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    Reducing carbon emissions from residential heating: A pathway forward

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    In the race to reduce climate-warming carbon emissions, the buildings sector is falling behind. While carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions in the U.S. electric power sector dropped by 34 percent between 2005 and 2021, emissions in the building sector declined by only 18 percent in that same time period. Moreover, in extremely cold locations, burning natural gas to heat houses can make up a substantial share of the emissions portfolio. Therefore, steps to electrify buildings in general, and residential heating in particular, are essential for decarbonizing the U.S. energy system.But that change will increase demand for electricity and decrease demand for natural gas. What will be the net impact of those two changes on carbon emissions and on the cost of decarbonizing? And how will the electric power and natural gas sectors handle the new challenges involved in their long-term planning for future operations and infrastructure investments?A new study by MIT researchers with support from the MIT Energy Initiative (MITEI) Future Energy Systems Center unravels the impacts of various levels of electrification of residential space heating on the joint power and natural gas systems. A specially devised modeling framework enabled them to estimate not only the added costs and emissions for the power sector to meet the new demand, but also any changes in costs and emissions that result for the natural gas sector.The analyses brought some surprising outcomes. For example, they show that — under certain conditions — switching 80 percent of homes to heating by electricity could cut carbon emissions and at the same time significantly reduce costs over the combined natural gas and electric power sectors relative to the case in which there is only modest switching. That outcome depends on two changes: Consumers must install high-efficiency heat pumps plus take steps to prevent heat losses from their homes, and planners in the power and the natural gas sectors must work together as they make long-term infrastructure and operations decisions. Based on their findings, the researchers stress the need for strong state, regional, and national policies that encourage and support the steps that homeowners and industry planners can take to help decarbonize today’s building sector.A two-part modeling approachTo analyze the impacts of electrification of residential heating on costs and emissions in the combined power and gas sectors, a team of MIT experts in building technology, power systems modeling, optimization techniques, and more developed a two-part modeling framework. Team members included Rahman Khorramfar, a senior postdoc in MITEI and the Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems (LIDS); Morgan Santoni-Colvin SM ’23, a former MITEI graduate research assistant, now an associate at Energy and Environmental Economics, Inc.; Saurabh Amin, a professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering and principal investigator in LIDS; Audun Botterud, a principal research scientist in LIDS; Leslie Norford, a professor in the Department of Architecture; and Dharik Mallapragada, a former MITEI principal research scientist, now an assistant professor at New York University, who led the project. They describe their new methods and findings in a paper published in the journal Cell Reports Sustainability on Feb. 6.The first model in the framework quantifies how various levels of electrification will change end-use demand for electricity and for natural gas, and the impacts of possible energy-saving measures that homeowners can take to help. “To perform that analysis, we built a ‘bottom-up’ model — meaning that it looks at electricity and gas consumption of individual buildings and then aggregates their consumption to get an overall demand for power and for gas,” explains Khorramfar. By assuming a wide range of building “archetypes” — that is, groupings of buildings with similar physical characteristics and properties — coupled with trends in population growth, the team could explore how demand for electricity and for natural gas would change under each of five assumed electrification pathways: “business as usual” with modest electrification, medium electrification (about 60 percent of homes are electrified), high electrification (about 80 percent of homes make the change), and medium and high electrification with “envelope improvements,” such as sealing up heat leaks and adding insulation.The second part of the framework consists of a model that takes the demand results from the first model as inputs and “co-optimizes” the overall electricity and natural gas system to minimize annual investment and operating costs while adhering to any constraints, such as limits on emissions or on resource availability. The modeling framework thus enables the researchers to explore the impact of each electrification pathway on the infrastructure and operating costs of the two interacting sectors.The New England case study: A challenge for electrificationAs a case study, the researchers chose New England, a region where the weather is sometimes extremely cold and where burning natural gas to heat houses contributes significantly to overall emissions. “Critics will say that electrification is never going to happen [in New England]. It’s just too expensive,” comments Santoni-Colvin. But he notes that most studies focus on the electricity sector in isolation. The new framework considers the joint operation of the two sectors and then quantifies their respective costs and emissions. “We know that electrification will require large investments in the electricity infrastructure,” says Santoni-Colvin. “But what hasn’t been well quantified in the literature is the savings that we generate on the natural gas side by doing that — so, the system-level savings.”Using their framework, the MIT team performed model runs aimed at an 80 percent reduction in building-sector emissions relative to 1990 levels — a target consistent with regional policy goals for 2050. The researchers defined parameters including details about building archetypes, the regional electric power system, existing and potential renewable generating systems, battery storage, availability of natural gas, and other key factors describing New England.They then performed analyses assuming various scenarios with different mixes of home improvements. While most studies assume typical weather, they instead developed 20 projections of annual weather data based on historical weather patterns and adjusted for the effects of climate change through 2050. They then analyzed their five levels of electrification.Relative to business-as-usual projections, results from the framework showed that high electrification of residential heating could more than double the demand for electricity during peak periods and increase overall electricity demand by close to 60 percent. Assuming that building-envelope improvements are deployed in parallel with electrification reduces the magnitude and weather sensitivity of peak loads and creates overall efficiency gains that reduce the combined demand for electricity plus natural gas for home heating by up to 30 percent relative to the present day. Notably, a combination of high electrification and envelope improvements resulted in the lowest average cost for the overall electric power-natural gas system in 2050.Lessons learnedReplacing existing natural gas-burning furnaces and boilers with heat pumps reduces overall energy consumption. Santoni-Colvin calls it “something of an intuitive result” that could be expected because heat pumps are “just that much more efficient than old, fossil fuel-burning systems. But even so, we were surprised by the gains.”Other unexpected results include the importance of homeowners making more traditional energy efficiency improvements, such as adding insulation and sealing air leaks — steps supported by recent rebate policies. Those changes are critical to reducing costs that would otherwise be incurred for upgrading the electricity grid to accommodate the increased demand. “You can’t just go wild dropping heat pumps into everybody’s houses if you’re not also considering other ways to reduce peak loads. So it really requires an ‘all of the above’ approach to get to the most cost-effective outcome,” says Santoni-Colvin.Testing a range of weather outcomes also provided important insights. Demand for heating fuel is very weather-dependent, yet most studies are based on a limited set of weather data — often a “typical year.” The researchers found that electrification can lead to extended peak electric load events that can last for a few days during cold winters. Accordingly, the researchers conclude that there will be a continuing need for a “firm, dispatchable” source of electricity; that is, a power-generating system that can be relied on to produce power any time it’s needed — unlike solar and wind systems. As examples, they modeled some possible technologies, including power plants fired by a low-carbon fuel or by natural gas equipped with carbon capture equipment. But they point out that there’s no way of knowing what types of firm generators will be available in 2050. It could be a system that’s not yet mature, or perhaps doesn’t even exist today.In presenting their findings, the researchers note several caveats. For one thing, their analyses don’t include the estimated cost to homeowners of installing heat pumps. While that cost is widely discussed and debated, that issue is outside the scope of their current project.In addition, the study doesn’t specify what happens to existing natural gas pipelines. “Some homes are going to electrify and get off the gas system and not have to pay for it, leaving other homes with increasing rates because the gas system cost now has to be divided among fewer customers,” says Khorramfar. “That will inevitably raise equity questions that need to be addressed by policymakers.”Finally, the researchers note that policies are needed to drive residential electrification. Current financial support for installation of heat pumps and steps to make homes more thermally efficient are a good start. But such incentives must be coupled with a new approach to planning energy infrastructure investments. Traditionally, electric power planning and natural gas planning are performed separately. However, to decarbonize residential heating, the two sectors should coordinate when planning future operations and infrastructure needs. Results from the MIT analysis indicate that such cooperation could significantly reduce both emissions and costs for residential heating — a change that would yield a much-needed step toward decarbonizing the buildings sector as a whole. More

