Macro is a planning tool specially designed for utility planners, regulators, and researchers who are trying to understand how electricity grids and other energy sectors might evolve given new technologies, policies, or ways of using electricity and energy-intensive commodities. By entering details about available generating units, projected demand, costs, possible new technologies, and potential policy… Read more
Sustainable Energy System Analysis Modelling Environment (SESAME) is a novel energy analysis and lifecycle assessment (LCA) tool to assess the system-level greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions of the evolving energy system. This analytical tool provides a consistent platform for estimating GHG emissions for more than a thousand individual energy pathways. The original version of SESAME was… Read more
Taiwan’s Innovative Green Economy Roadmap (TIGER) consortium consists of ten Taiwanese corporations devoted to exploring the latest developments in the areas of advanced energy technologies, including hydrogen, energy storage, advanced nuclear, and carbon capture. These Taiwanese industrial leaders are exploring trade-offs for numerous alternative pathways for the future development of the nation’s industrial sector. Through… Read more
MITEI’s three-year Future of Energy Storage study explored the role that energy storage can play in fighting climate change and in the global adoption of clean energy grids. Replacing fossil fuel-based power generation with power generation from wind and solar resources is a key strategy for decarbonizing electricity. Storage enables electricity systems to remain in… Read more
One of the things that we’re excited about in this study is that the result is not final in and of itself. It has really seeded a brand-new thrust area in our research program, including new ways to design catalysts for the production and transformation of renewable fuels and chemicals. Yogesh Surendranath Chemists worldwide are… Read more
Our study shows that by viewing Canadian hydropower as a baseload source of electricity—or indeed a source of electricity at all—you’re not taking full advantage of what that resource can provide. Emil Dimanchev In planning for a carbon-free electric power system in 2050, U.S. states in New England have looked to hydropower imported from Quebec… Read more
Tree forks are naturally engineered structural connections that work as cantilevers in trees, which means that they have the potential to transfer force very efficiently thanks to their internal fiber structure. If you take a tree fork and slice it down the middle, you see an unbelievable network of fibers that are intertwining to create… Read more
There have been few attempts to look systematically at plants’ compliance with environmental regulation. We wanted to understand whether policy actually changes behavior. Valerie Karplus, assistant professor An MIT investigator and her colleagues have confirmed that power plant emissions in China declined when strict new limits went into effect in 2014—but the response by plants… Read more
We started out trying to realize an optically transparent, thermally insulating aerogel for solar thermal systems. Evelyn Wang, professor After five years’ work, an MIT team can now fabricate a transparent version of a silica aerogel, an ultralight material that blocks heat transfer. They have used their aerogel in a solar thermal collector to generate… Read more
Organic chemists would say that it shouldn’t be possible because water and olefins don’t react with one another. But what if we use electricity to liberate the oxygen atoms in water? Electrochemistry causes interesting things to happen—and it’s at the heart of what our group does. Karthish Manthiram, assistant professor Making raw materials for the… Read more
When it comes to air quality, the most important factor is how much coal a certain jurisdiction is burning, because coal is by far the biggest contributor to air pollutants in the electricity sector. Noelle Selin, associate professor U.S. legislators in a number of states are now evaluating the costs and benefits of policies that… Read more
MIT researchers have demonstrated a way to rapidly evaluate new transition metal compounds to identify those that can perform specialized functions, for example, as sensors or switches or catalysts for fuel conversion. Using data on known materials, they first trained an artificial neural network to identify good candidates—an approach that’s been used with success in… Read more
Some power plants use materials called sorbents to remove carbon dioxide (CO2) from their exhaust so it can be sequestered from the environment. But separating the CO2 from the sorbent requires high temperatures and produces CO2 gas that must be put into long-term storage—a prospect that raises safety and security concerns. In a proof-of-concept study,… Read more
Using a new, holistic approach called cybersafety, an MIT team has shown that today’s energy systems are rife with vulnerabilities to cyberattack—often the result of increased complexity due to high interconnectivity between devices and greater use of software to control system operation. The methodology examines a spectrum of factors that influence system operation, from physical… Read more
If we could understand how absorbed energy is converted to heat, we might be able to rewire that process to optimize the overall production of biomass and crops. We could control that switch to make plants less hesitant to shut off the protection. They could still be protected to some extent, and even if a… Read more
You can charge a battery, and it’ll store the electricity until you want to use it, say, in your cell phone or electric car. But people have to heat up their solar cooker when the sun’s out, and by the time they want to make dinner, it may well have given off all its stored… Read more
3D printing compels us to rethink how we develop, produce, and service products. A. John Hart Recent work from an MIT lab may help 3D printing fulfill its long-standing promise to transform manufacturing by enabling the rapid design and production of customized and complex objects. Key to 3D printing is a printhead that deposits successive… Read more
The Future of Nuclear Energy in a Carbon-Constrained World study is the eighth in the MIT Energy Initiative’s Future of series, which aims to shed light on a range of complex and important issues involving energy and the environment. A central theme is understanding the role of technologies that might contribute at scale in meeting… Read more
We need to replace diesel engines with other internal combustion engines that are much cleaner and produce less greenhouse gas. Daniel Cohn Using computer simulation analysis, MIT researchers have developed a conceptual design for a half-sized gasoline engine that would be as efficient and powerful as the full-sized diesel engines now used in heavy-duty trucks—without… Read more
I view our system as another source of information that the experts can leverage in their search for better materials. Elsa Olivetti MIT researchers and their collaborators have demonstrated a novel system using artificial-intelligence techniques to help identify methods of fabricating materials, especially those that look promising in computer simulations. In one test, the system… Read more