state-by-state basis, meaning that even modest-size startups will have to have knowledgeable and productive legal departments.

      All of which makes it possible, as Fine suggested, that the large legacy automakers will start investing more heavily in the charging business in the near future. Mercedes, he noted, just announced in January that it is entering into a partnership with charging firms ChargePoint and MN8 Energy to develop about 400 charging stations across North America by 2027. By necessity, others might have to follow suit if they want to protect their massive planned investments in the EV sector.

      “I’m not in the business of telling [automakers] what to do, but I do think they have a lot at risk,” Fine said. “They’re spending billions and billions of dollars to produce these cars, and I don’t think they can afford an epic failure [if] people don’t buy them because there’s no charging infrastructure. If they’re waiting for the startups to build out rapidly, then they may be waiting longer than they hope to wait.” More

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      MIT Energy Conference grapples with geopolitics

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      As Russia’s war in Ukraine rages on, this year’s MIT Energy Conference spotlighted the role of geopolitics in the world’s efforts to lower greenhouse gas emissions and mitigate the worst effects of climate change.

      Each year, the student-run conference, which its organizers say is the largest of its kind, brings together leaders from around the globe to discuss humanity’s most pressing energy and sustainability challenges.

      The event always involves perspectives from the investment, business, research, and startup communities. But this year, as more than 600 attendees gathered on April 11 and 12 for a whirlwind of keynote talks, fireside chats, and panel discussions, common themes also included the influence of Russia’s war, rising tensions between the U.S. and China, and international collaboration.

      As participants grappled with the evolving geopolitical landscape, some speakers encouraged moving past isolationist tendencies.

      “Some people push for self-sufficiency, others emphasize that we should not rely on trading partners that don’t share our values — I think both arguments are misguided,” said Juan Carlos Jobet, Chile’s former ministry of energy and mining. “No country has all that’s needed to create an energy system that’s affordable, clean, and secure. … A third of the world’s energy output is generated in nondemocratic countries. Can we really make our energy systems affordable and secure and curb climate change while excluding those countries from our collective effort? If we enter an area of protectionism and disintegration, we will all be worse off.”

      Another theme was optimism, such as that expressed by Volodymyr Kudrytskyi, CEO of Ukraine’s national power company, who spoke to the conference live from Kyiv. Kudrytskyi outlined Russia’s attacks on Ukraine’s power grids, which included more than 1,000 heavy missiles, making it the largest-ever campaign against a country’s power grid.

      Still, Kudrytskyi said he was confident he’d be able to attend the conference in person next year. As it happened, Kudrytskyi’s presentation marked the day Ukraine resumed its energy exports to other countries.

      “The good news is, after all of that, our system survived and continues operations,” he said.

      Energy security and the green transition

      Richard Duke, the U.S. Department of State’s deputy special envoy for climate, opened the conference with a keynote centered on the U.S.’ role in the global shift toward cleaner energy. Duke was among those advocating for a more integrated and diversified global energy system, noting that no country can address climate change on its own.

      “We need to do all of these things in parallel, in concert with other governments, and through the architecture of the Paris Climate agreement that wraps it together in ambitious net greenhouse gas abatement targets,” Duke said.

      Following his talk, Ditte Juul Jørgensen, the European Commission’s director general for energy, discussed the shift in the EU’s energy policies spurred by the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

      She admitted the EU had grown too dependent on Russian natural gas, but said the invasion forced European states to revise their energy strategy while keeping their long-term objective of net neutrality by 2050.

      “We see energy security and the green transition as interlinked. There is no energy security without the energy transition toward climate neutrality, and there’s no energy transition without energy security,” Jorgensen said.

      Jørgensen also outlined steps the EU has taken to improve its energy security over the last year, including rolling out additional renewable energy projects and replacing Russian fuel with fuel from the U.S., which has now become the continent’s main supplier of energy.

      “The fight against climate change is our shared ambition, it’s our shared responsibility, and I think we’ve shown over these last few years that we can turn that ambition into action and bring results,” she said.

      A challenge and an opportunity

      Optimism also shone through in the way speakers framed the green energy transition as a business opportunity. In keeping with the idea, the conference included a showcase of more than 30 startups focused on clean energy and sustainability.

      “We’re all battling a huge problem that needs a collective effort,” said Malav Sukhadia of Sol Clarity, a conference exhibitor that uses electricity to clean solar panels as a way to replace water cleaning. “This is one of the best energy conferences in the world. We felt if you’re in climate tech, you have to be here.”

      Technological development was a pillar of the conference, and a big topic in those discussions was green hydrogen, a clean fuel source that could replace natural gas in a number of applications and be produced using renewable energy. In one panel discussion on the technology, Sunita Satyapal of the Department of Energy noted the agency has been funding hydrogen development since the 1970s. Other panel members also stressed the maturity of the technology.