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      Toward sustainable decarbonization of aviation in Latin America

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      According to the International Energy Agency, aviation accounts for about 2 percent of global carbon dioxide emissions, and aviation emissions are expected to double by mid-century as demand for domestic and international air travel rises. To sharply reduce emissions in alignment with the Paris Agreement’s long-term goal to keep global warming below 1.5 degrees Celsius, the International Air Transport Association (IATA) has set a goal to achieve net-zero carbon emissions by 2050. Which raises the question: Are there technologically feasible and economically viable strategies to reach that goal within the next 25 years?To begin to address that question, a team of researchers at the MIT Center for Sustainability Science and Strategy (CS3) and the MIT Laboratory for Aviation and the Environment has spent the past year analyzing aviation decarbonization options in Latin America, where air travel is expected to more than triple by 2050 and thereby double today’s aviation-related emissions in the region.Chief among those options is the development and deployment of sustainable aviation fuel. Currently produced from low- and zero-carbon sources (feedstock) including municipal waste and non-food crops, and requiring practically no alteration of aircraft systems or refueling infrastructure, sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) has the potential to perform just as well as petroleum-based jet fuel with as low as 20 percent of its carbon footprint.Focused on Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Mexico and Peru, the researchers assessed SAF feedstock availability, the costs of corresponding SAF pathways, and how SAF deployment would likely impact fuel use, prices, emissions, and aviation demand in each country. They also explored how efficiency improvements and market-based mechanisms could help the region to reach decarbonization targets. The team’s findings appear in a CS3 Special Report.SAF emissions, costs, and sourcesUnder an ambitious emissions mitigation scenario designed to cap global warming at 1.5 C and raise the rate of SAF use in Latin America to 65 percent by 2050, the researchers projected aviation emissions to be reduced by about 60 percent in 2050 compared to a scenario in which existing climate policies are not strengthened. To achieve net-zero emissions by 2050, other measures would be required, such as improvements in operational and air traffic efficiencies, airplane fleet renewal, alternative forms of propulsion, and carbon offsets and removals.As of 2024, jet fuel prices in Latin America are around $0.70 per liter. Based on the current availability of feedstocks, the researchers projected SAF costs within the six countries studied to range from $1.11 to $2.86 per liter. They cautioned that increased fuel prices could affect operating costs of the aviation sector and overall aviation demand unless strategies to manage price increases are implemented.Under the 1.5 C scenario, the total cumulative capital investments required to build new SAF producing plants between 2025 and 2050 were estimated at $204 billion for the six countries (ranging from $5 billion in Ecuador to $84 billion in Brazil). The researchers identified sugarcane- and corn-based ethanol-to-jet fuel, palm oil- and soybean-based hydro-processed esters and fatty acids as the most promising feedstock sources in the near term for SAF production in Latin America.“Our findings show that SAF offers a significant decarbonization pathway, which must be combined with an economy-wide emissions mitigation policy that uses market-based mechanisms to offset the remaining emissions,” says Sergey Paltsev, lead author of the report, MIT CS3 deputy director, and senior research scientist at the MIT Energy Initiative.RecommendationsThe researchers concluded the report with recommendations for national policymakers and aviation industry leaders in Latin America.They stressed that government policy and regulatory mechanisms will be needed to create sufficient conditions to attract SAF investments in the region and make SAF commercially viable as the aviation industry decarbonizes operations. Without appropriate policy frameworks, SAF requirements will affect the cost of air travel. For fuel producers, stable, long-term-oriented policies and regulations will be needed to create robust supply chains, build demand for establishing economies of scale, and develop innovative pathways for producing SAF.Finally, the research team recommended a region-wide collaboration in designing SAF policies. A unified decarbonization strategy among all countries in the region will help ensure competitiveness, economies of scale, and achievement of long-term carbon emissions-reduction goals.“Regional feedstock availability and costs make Latin America a potential major player in SAF production,” says Angelo Gurgel, a principal research scientist at MIT CS3 and co-author of the study. “SAF requirements, combined with government support mechanisms, will ensure sustainable decarbonization while enhancing the region’s connectivity and the ability of disadvantaged communities to access air transport.”Financial support for this study was provided by LATAM Airlines and Airbus. More

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      The multifaceted challenge of powering AI

