This spring, the MIT Energy Initiative (MITEI) awarded more than $1.2 million in grants to support seven novel energy research projects as part of its Seed Fund program. Each project will receive $175,000 in funding over the span of two years.
The Seed Fund Program supports early-stage clean energy research and encourages researchers from across the Institute to explore new energy-related ideas. Reflecting the complexity of the global energy system, the projects have addressed challenges and opportunities across a wide spectrum of sectors. This year’s winning projects address transportation, power infrastructure, recycling, and more.
Over the past four cycles, the largest concentration of projects awarded funding—just more than 30% of the 35 projects funded—have been related to batteries and energy storage. Improving energy storage capabilities is key to expanding the use of renewable energy and enabling energy system decarbonization.
“The Seed Fund Program gives MIT faculty and scientists the opportunity to propose the line of research they think is most innovative and likely to be most impactful in our urgent efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and transition to a clean energy system,” said William H. Green, director of MITEI. “Programs like these are critical to encouraging new innovations that could move the needle on climate change.”
Every year, this program attracts faculty and researchers across MIT’s college and many schools—from well-established energy experts to new faculty needing startup support to those applying their expertise to energy for the first time. This year, 41 proposals were submitted from 63 faculty, research scientists, and engineers across 21 different departments, centers, labs, and institutes.
To date, the MITEI Seed Fund Program has supported 226 energy-focused projects through grants totaling $29.8 million. This funding comes primarily from MITEI’s Founding and Sustaining Members, supplemented by philanthropic donations.
Brief descriptions of the projects funded in this round follow.
Sustainable energy pathways for Africa
Africa has the potential to be a major global player in renewable energy production and carbon dioxide removal. This project will create a framework for evaluating decarbonization and energy transition pathways for Africa as well as their broader social and environmental implications. Rather than look at Africa as a single aggregated region like most global studies, this project will treat Africa as multiple sub-regions within a global economy-wide model to capture their differences in resources and potential interactions among them.
PIs: Jennifer Morris, research scientist at MITEI, and Angelo Gurgel, research scientist at MITEI
Robotics for efficient infrastructure maintenance
This research project aims to make renewable energy systems more reliable and scalable by exploring how robotics can be used to enhance efficiency and safety of renewable energy system infrastructure maintenance. The results of this work will allow human operators to supervise fleets of learning-enabled robots. The team combines physical correction and verbal instructions so robots can learn from human expertise more effectively. They also develop strategies to manage operator attention intelligently and reduce the need for operator guidance.
PI: Andreea Bobu, assistant professor in the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics and CSAIL
Revolutionizing ammonia as a hydrogen carrier
Due to its high hydrogen storage capacity and high energy density, as well as lower costs to liquefy and transport, ammonia could be a potential liquid commodity to store and transport hydrogen, an environmentally friendly and sustainable fuel. This project aims to reduce the energy cost of the reaction needed to decompose ammonia into hydrogen and nitrogen—a cost that has slowed the large-scale application of ammonia as a hydrogen carrier. The researchers will do this by lowering the overall temperature of the reaction by providing energy mainly to where it is needed: the kinetic energy of the incident ammonia molecule.
PI: Sylvia Ceyer, professor in the Department of Chemistry
Electric vehicle battery management
While the electric vehicle (EV) market has grown significantly over the past decade, it still faces challenges such as lengthy charging times, limited lifespans, and safety concerns. To make EVs more attractive to future customers, this project aims to develop fast-charging protocols and fault prognostic methods to ensure efficient and reliable EV management. The research team will do this by developing digital twins that accurately capture the inherent cell-to-cell variability in battery packs during EV operations and allow for their management in real-time.
PI: Richard Braatz, a professor of chemical engineering
Separation and recycling of rare earth elements
Rare earth elements (REEs) are a key resource for many defense, electronic, and clean energy technologies, including electric vehicles and wind turbines. However, REEs are very challenging to separate which requires chemically and energy-intensive processing methods over multiple stages. This project aims to improve the sustainability of REEs and their end products by developing a redox-mediated electrosorption process to efficiently separate REEs. By relying on electricity to drive the separation, this process represents a key step towards enabling more sustainable manufacturing and recycling of clean energy technologies.
PI: Martin Bazant, a professor of chemical engineering
Electric-field enhanced CO2 capture
There is a growing need for electrically conductive materials as the push for electrification increases. This project builds on a recent discovery from MIT’s Smith Lab that has enabled scientists to transform some classic microporous polymer systems, which act as insulators, into microporous semiconductors. This discovery opens up a vast number of potential applications, including the possibility of leveraging electric-field gradients as an alternative driving force for the capture and separation of gases. The research team will develop their processable microporous semiconductors and apply them to a proof-of-concept study on electric-field enhanced CO2 capture.
PI: Zachary Smith, an assistant professor of chemical engineering
Accelerating grid planning for the data center era
In 2023, data centers consumed about 4.4% of the total electricity supply in the United States —a share that could more than double by 2030. This rapid, geographically concentrated growth has raised urgent concerns about the grid’s ability to deliver reliable, clean power at scale. To address this challenge, this project will develop DecarbAI, a novel software framework that leverages recent advances in large language models and machine learning to transform energy planning. By integrating textual data (e.g., regulations, market rules) and visual inputs (e.g., climate maps, risk profiles) into tractable optimization models, DecarbAI enables real-time, multisectoral analysis of technology and policy options. The goal is to accelerate grid expansion and interconnection decisions while ensuring that the expansion of data centers proceeds in lockstep with the nation’s clean energy transition.
PIs: Saurabh Amin, a professor in civil and environmental engineering and PI at the Laboratory of Information and Decision Systems, and Deepjyoti Deka, a research scientist at MITEI