Jenny Hu: Building a Clean Energy Future

As we come to the end of the Energy Studies Minor’s fifth year, the MIT Energy Initiative (MITEI) would like to highlight our 2014 Energy Studies Minor (ESM) seniors. Thirty-four members of the class of 2014 are on track to graduate with the Minor, making this by far the largest cohort to-date. Our students exemplify the strength and diversity of MIT undergraduates. The graduating ESM class includes majors in five Engineering departments, plus SHASS, Sloan, and the School of Science. And, forty percent of our graduating ESM seniors are women. We are so proud of their accomplishments here at MIT, and look forward to continuing to hear of their journeys once they have passed through the doors on June 6th. Congratulations to all of our Energy Studies Minors!

A fortuitous encounter with Al Gore laid the groundwork for Jenny Hu’s interest in energy. She was part of a high school group who met with Gore in Philadelphia after watching his documentary, An Inconvenient Truth: “He told us how John F. Kennedy challenged people to get on the moon… He looked straight at us and said that’s what you need to do for energy. That really sparked my interest.”

This episode stuck with Hu when she arrived at MIT. When she discovered that her freshman advisor, Michael Strano, a Charles and Hilda Roddey Professor of Chemical Engineering, was working on an experimental method for generating energy, she asked for a position with his group.

Before long, Hu was prepping bundles of nanotubes, cylindrical carbon molecules with unique heat-conducting properties. The Strano lab had discovered that a bundle of nanotubes coated with the right chemicals could ignite and generate electricity, a process Strano called thermopower waves. “I’d sometimes come in at night, using tweezers to help coat the nanotubes with fuel so they’d be ready for the morning’s experiments.”

While engaged in this energy research, Hu developed an equivalent passion for economics, and sought a way to combine her primary interests. An internship with a San Francisco company, Clean Power Finance, showed her one way to accomplish the merger. “Clean Power Finance was using innovative financial structures to drive the mass-market adoption of solar,” she says. “I realized that third-party financing, securitization, and other kinds of financial engineering are key to driving the adoption of many technologies, so I became interested in how to use finance to advance clean energy,” recalls Hu.

This experience set Hu on a dual course of study at MIT: She declared a major in Management Science, with a concentration in Operations Research, and a minor in Energy Studies. A class she found particularly constructive was Energy Ventures (15.366), which introduced her to “a ridiculous number of enthusiastic people” working to overcome the challenges, whether technical, regulatory, or financial, specific to moving novel energy businesses forward.

After graduation, Hu will be working for Vivint, a home automation and energy management company, as a business analyst in its new innovation center. Someday, she says, she might test a business model for a clean energy tech firm, or find ways to integrate new energy technologies into the smart grid. “I have a ton of ideas; I’d like to see if they are feasible, and I’d love to work in an innovation center where I can test them out.”

Jenny Hu is a senior in Management Science with a minor in Energy Studies. In recent years, working for Clean Power Finance, she helped develop and manage several Department of Energy grants integral to the Sunshot Initiative, an effort by the federal government to make solar energy more competitive. One project involved an operations and maintenance marketplace for solar ventures, aimed at minimizing investor risk and market failures. For another project, Hu helped conduct a comprehensive study of solar permitting regulations across the U.S., and helped create the first ever National Solar Permitting Database.

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