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      Artificial intelligence has become vital in business and financial dealings, medical care, technology development, research, and much more. Without realizing it, consumers rely on AI when they stream a video, do online banking, or perform an online search. Behind these capabilities are more than 10,000 data centers globally, each one a huge warehouse containing thousands of computer servers and other infrastructure for storing, managing, and processing data. There are now over 5,000 data centers in the United States, and new ones are being built every day — in the U.S. and worldwide. Often dozens are clustered together right near where people live, attracted by policies that provide tax breaks and other incentives, and by what looks like abundant electricity.And data centers do consume huge amounts of electricity. U.S. data centers consumed more than 4 percent of the country’s total electricity in 2023, and by 2030 that fraction could rise to 9 percent, according to the Electric Power Research Institute. A single large data center can consume as much electricity as 50,000 homes.The sudden need for so many data centers presents a massive challenge to the technology and energy industries, government policymakers, and everyday consumers. Research scientists and faculty members at the MIT Energy Initiative (MITEI) are exploring multiple facets of this problem — from sourcing power to grid improvement to analytical tools that increase efficiency, and more. Data centers have quickly become the energy issue of our day.Unexpected demand brings unexpected solutionsSeveral companies that use data centers to provide cloud computing and data management services are announcing some surprising steps to deliver all that electricity. Proposals include building their own small nuclear plants near their data centers and even restarting one of the undamaged nuclear reactors at Three Mile Island, which has been shuttered since 2019. (A different reactor at that plant partially melted down in 1979, causing the nation’s worst nuclear power accident.) Already the need to power AI is causing delays in the planned shutdown of some coal-fired power plants and raising prices for residential consumers. Meeting the needs of data centers is not only stressing power grids, but also setting back the transition to clean energy needed to stop climate change.There are many aspects to the data center problem from a power perspective. Here are some that MIT researchers are focusing on, and why they’re important.An unprecedented surge in the demand for electricity“In the past, computing was not a significant user of electricity,” says William H. Green, director of MITEI and the Hoyt C. Hottel Professor in the MIT Department of Chemical Engineering. “Electricity was used for running industrial processes and powering household devices such as air conditioners and lights, and more recently for powering heat pumps and charging electric cars. But now all of a sudden, electricity used for computing in general, and by data centers in particular, is becoming a gigantic new demand that no one anticipated.”Why the lack of foresight? Usually, demand for electric power increases by roughly half-a-percent per year, and utilities bring in new power generators and make other investments as needed to meet the expected new demand. But the data centers now coming online are creating unprecedented leaps in demand that operators didn’t see coming. In addition, the new demand is constant. It’s critical that a data center provides its services all day, every day. There can be no interruptions in processing large datasets, accessing stored data, and running the cooling equipment needed to keep all the packed-together computers churning away without overheating.Moreover, even if enough electricity is generated, getting it to where it’s needed may be a problem, explains Deepjyoti Deka, a MITEI research scientist. “A grid is a network-wide operation, and the grid operator may have sufficient generation at another location or even elsewhere in the country, but the wires may not have sufficient capacity to carry the electricity to where it’s wanted.” So transmission capacity must be expanded — and, says Deka, that’s a slow process.Then there’s the “interconnection queue.” Sometimes, adding either a new user (a “load”) or a new generator to an existing grid can cause instabilities or other problems for everyone else already on the grid. In that situation, bringing a new data center online may be delayed. Enough delays can result in new loads or generators having to stand in line and wait for their turn. Right now, much of the interconnection queue is already filled up with new solar and wind projects. The delay is now about five years. Meeting the demand from newly installed data centers while ensuring that the quality of service elsewhere is not hampered is a problem that needs to be addressed.Finding clean electricity sourcesTo further complicate the challenge, many companies — including so-called “hyperscalers” such as Google, Microsoft, and Amazon — have made public commitments to having net-zero carbon emissions within the next 10 years. Many have been making strides toward achieving their clean-energy goals by buying “power purchase agreements.” They sign a contract to buy electricity from, say, a solar or wind facility, sometimes providing funding for the facility to be built. But that approach to accessing clean energy has its limits when faced with the extreme electricity demand of a data center.Meanwhile, soaring power consumption is delaying coal plant closures in many states. There are simply not enough sources of renewable energy to serve both the hyperscalers and the existing users, including individual consumers. As a result, conventional plants fired by fossil fuels such as coal are needed more than ever.As the hyperscalers look for sources of clean energy for their data centers, one option could be to build their own wind and solar installations. But such facilities would generate electricity only intermittently. Given the need for uninterrupted power, the data center would have to maintain energy storage units, which are expensive. They could instead rely on natural gas or diesel generators for backup power — but those devices would need to be coupled with equipment to capture the carbon emissions, plus a nearby site for permanently disposing of the captured carbon.Because of such complications, several of the hyperscalers are turning to nuclear power. As Green notes, “Nuclear energy is well matched to the demand of data centers, because nuclear plants can generate lots of power reliably, without interruption.”In a much-publicized move in September, Microsoft signed a deal to buy power for 20 years after Constellation Energy reopens one of the undamaged reactors at its now-shuttered nuclear plant at Three Mile Island, the site of the much-publicized nuclear accident in 1979. If approved by regulators, Constellation will bring that reactor online by 2028, with Microsoft buying all of the power it produces. Amazon also reached a deal to purchase power produced by another nuclear plant threatened with closure due to financial troubles. And in early December, Meta released a request for proposals to identify nuclear energy developers to help the company meet their AI needs and their sustainability goals.Other nuclear news focuses on small modular nuclear reactors (SMRs), factory-built, modular power plants that could be installed near data centers, potentially without the cost overruns and delays often experienced in building large plants. Google recently ordered a fleet of SMRs to generate the power needed by its data centers. The first one will be completed by 2030 and the remainder by 2035.Some hyperscalers are betting on new technologies. For example, Google is pursuing next-generation geothermal projects, and Microsoft has signed a contract to purchase electricity from a startup’s fusion power plant beginning in 2028 — even though the fusion technology hasn’t yet been demonstrated.Reducing electricity demandOther approaches to providing sufficient clean electricity focus on making the data center and the operations it houses more energy efficient so as to perform the same computing tasks using less power. Using faster computer chips and optimizing algorithms that use less energy are already helping to reduce the load, and also the heat generated.Another idea being tried involves shifting computing tasks to times and places where carbon-free energy is available on the grid. Deka explains: “If a task doesn’t have to be completed immediately, but rather by a certain deadline, can it be delayed or moved to a data center elsewhere in the U.S. or overseas where electricity is more abundant, cheaper, and/or cleaner? This approach is known as ‘carbon-aware computing.’” We’re not yet sure whether every task can be moved or delayed easily, says Deka. “If you think of a generative AI-based task, can it easily be separated into small tasks that can be taken to different parts of the country, solved using clean energy, and then be brought back together? What is the cost of doing this kind of division of tasks?”That approach is, of course, limited by the problem of the interconnection queue. It’s difficult to access clean energy in another region or state. But efforts are under way to ease the regulatory framework to make sure that critical interconnections can be developed more quickly and easily.What about the neighbors?A major concern running through all the options for powering data centers is the impact on residential energy consumers. When a data center comes into a neighborhood, there are not only aesthetic concerns but also more practical worries. Will the local electricity service become less reliable? Where will the new transmission lines be located? And who will pay for the new generators, upgrades to existing equipment, and so on? When new manufacturing facilities or industrial plants go into a neighborhood, the downsides are generally offset by the availability of new jobs. Not so with a data center, which may require just a couple dozen employees.There are standard rules about how maintenance and upgrade costs are shared and allocated. But the situation is totally changed by the presence of a new data center. As a result, utilities now need to rethink their traditional rate structures so as not to place an undue burden on residents to pay for the infrastructure changes needed to host data centers.MIT’s contributionsAt MIT, researchers are thinking about and exploring a range of options for tackling the problem of providing clean power to data centers. For example, they are investigating architectural designs that will use natural ventilation to facilitate cooling, equipment layouts that will permit better airflow and power distribution, and highly energy-efficient air conditioning systems based on novel materials. They are creating new analytical tools for evaluating the impact of data center deployments on the U.S. power system and for finding the most efficient ways to provide the facilities with clean energy. Other work looks at how to match the output of small nuclear reactors to the needs of a data center, and how to speed up the construction of such reactors.MIT teams also focus on determining the best sources of backup power and long-duration storage, and on developing decision support systems for locating proposed new data centers, taking into account the availability of electric power and water and also regulatory considerations, and even the potential for using what can be significant waste heat, for example, for heating nearby buildings. Technology development projects include designing faster, more efficient computer chips and more energy-efficient computing algorithms.In addition to providing leadership and funding for many research projects, MITEI is acting as a convenor, bringing together companies and stakeholders to address this issue. At MITEI’s 2024 Annual Research Conference, a panel of representatives from two hyperscalers and two companies that design and construct data centers together discussed their challenges, possible solutions, and where MIT research could be most beneficial.As data centers continue to be built, and computing continues to create an unprecedented increase in demand for electricity, Green says, scientists and engineers are in a race to provide the ideas, innovations, and technologies that can meet this need, and at the same time continue to advance the transition to a decarbonized energy system. More