      “A lot of the technology needed to advance the ecosystem exists now,” said Laura Parkan, vice president of hydrogen energy at Air Liquide Americas. “The challenge is to get things to a large enough scale so that the costs come down to make it more affordable and really advance the hydrogen ecosystem.”

      Still, panel members acknowledged more technological development is needed to leverage the full potential of hydrogen, such as better mechanisms for storage and transportation.

      Other advanced technologies mentioned in panel discussions included advanced geothermal energy and small modular nuclear reactors that could be built and deployed more quickly than conventional reactors.

      “Exploring these different technologies may actually get us to the net zero — or even a zero carbon future — that we’re hoping for in electricity generation,” said Emma Wong of the OECD Nuclear Energy Agency, noting there are more than 80 advanced reactor designs that have been explored around the world. “There are various challenges and enabling conditions to be addressed, but places like China and Russia are already building these things, so there’s not a technological barrier.”

      “Glass half full”

      Despite the tall tasks that lie ahead, some speakers took a moment to celebrate accomplishments thus far.

      “It’s incredible to think about the progress we’ve made in the last 10 years,” said Neil Brown of the KKR investment firm, whose company is working to build a large offshore wind project. “Solar and wind and electric vehicles have gone from impossibly expensive and hard to imagine penetrating the market to being very close to, if not already at, cost parity. We’ve really come an awful long way.”

      Other speakers mixed their positivity with a confession of envy for the opportunity ahead of the young people in the audience, many of them students from MIT.

      “I have a mix of excitement from the speakers we’ve heard so far and a little bit of envy as well for the open road the young students and professionals here have in front of them,” said Jobert. “Coming back to this place has made me reconnect with the sense of opportunity and responsibility that I felt as a student.”

      Jobert offered lessons learned from his country’s struggles with an energy crisis, populist policies, and severe droughts. His talk finished with questions that struck at the heart of the conference.

      “The evidence is clear: The Earth will change. How much is still to be decided,” Jobert said. “The energy sector has been a central part of the problem. We now must work to become an essential pierce of the solution. Where should we focus our efforts? What can we learn from each other?” More

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      Responding to Ukraine’s “ocean of suffering”

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      Within 72 hours of the first Russian missiles striking Kyiv, Ukraine, in February 2022, Ian Miller SM ’19 boarded a flight for Poland.

      Later, he’d say he felt motivated by Kyiv’s “tragic ocean of suffering” and Ukrainian President Zelensky’s pleas for help. But he arrived with little notion of what to do.

      As he’d anticipated, his hotel in Rzeszów turned out to be a hub for aid workers and journalists. Miller was on his laptop, using the lobby Wi-Fi to work remotely as an MIT Energy Initiative (MITEI) project manager, when he overheard a reporter interviewing a Finnish man about his efforts to get bulletproof vests and helmets to the front lines.

      Miller soon found himself loading supplies onto trains that had brought huge numbers of refugees — mostly women, children, and the elderly — to the station in Rzeszów. The trains ran back at night, their empty seats filled with medical supplies, generators, and baby food, their lights dimmed to reduce the chances of attack.

      In April 2022, Miller and volunteers from a half-dozen countries planned and drove a convoy of trucks packed with tourniquets, bandages, and bulletproof vests across the border, arriving at the site of the Bucha massacre soon after the Russians retreated.

      Miller peered into a mass grave. “They were still excavating it, and those weren’t soldiers, you know?” he says. “I try to avoid looking at things like that too often, because it doesn’t help us save lives to be horrified all the time.” He downplays any potential danger to himself, telling his family he’s safer where he is than in parts of the United States.

      Soon after his first trip across the border, Miller convinced his former MIT roommate, Evan Platt SM ’20, to come help. “Just for a week,” he told Platt.

      Inspired by energy

      Miller and Platt met in 2008 in Washington, where Platt was interning at the White House and Miller was about to start his senior year at Georgetown University.

      Miller majored in government, but his interest in energy policy and technology grew during the years after graduation he spent teaching science to primary and secondary school students in New York, where he’d grown up; in Boston; and in Kampala, Uganda. “Some of the most fun, inspiring, engaging lessons and modules I did with the kids were focused on energy,” he recalls.

      While pursuing an MIT master of science in chemical engineering from 2016 to 2018, he started researching photovoltaics and wind power. He held leadership positions with the MIT Energy Conference and the MIT Energy Club.

      After joining MITEI, Miller worked on electric vehicles (EVs), EV charging patterns, and other applications. He became project manager and research specialist for the Sustainable Energy System Analysis Modeling Environment (SESAME), which models the levels of greenhouse gas emissions from multiple energy sectors in future scenarios.

