Today marks the 45th Anniversary of Earth Day, and we’ve asked MIT energy students to share their thoughts on the energy challenges the planet faces today, and their hopes for the future.
Vivian Li is a first year S.M. student in the Technology and Policy Program (Engineering Systems Division). She studies rural electrification and microgrid design and planning in India and Rwanda.
What do you think are the key energy challenges our planet faces right now?
In the United States, electricity is available instantaneously to cover all our daily needs. Those who have grown up with this luxury often are unaware the essential services provided by the power system. For the majority of us, electricity is as simple as flipping on a switch, or plugging into a socket. Yet globally, there are still millions of people without adequate access to electricity. This basic service could enable better education, improve health care services, and improve quality of life. Energy access in the developing world is therefore critically important. But electricity is extremely resource-intensive and still generated primarily by carbon intensive fuels. How can an overall positive increase in global net welfare truly be achieved? As the international society pushes forward to bring energy access to those in need, it faces the problem of doing so sustainably.
Effective responses to this challenge may lie in the intersection of technology and policy. In India, alternative electrification technologies have sprung up in the form of microgrids. Though many are powered in some combination by renewable resources, are these microgrids truly sustainable solutions? If off-grid policies encourage grid compatibility, the answer may be yes. Two extreme examples can be imagined upon extension of the centralized grid to off-grid networks. The off-grid network, if not grid compatible, must be removed and discarded. Its consumers will henceforth be serviced by fossil fuel-based generation. In contrast, microgrids that can simply be connected to the main grid will allow those consumers to continue being served by renewable generation. This is just one challenge being tackled by the Universal Access Research team at MIT and IIT Comillas. Nonetheless, it demonstrates the role that creative thinking and interdisciplinary solutions may play as society moves forward to provide sustainable energy access.
– Vivian Li
Ross Collins is a PhD candidate in the Engineering Systems Division at MIT. He studies large-scale infrastructure planning as it relates to sustainable economic development.
In the context of Earth Day, why are you personally pursuing energy studies?
I’m pursuing energy studies because it’s the highest leverage field to solve problems in environmental protection and sustainable development. Energy is a conundrum because it’s essential to human development, but it also presents a range of threats to humanity depending on how the systems are planned and managed. While climate change is perhaps the largest existential threat we face, I study energy to uncover additional, more immediate reasons why non-fossil technologies make socioeconomic sense. This includes evaluating alternative energy systems in oil-producing countries, where non-fossil systems alleviate the domestic consumption of valuable resource exports.
Are there small things you do every day to help create a sustainable energy future for our planet?
I’d like to think I do my part, however small. For instance, I do everything in my power to prevent wasting food, even if that means reaching back into the fridge to eat some questionable leftovers. I also try to reuse plastic bags, limit heating and cooling in my apartment, and recycle diligently.
– Ross Collins
Ash Bharatkumar is a PhD student in the Engineering Systems Division at MIT and a research assistant with the MIT Energy Initiative’s Utility of the Future project. Her research interests include the development of computational tools to capture the physical impacts of distributed energy resources on power system planning and operations in order to inform the design of electricity markets, network regulation, and the pricing of electricity services.
In five years, for the 50th anniversary of Earth Day, what changes do you hope to see in terms of the way people use energy?
I think consumers will have more options to make more conscientious energy choices with less thought and effort. That may sound like a contradiction, but developments in automation, digital technologies such as smart electricity meters and programmable appliances, and data collection and information about energy use behaviors will make it feasible for end users, utilities, aggregators, or other energy service providers to make more efficient decisions.
Historically, five years is not a lot of time for significant change in the energy industry, but it will be the case that the next five years will bring with them significant changes in the power sector and also the oil and gas sectors. Growing integration of centralized renewables and potential growth of distributed energy resources – beyond the rapid growth of distributed solar that we already see – is reshaping the power system and electric utility industry. Low oil and gas prices are driving a search for innovation in the fossil fuel industry as well; and in the next five years, oil and gas will still play the central role in meeting energy demand that they do now. But information technology is going to redefine the pace of change in both sectors. For example, the notion of a “smart grid” offers a great opportunity for integrating into the electricity sector – through sensing, control, and automation – the software and hardware that have permeated so many other dimensions of our lives. Similarly, advances in robotics and autonomous vehicles, smarter sensors and monitoring, and wearable technologies for field workers are welling up throughout the oil and gas industries.
While this won’t translate into an overhaul of the sources of energy that we use, I am optimistic that it will be an impressive step towards more efficient use of our resources and a stepping-stone towards continuing innovation.
In thirty years, for the 75th Anniversary of Earth Day, what do you hope the Earth’s energy future looks like?
I hope that we find ourselves with an energy system that allows us to simultaneously achieve the numerous objectives that often appear to be tradeoffs today. That is, I hope our energy future is one in which we are on-course to meet our decarbonization objectives, achieve our development and economic growth goals, fulfill our other environmental and quality of life goals, and continue to pursue sustained innovation. It’s certainly an ambitious vision, but I am confident that human ingenuity will drive us to expand our boundaries of knowledge to find solutions that will balance the best interests of multiple stakeholders.
– Ash Bharatkumar
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