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      in Energy

      The role of modeling in the energy transition

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

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      in Environment

      Enabling a circular economy in the built environment

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      The amount of waste generated by the construction sector underscores an urgent need for embracing circularity — a sustainable model that aims to minimize waste and maximize material efficiency through recovery and reuse — in the built environment: 600 million tons of construction and demolition waste was produced in the United States alone in 2018, with 820 million tons reported in the European Union, and an excess of 2 billion tons annually in China.This significant resource loss embedded in our current industrial ecosystem marks a linear economy that operates on a “take-make-dispose” model of construction; in contrast, the “make-use-reuse” approach of a circular economy offers an important opportunity to reduce environmental impacts.A team of MIT researchers has begun to assess what may be needed to spur widespread circular transition within the built environment in a new open-access study that aims to understand stakeholders’ current perceptions of circularity and quantify their willingness to pay.“This paper acts as an initial endeavor into understanding what the industry may be motivated by, and how integration of stakeholder motivations could lead to greater adoption,” says lead author Juliana Berglund-Brown, PhD student in the Department of Architecture at MIT.Considering stakeholders’ perceptionsThree different stakeholder groups from North America, Europe, and Asia — material suppliers, design and construction teams, and real estate developers — were surveyed by the research team that also comprises Akrisht Pandey ’23; Fabio Duarte, associate director of the MIT Senseable City Lab; Raquel Ganitsky, fellow in the Sustainable Real Estate Development Action Program; Randolph Kirchain, co-director of MIT Concrete Sustainability Hub; and Siqi Zheng, the STL Champion Professor of Urban and Real Estate Sustainability at Department of Urban Studies and Planning.Despite growing awareness of reuse practice among construction industry stakeholders, circular practices have yet to be implemented at scale — attributable to many factors that influence the intersection of construction needs with government regulations and the economic interests of real estate developers.The study notes that perceived barriers to circular adoption differ based on industry role, with lack of both client interest and standardized structural assessment methods identified as the primary concern of design and construction teams, while the largest deterrents for material suppliers are logistics complexity, and supply uncertainty. Real estate developers, on the other hand, are chiefly concerned with higher costs and structural assessment. Yet encouragingly, respondents expressed willingness to absorb higher costs, with developers indicating readiness to pay an average of 9.6 percent higher construction costs for a minimum 52.9 percent reduction in embodied carbon — and all stakeholders highly favor the potential of incentives like tax exemptions to aid with cost premiums.Next steps to encourage circularityThe findings highlight the need for further conversation between design teams and developers, as well as for additional exploration into potential solutions to practical challenges. “The thing about circularity is that there is opportunity for a lot of value creation, and subsequently profit,” says Berglund-Brown. “If people are motivated by cost, let’s provide a cost incentive, or establish strategies that have one.”When it comes to motivating reasons to adopt circularity practices, the study also found trends emerging by industry role. Future net-zero goals influence developers as well as design and construction teams, with government regulation the third-most frequently named reason across all respondent types.“The construction industry needs a market driver to embrace circularity,” says Berglund-Brown, “Be it carrots or sticks, stakeholders require incentives for adoption.”The effect of policy to motivate change cannot be understated, with major strides being made in low operational carbon building design after policy restricting emissions was introduced, such as Local Law 97 in New York City and the Building Emissions Reduction and Disclosure Ordinance in Boston. These pieces of policy, and their results, can serve as models for embodied carbon reduction policy elsewhere.Berglund-Brown suggests that municipalities might initiate ordinances requiring buildings to be deconstructed, which would allow components to be reused, curbing demolition methods that result in waste rather than salvage. Top-down ordinances could be one way to trigger a supply chain shift toward reprocessing building materials that are typically deemed “end-of-life.”The study also identifies other challenges to the implementation of circularity at scale, including risk associated with how to reuse materials in new buildings, and disrupting status quo design practices.“Understanding the best way to motivate transition despite uncertainty is where our work comes in,” says Berglund-Brown. “Beyond that, researchers can continue to do a lot to alleviate risk — like developing standards for reuse.”Innovations that challenge the status quoDisrupting the status quo is not unusual for MIT researchers; other visionary work in construction circularity pioneered at MIT includes “a smart kit of parts” called Pixelframe. This system for modular concrete reuse allows building elements to be disassembled and rebuilt several times, aiding deconstruction and reuse while maintaining material efficiency and versatility.Developed by MIT Climate and Sustainability Consortium Associate Director Caitlin Mueller’s research team, Pixelframe is designed to accommodate a wide range of applications from housing to warehouses, with each piece of interlocking precast concrete modules, called Pixels, assigned a material passport to enable tracking through its many life cycles.Mueller’s work demonstrates that circularity can work technically and logistically at the scale of the built environment — by designing specifically for disassembly, configuration, versatility, and upfront carbon and cost efficiency.“This can be built today. This is building code-compliant today,” said Mueller of Pixelframe in a keynote speech at the recent MCSC Annual Symposium, which saw industry representatives and members of the MIT community coming together to discuss scalable solutions to climate and sustainability problems. “We currently have the potential for high-impact carbon reduction as a compelling alternative to the business-as-usual construction methods we are used to.”Pixelframe was recently awarded a grant by the Massachusetts Clean Energy Center (MassCEC) to pursue commercialization, an important next step toward integrating innovations like this into a circular economy in practice. “It’s MassCEC’s job to make sure that these climate leaders have the resources they need to turn their technologies into successful businesses that make a difference around the world,” said MassCEC CEO Emily Reichart, in a press release.Additional support for circular innovation has emerged thanks to a historic piece of climate legislation from the Biden administration. The Environmental Protection Agency recently awarded a federal grant on the topic of advancing steel reuse to Berglund-Brown — whose PhD thesis focuses on scaling the reuse of structural heavy-section steel — and John Ochsendorf, the Class of 1942 Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering and Architecture at MIT.“There is a lot of exciting upcoming work on this topic,” says Berglund-Brown. “To any practitioners reading this who are interested in getting involved — please reach out.”The study is supported in part by the MIT Climate and Sustainability Consortium. 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      MIT delegation mainstreams biodiversity conservation at the UN Biodiversity Convention, COP16