      Miller and Platt reconnected and shared an apartment for three years. Platt studied systems design and management through a joint MIT School of Engineering and Sloan School of Management program, then stayed on to work for the MIT Technology Licensing Office.

      Platt left MIT to pursue other interests in 2020. The next time the two would see each other would be in Poland.

      “It’s not easy living and working in an active combat zone,” Platt says. “There is nobody on Earth I would rather be navigating this environment with than Ian.”

      Navigating the last mile

      In Rzeszów and Ukraine, Miller and U.S. Air Force veteran Mark Lindquist oversaw fulfillment for the new team. With the help of Google Translate, their phones lit up with encrypted texts to and from Polish customs agents and Ukrainian warehouse operators.

      Platt and two Ukrainian team members took the lead on a needs analysis of what was most in demand at the front. Another team member led procurement. Their efforts crystallized in the creation of Zero Line, a tax-exempt nonprofit that works closely with the Ukrainian government at the front line (a.k.a. “the zero line”).

      With Platt on board, “we got more rigorous and quantitative in terms of lives-saved-per-dollar,” Miller says. A hundred dollars buys four tourniquets. A thousand dollars adds crude steel armor to a Jeep. Two thousand dollars provides a small observation drone or a satellite phone, equipment that locates Russian artillery and detects Russian attacks.

      “Russian artillery shells are the No. 1 killer of Ukrainians, causing around 80 percent of casualties,” he says. “Tourniquets save people injured by Russian shells, vehicles help evacuate them, and communications equipment prevents deadly injuries from occurring in the first place.”

      Miller’s skills in transportation and power system modeling, developed at MITEI under Principal Research Scientist Emre Gençer, helped the team transport more than 150 used vehicles — Nissan Pathfinders and vans for moving civilians away from the front, Ford pickups for transporting anti-missile defense systems — and hundreds of batteries, generators, drones, bulletproof vests, and helmets to the front through nightmarish logistical bottlenecks.

      Typically, supplies from the United States, Asia, and elsewhere in Europe move through Gdansk and Warsaw, then proceed via train or vehicle to warehouses in Lviv, around 70 kilometers east of the border. Next is the seven-hour trip to Kyiv or the 12-hour drive to Dnipro (the current southern edge of the safe “green zone”) and the final 200 kilometers to the front. Here, says Miller, drivers with training and protective gear, often members of the Ukrainian military, take vehicles and supplies to front-line end users.

      “From day one, we asked our Ukrainian members and partners for introductions, and we’re constantly looking for more,” Miller says. “When our vehicles reach the front lines, Evan’s team always does interviews about needs, and what’s working, what’s not. What’s saving the most lives.”

      “From my early days with Ian, it’s clear he was always looking for ways to help people. Connections were really important to him,” says MITEI Director Robert C. Armstrong. “When war broke out, he found the call to answer human need irresistible. I think many of us think of doing that, but we get bogged down in the mechanics of everyday life. He just picked up and went.

      “Ian is just a terrific person and a great role model,” Armstrong says.

      Accelerating peace

      From the time Miller arrived in late February through October 2022, he continued working remotely for MITEI. He now works full time as co-director of Zero Line. For the foreseeable future, Miller will remain in Ukraine and Poland.

      He wants to see Ukrainians “follow in the happy, free, prospering footsteps of other ex-Soviet states, like the Baltics,” he says. He’d like to see the supply-chain innovations he and Platt achieved applied to humanitarian crises elsewhere.

      To date, Zero Line has raised more than $5 million in donations and delivered hundreds of tons of high-impact aid. “A key part of our approach has always been to support Ukrainians who excel in saving lives,” Miller says. To that end, the group works with Ukrainian software programmers and military units to create digital maps and processes to replace paper maps and operations “reminiscent of World War II,” Platt says. “Modernizing the intelligence infrastructure to facilitate better military operations is an important part of how a smaller military can beat a larger, more powerful military.”

      The fact that energy underlies so many aspects of the war is never far from Miller’s mind. Russia cut off energy supplies to Europe, then targeted Ukraine’s energy infrastructure. On one hand, he understands that billions of people in developing countries such as India need and deserve affordable energy. On the other hand, he says, oil and gas purchases by those countries are directly funding Russia’s war machine.

      “Everyone wants cheap renewables and we’re getting there, but it’s taking time. Lowering the costs of renewables and energy storage and supporting nascent commercial fusion — that’s a very important focus of MITEI. In the long run, that’ll help us reach a more peaceful world, without a doubt.”

      Work at MITEI and at Zero Line, Miller says, “truly could accelerate peace.” More