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      For the first time, MIT sent an organized engagement to the global Conference of the Parties for the Convention on Biological Diversity, which this year was held Oct. 21 to Nov. 1 in Cali, Colombia.The 10 delegates to COP16 included faculty, researchers, and students from the MIT Environmental Solutions Initiative (ESI), the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS), the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), the Department of Urban Studies and Planning (DUSP), the Institute for Data, Systems, and Society (IDSS), and the Center for Sustainability Science and Strategy.In previous years, MIT faculty had participated sporadically in the discussions. This organized engagement, led by the ESI, is significant because it brought representatives from many of the groups working on biodiversity across the Institute; showcased the breadth of MIT’s research in more than 15 events including panels, roundtables, and keynote presentations across the Blue and Green Zones of the conference (with the Blue Zone representing the primary venue for the official negotiations and discussions and the Green Zone representing public events); and created an experiential learning opportunity for students who followed specific topics in the negotiations and throughout side events.The conference also gathered attendees from governments, nongovernmental organizations, businesses, other academic institutions, and practitioners focused on stopping global biodiversity loss and advancing the 23 goals of the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (KMGBF), an international agreement adopted in 2022 to guide global efforts to protect and restore biodiversity through 2030.MIT’s involvement was particularly pronounced when addressing goals related to building coalitions of sub-national governments (targets 11, 12, 14); technology and AI for biodiversity conservation (targets 20 and 21); shaping equitable markets (targets 3, 11, and 19); and informing an action plan for Afro-descendant communities (targets 3, 10, and 22).Building coalitions of sub-national governmentsThe ESI’s Natural Climate Solutions (NCS) Program was able to support two separate coalitions of Latin American cities, namely the Coalition of Cities Against Illicit Economies in the Biogeographic Chocó Region and the Colombian Amazonian Cities coalition, who successfully signed declarations to advance specific targets of the KMGBF (the aforementioned targets 11, 12, 14).This was accomplished through roundtables and discussions where team members — including Marcela Angel, research program director at the MIT ESI; Angelica Mayolo, ESI Martin Luther King Fellow 2023-25; and Silvia Duque and Hannah Leung, MIT Master’s in City Planning students — presented a set of multi-scale actions including transnational strategies, recommendations to strengthen local and regional institutions, and community-based actions to promote the conservation of the Biogeographic Chocó as an ecological corridor.“There is an urgent need to deepen the relationship between academia and local governments of cities located in biodiversity hotspots,” said Angel. “Given the scale and unique conditions of Amazonian cities, pilot research projects present an opportunity to test and generate a proof of concept. These could generate catalytic information needed to scale up climate adaptation and conservation efforts in socially and ecologically sensitive contexts.”ESI’s research also provided key inputs for the creation of the Fund for the Biogeographic Chocó Region, a multi-donor fund launched within the framework of COP16 by a coalition composed of Colombia, Ecuador, Panamá, and Costa Rica. The fund aims to support biodiversity conservation, ecosystem restoration, climate change mitigation and adaptation, and sustainable development efforts across the region.Technology and AI for biodiversity conservationData, technology, and artificial intelligence are playing an increasing role in how we understand biodiversity and ecosystem change globally. Professor Sara Beery’s research group at MIT focuses on this intersection, developing AI methods that enable species and environmental monitoring at previously unprecedented spatial, temporal, and taxonomic scales.During the International Union of Biological Diversity Science-Policy Forum, the high-level COP16 segment focused on outlining recommendations from scientific and academic community, Beery spoke on a panel alongside María Cecilia Londoño, scientific information manager of the Humboldt Institute and co-chair of the Global Biodiversity Observations Network, and Josh Tewksbury, director of the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, among others, about how these technological advancements will help humanity achieve our biodiversity targets. The panel emphasized that AI innovation was needed, but with emphasis on direct human-AI partnership, AI capacity building, and the need for data and AI policy to ensure equity of access and benefit from these technologies.As a direct outcome of the session, for the first time, AI was emphasized in the statement on behalf of science and academia delivered by Hernando Garcia, director of the Humboldt Institute, and David Skorton, secretary general of the Smithsonian Institute, to the high-level segment of the COP16.That statement read, “To effectively address current and future challenges, urgent action is required in equity, governance, valuation, infrastructure, decolonization and policy frameworks around biodiversity data and artificial intelligence.”Beery also organized a panel at the GEOBON pavilion in the Blue Zone on Scaling Biodiversity Monitoring with AI, which brought together global leaders from AI research, infrastructure development, capacity and community building, and policy and regulation. The panel was initiated and experts selected from the participants at the recent Aspen Global Change Institute Workshop on Overcoming Barriers to Impact in AI for Biodiversity, co-organized by Beery.Shaping equitable marketsIn a side event co-hosted by the ESI with CAF-Development Bank of Latin America, researchers from ESI’s Natural Climate Solutions Program — including Marcela Angel; Angelica Mayolo; Jimena Muzio, ESI research associate; and Martin Perez Lara, ESI research affiliate and director for Forest Climate Solutions Impact and Monitoring at World Wide Fund for Nature of the U.S. — presented results of a study titled “Voluntary Carbon Markets for Social Impact: Comprehensive Assessment of the Role of Indigenous Peoples and Local Communities (IPLC) in Carbon Forestry Projects in Colombia.” The report highlighted the structural barriers that hinder effective participation of IPLC, and proposed a conceptual framework to assess IPLC engagement in voluntary carbon markets.Communicating these findings is important because the global carbon market has experienced a credibility crisis since 2023, influenced by critical assessments in academic literature, journalism questioning the quality of mitigation results, and persistent concerns about the engagement of private actors with IPLC. Nonetheless, carbon forestry projects have expanded rapidly in Indigenous, Afro-descendant, and local communities’ territories, and there is a need to assess the relationships between private actors and IPLC and to propose pathways for equitable participation. 

      Panelists pose at the equitable markets side event at the Latin American Pavilion in the Blue Zone.

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      The research presentation and subsequent panel with representatives of the association for Carbon Project Developers in Colombia Asocarbono, Fondo Acción, and CAF further discussed recommendations for all actors in the value chain of carbon certificates — including those focused on promoting equitable benefit-sharing and safeguarding compliance, increased accountability, enhanced governance structures, strengthened institutionality, and regulatory frameworks  — necessary to create an inclusive and transparent market.Informing an action plan for Afro-descendant communitiesThe Afro-Interamerican Forum on Climate Change (AIFCC), an international network working to highlight the critical role of Afro-descendant peoples in global climate action, was also present at COP16.At the Afro Summit, Mayolo presented key recommendations prepared collectively by the members of AIFCC to the technical secretariat of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD). The recommendations emphasize:creating financial tools for conservation and supporting Afro-descendant land rights;including a credit guarantee fund for countries that recognize Afro-descendant collective land titling and research on their contributions to biodiversity conservation;calling for increased representation of Afro-descendant communities in international policy forums;capacity-building for local governments; andstrategies for inclusive growth in green business and energy transition.These actions aim to promote inclusive and sustainable development for Afro-descendant populations.“Attending COP16 with a large group from MIT contributing knowledge and informed perspectives at 15 separate events was a privilege and honor,” says MIT ESI Director John E. Fernández. “This demonstrates the value of the ESI as a powerful research and convening body at MIT. Science is telling us unequivocally that climate change and biodiversity loss are the two greatest challenges that we face as a species and a planet. MIT has the capacity, expertise, and passion to address not only the former, but also the latter, and the ESI is committed to facilitating the very best contributions across the institute for the critical years that are ahead of us.”A fuller overview of the conference is available via The MIT Environmental Solutions Initiative’s Primer of COP16. More

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      Is there enough land on Earth to fight climate change and feed the world?

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      Capping global warming at 1.5 degrees Celsius is a tall order. Achieving that goal will not only require a massive reduction in greenhouse gas emissions from human activities, but also a substantial reallocation of land to support that effort and sustain the biosphere, including humans. More land will be needed to accommodate a growing demand for bioenergy and nature-based carbon sequestration while ensuring sufficient acreage for food production and ecological sustainability.The expanding role of land in a 1.5 C world will be twofold — to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and to produce clean energy. Land-based carbon dioxide removal strategies include bioenergy with carbon capture and storage; direct air capture; and afforestation/reforestation and other nature-based solutions. Land-based clean energy production includes wind and solar farms and sustainable bioenergy cropland. Any decision to allocate more land for climate mitigation must also address competing needs for long-term food security and ecosystem health.Land-based climate mitigation choices vary in terms of costs — amount of land required, implications for food security, impact on biodiversity and other ecosystem services — and benefits — potential for sequestering greenhouse gases and producing clean energy.Now a study in the journal Frontiers in Environmental Science provides the most comprehensive analysis to date of competing land-use and technology options to limit global warming to 1.5 C. Led by researchers at the MIT Center for Sustainability Science and Strategy (CS3), the study applies the MIT Integrated Global System Modeling (IGSM) framework to evaluate costs and benefits of different land-based climate mitigation options in Sky2050, a 1.5 C climate-stabilization scenario developed by Shell.Under this scenario, demand for bioenergy and natural carbon sinks increase along with the need for sustainable farming and food production. To determine if there’s enough land to meet all these growing demands, the research team uses the global hectare (gha) — an area of 10,000 square meters, or 2.471 acres — as the standard unit of measurement, and current estimates of the Earth’s total habitable land area (about 10 gha) and land area used for food production and bioenergy (5 gha).The team finds that with transformative changes in policy, land management practices, and consumption patterns, global land is sufficient to provide a sustainable supply of food and ecosystem services throughout this century while also reducing greenhouse gas emissions in alignment with the 1.5 C goal. These transformative changes include policies to protect natural ecosystems; stop deforestation and accelerate reforestation and afforestation; promote advances in sustainable agriculture technology and practice; reduce agricultural and food waste; and incentivize consumers to purchase sustainably produced goods.If such changes are implemented, 2.5–3.5 gha of land would be used for NBS practices to sequester 3–6 gigatonnes (Gt) of CO2 per year, and 0.4–0.6 gha of land would be allocated for energy production — 0.2–0.3 gha for bioenergy and 0.2–0.35 gha for wind and solar power generation.“Our scenario shows that there is enough land to support a 1.5 degree C future as long as effective policies at national and global levels are in place,” says CS3 Principal Research Scientist Angelo Gurgel, the study’s lead author. “These policies must not only promote efficient use of land for food, energy, and nature, but also be supported by long-term commitments from government and industry decision-makers.” More

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      Reality check on technologies to remove carbon dioxide from the air

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      In 2015, 195 nations plus the European Union signed the Paris Agreement and pledged to undertake plans designed to limit the global temperature increase to 1.5 degrees Celsius. Yet in 2023, the world exceeded that target for most, if not all of, the year — calling into question the long-term feasibility of achieving that target.To do so, the world must reduce the levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, and strategies for achieving levels that will “stabilize the climate” have been both proposed and adopted. Many of those strategies combine dramatic cuts in carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions with the use of direct air capture (DAC), a technology that removes CO2 from the ambient air. As a reality check, a team of researchers in the MIT Energy Initiative (MITEI) examined those strategies, and what they found was alarming: The strategies rely on overly optimistic — indeed, unrealistic — assumptions about how much CO2 could be removed by DAC. As a result, the strategies won’t perform as predicted. Nevertheless, the MITEI team recommends that work to develop the DAC technology continue so that it’s ready to help with the energy transition — even if it’s not the silver bullet that solves the world’s decarbonization challenge.DAC: The promise and the realityIncluding DAC in plans to stabilize the climate makes sense. Much work is now under way to develop DAC systems, and the technology looks promising. While companies may never run their own DAC systems, they can already buy “carbon credits” based on DAC. Today, a multibillion-dollar market exists on which entities or individuals that face high costs or excessive disruptions to reduce their own carbon emissions can pay others to take emissions-reducing actions on their behalf. Those actions can involve undertaking new renewable energy projects or “carbon-removal” initiatives such as DAC or afforestation/reforestation (planting trees in areas that have never been forested or that were forested in the past). DAC-based credits are especially appealing for several reasons, explains Howard Herzog, a senior research engineer at MITEI. With DAC, measuring and verifying the amount of carbon removed is straightforward; the removal is immediate, unlike with planting forests, which may take decades to have an impact; and when DAC is coupled with CO2 storage in geologic formations, the CO2 is kept out of the atmosphere essentially permanently — in contrast to, for example, sequestering it in trees, which may one day burn and release the stored CO2.Will current plans that rely on DAC be effective in stabilizing the climate in the coming years? To find out, Herzog and his colleagues Jennifer Morris and Angelo Gurgel, both MITEI principal research scientists, and Sergey Paltsev, a MITEI senior research scientist — all affiliated with the MIT Center for Sustainability Science and Strategy (CS3) — took a close look at the modeling studies on which those plans are based.Their investigation identified three unavoidable engineering challenges that together lead to a fourth challenge — high costs for removing a single ton of CO2 from the atmosphere. The details of their findings are reported in a paper published in the journal One Earth on Sept. 20.Challenge 1: Scaling upWhen it comes to removing CO2 from the air, nature presents “a major, non-negotiable challenge,” notes the MITEI team: The concentration of CO2 in the air is extremely low — just 420 parts per million, or roughly 0.04 percent. In contrast, the CO2 concentration in flue gases emitted by power plants and industrial processes ranges from 3 percent to 20 percent. Companies now use various carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) technologies to capture CO2 from their flue gases, but capturing CO2 from the air is much more difficult. To explain, the researchers offer the following analogy: “The difference is akin to needing to find 10 red marbles in a jar of 25,000 marbles of which 24,990 are blue [the task representing DAC] versus needing to find about 10 red marbles in a jar of 100 marbles of which 90 are blue [the task for CCS].”Given that low concentration, removing a single metric ton (tonne) of CO2 from air requires processing about 1.8 million cubic meters of air, which is roughly equivalent to the volume of 720 Olympic-sized swimming pools. And all that air must be moved across a CO2-capturing sorbent — a feat requiring large equipment. For example, one recently proposed design for capturing 1 million tonnes of CO2 per year would require an “air contactor” equivalent in size to a structure about three stories high and three miles long.Recent modeling studies project DAC deployment on the scale of 5 to 40 gigatonnes of CO2 removed per year. (A gigatonne equals 1 billion metric tonnes.) But in their paper, the researchers conclude that the likelihood of deploying DAC at the gigatonne scale is “highly uncertain.”Challenge 2: Energy requirementGiven the low concentration of CO2 in the air and the need to move large quantities of air to capture it, it’s no surprise that even the best DAC processes proposed today would consume large amounts of energy — energy that’s generally supplied by a combination of electricity and heat. Including the energy needed to compress the captured CO2 for transportation and storage, most proposed processes require an equivalent of at least 1.2 megawatt-hours of electricity for each tonne of CO2 removed.The source of that electricity is critical. For example, using coal-based electricity to drive an all-electric DAC process would generate 1.2 tonnes of CO2 for each tonne of CO2 captured. The result would be a net increase in emissions, defeating the whole purpose of the DAC. So clearly, the energy requirement must be satisfied using either low-carbon electricity or electricity generated using fossil fuels with CCS. All-electric DAC deployed at large scale — say, 10 gigatonnes of CO2 removed annually — would require 12,000 terawatt-hours of electricity, which is more than 40 percent of total global electricity generation today.Electricity consumption is expected to grow due to increasing overall electrification of the world economy, so low-carbon electricity will be in high demand for many competing uses — for example, in power generation, transportation, industry, and building operations. Using clean electricity for DAC instead of for reducing CO2 emissions in other critical areas raises concerns about the best uses of clean electricity.Many studies assume that a DAC unit could also get energy from “waste heat” generated by some industrial process or facility nearby. In the MITEI researchers’ opinion, “that may be more wishful thinking than reality.” The heat source would need to be within a few miles of the DAC plant for transporting the heat to be economical; given its high capital cost, the DAC plant would need to run nonstop, requiring constant heat delivery; and heat at the temperature required by the DAC plant would have competing uses, for example, for heating buildings. Finally, if DAC is deployed at the gigatonne per year scale, waste heat will likely be able to provide only a small fraction of the needed energy.Challenge 3: SitingSome analysts have asserted that, because air is everywhere, DAC units can be located anywhere. But in reality, siting a DAC plant involves many complex issues. As noted above, DAC plants require significant amounts of energy, so having access to enough low-carbon energy is critical. Likewise, having nearby options for storing the removed CO2 is also critical. If storage sites or pipelines to such sites don’t exist, major new infrastructure will need to be built, and building new infrastructure of any kind is expensive and complicated, involving issues related to permitting, environmental justice, and public acceptability — issues that are, in the words of the researchers, “commonly underestimated in the real world and neglected in models.”Two more siting needs must be considered. First, meteorological conditions must be acceptable. By definition, any DAC unit will be exposed to the elements, and factors like temperature and humidity will affect process performance and process availability. And second, a DAC plant will require some dedicated land — though how much is unclear, as the optimal spacing of units is as yet unresolved. Like wind turbines, DAC units need to be properly spaced to ensure maximum performance such that one unit is not sucking in CO2-depleted air from another unit.Challenge 4: CostConsidering the first three challenges, the final challenge is clear: the cost per tonne of CO2 removed is inevitably high. Recent modeling studies assume DAC costs as low as $100 to $200 per ton of CO2 removed. But the researchers found evidence suggesting far higher costs.To start, they cite typical costs for power plants and industrial sites that now use CCS to remove CO2 from their flue gases. The cost of CCS in such applications is estimated to be in the range of $50 to $150 per ton of CO2 removed. As explained above, the far lower concentration of CO2 in the air will lead to substantially higher costs.As explained under Challenge 1, the DAC units needed to capture the required amount of air are massive. The capital cost of building them will be high, given labor, materials, permitting costs, and so on. Some estimates in the literature exceed $5,000 per tonne captured per year.Then there are the ongoing costs of energy. As noted under Challenge 2, removing 1 tonne of CO2 requires the equivalent of 1.2 megawatt-hours of electricity. If that electricity costs $0.10 per kilowatt-hour, the cost of just the electricity needed to remove 1 tonne of CO2 is $120. The researchers point out that assuming such a low price is “questionable,” given the expected increase in electricity demand, future competition for clean energy, and higher costs on a system dominated by renewable — but intermittent — energy sources.Then there’s the cost of storage, which is ignored in many DAC cost estimates.Clearly, many considerations show that prices of $100 to $200 per tonne are unrealistic, and assuming such low prices will distort assessments of strategies, leading them to underperform going forward.The bottom lineIn their paper, the MITEI team calls DAC a “very seductive concept.” Using DAC to suck CO2 out of the air and generate high-quality carbon-removal credits can offset reduction requirements for industries that have hard-to-abate emissions. By doing so, DAC would minimize disruptions to key parts of the world’s economy, including air travel, certain carbon-intensive industries, and agriculture. However, the world would need to generate billions of tonnes of CO2 credits at an affordable price. That prospect doesn’t look likely. The largest DAC plant in operation today removes just 4,000 tonnes of CO2 per year, and the price to buy the company’s carbon-removal credits on the market today is $1,500 per tonne.The researchers recognize that there is room for energy efficiency improvements in the future, but DAC units will always be subject to higher work requirements than CCS applied to power plant or industrial flue gases, and there is not a clear pathway to reducing work requirements much below the levels of current DAC technologies.Nevertheless, the researchers recommend that work to develop DAC continue “because it may be needed for meeting net-zero emissions goals, especially given the current pace of emissions.” But their paper concludes with this warning: “Given the high stakes of climate change, it is foolhardy to rely on DAC to be the hero that comes to our rescue.” More

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      Preparing Taiwan for a decarbonized economy

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      The operations of Taiwan’s electronics, manufacturing, and financial firms vary widely, but their leaders all have at least one thing in common: They recognize the role that a changing energy landscape will play in their future success, and they’re actively planning for that transition.“They’re all interested in how Taiwan can supply energy for its economy going forward — energy that meets global goals for decarbonization,” says Robert C. Armstrong, the Chevron Professor of Chemical Engineering Emeritus at MIT, as well as a principal investigator for the Taiwan Innovative Green Economy Roadmap (TIGER) program. “Each company is going to have its own particular needs. For example, financial companies have data centers that need energy 24/7, with no interruptions. But the need for a robust, reliable, resilient energy system is shared among all of them.”Ten Taiwanese companies are participating in TIGER, a two-year program with the MIT Energy Initiative (MITEI) to explore various ways that industry and government can promote and adopt technologies, practices, and policies that will keep Taiwan competitive amid a quickly changing energy landscape. MIT research teams are exploring a set of six topics during the first year of the program, with plans to tackle a second set of topics during the second year, eventually leading to a roadmap to green energy security for Taiwan.“We are helping them to understand green energy technologies, we are helping them to understand how policies around the world might affect supply chains, and we are helping them to understand different pathways for their domestic policies,” says Sergey Paltsev, a principal investigator for the TIGER program, as well as a deputy director of the MIT Center for Sustainability Science and Strategy and a senior research scientist at MITEI. “We are looking at how Taiwan will be affected in terms of the cost of doing business and how to preserve the competitive advantage of its export-oriented industries.”“The biggest question,” Paltsev adds, “is how Taiwanese companies can decarbonize their energy in a sustainable manner.”Why Taiwan?Paul Hsu, founding partner of the Taiwanese business consultancy Paul Hsu and Partners (one of the 10 participating TIGER companies), as well as founding chair and current board member of the Epoch Foundation, has been working for more than 30 years to forge collaborations between business leaders in Taiwan and MIT researchers. The energy challenges facing Taiwanese businesses, as well as their place in the global supply chain, make the TIGER program critical not only to improve environmental sustainability, but also to ensure future competitiveness, he says. “The energy field is facing revolution,” Hsu says. “Taiwanese companies are not operating in Taiwan alone, but also operating worldwide, and we are affected by the global supply chain. We need to diversify our businesses and our energy resources, and the first thing we’re looking for in this partnership is education — an understanding about how to orient Taiwanese industry toward the future of energy.”Wendy Duan, the program director of the Asia Pacific program at MITEI, notes that Taiwan has a number of similarities to places such as Singapore and Japan. The lessons learned through the TIGER program, she says, will likely be applicable — at least on some level — to other markets throughout Asia, and even around the world.“Taiwan is very much dependent on imported energy,” Duan notes. “Many countries in East Asia are facing similar challenges, and if Taiwan has a good roadmap for the future of energy, it can be a good role model.”“Taiwan is a great place for this sort of collaboration,” Armstrong says. “Their industry is very innovative, and it’s a place where businesses are willing to implement new, important ideas. At the same time, their economy is highly dependent on trade, and they import a lot of fossil fuels today. To compete in a decarbonized global economy, they’re going to have to find alternatives to that. If you can develop a path from today’s economy in Taiwan to a future manufacturing economy that is decarbonized, then that gives you a lot of interesting tools you could bring to bear in other economies.”Uncovering solutionsStakeholders from MIT and the participating companies meet for monthly webinars and biannual in-person workshops (alternating between Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Taipei) to discuss progress. The research addresses options for Taiwan to increase its supply of green energy, methods for storing and distributing that energy more efficiently, policy levers for implementing these changes, and Taiwan’s place in the global energy economy.“The project on the electric grid, the project on storage, and the project on hydrogen — all three of those are related to the issue of how to decarbonize power generation and delivery,” notes Paltsev. “But we also need to understand how things in other parts of the world are going to affect demand for the products that are produced in Taiwan. If there is a huge change in demand for certain products due to decarbonization, Taiwanese companies are going to feel it. Therefore, the companies want to understand where the demand is going to be coming from, and how to adjust their business strategies.”One of the research projects is looking closely at advanced nuclear power. There are significant political roadblocks standing in the way, but business leaders are intrigued by the prospect of nuclear energy in Taiwan, where available land for wind and solar power generation is sparse.“So far, Taiwan government policy is anti-nuclear,” Hsu says. “The current ruling party is against it. They are still thinking about what happened in the 1960s and 1970s, and they think nuclear is very dangerous. But if you look into it, nuclear generation technology has really improved.”Implementing a green economy roadmapTIGER participants’ interest in green energy solutions is, of course, not merely academic. Ultimately, the success of the program will be determined not only by the insights from the research produced over these two years, but by how these findings constructively inform both the private and public sectors.“MIT and TIGER participants are united in their commitment to advancing regional industrial and economic development, while championing decarbonization and sustainability efforts in Taiwan,” Duan says. “MIT researchers are informed by insights and domain expertise contributed by TIGER participants, believing that their collaborative efforts can help other nations facing similar geo-economic challenges.”“We are helping the companies understand how to stay leaders in this changing world,” says Paltsev. “We want to make sure that we are not painting an unrealistically rosy picture, or conveying that it will be easy to decarbonize. On the contrary, we want to stay realistic and try to show them both where they can make advances and where we see challenges.”The goal, Armstrong says, is not energy independence for Taiwan, but rather energy security. “Energy security requires diversity of supply,” he says. “So, you have a diverse set of suppliers, who are trusted trading partners, but it doesn’t mean you’re on your own. That’s the goal for Taiwan.”What will that mean, more specifically? Well, that’s what TIGER researchers aim to learn. “It probably means a mix of energy sources,” Armstrong says. “It could be that nuclear fission provides a core of energy that companies need for their industrial operations, it could be that they can import hydrogen in the form of ammonia or another carrier, and it could be that they leverage the renewable resources they have, together with storage technologies, to provide some pretty inexpensive energy for their manufacturing sector.”“We don’t know,” Armstrong adds. “But that’s what we’re looking at, to see if we can figure out a pathway that gets them to their goals. We are optimistic that we can get there.”The companies participating in the TIGER program include AcBel Polytech Inc., CDIB Capital Group / KGI Bank Co., Ltd.; Delta Electronics, Inc.; Fubon Financial Holding Co., Ltd.; Paul Hsu and Partners Co., Ltd.; Ta Ya Electric Wire & Cable Co., Ltd.; TCC Group Holdings Co. Ltd.; Walsin Lihwa Corporation; Wistron Corporation; and Zhen Ding Technology Holding, Ltd. More