Assessing the value of battery energy storage in future power grids
In the transition to a decarbonized electric power system, variable renewable energy (VRE) resources such as wind and solar photovoltaics play a vital role due to their availability, scalability, and...
View ArticleEvaluating battery revenues for offshore wind farms using advanced modeling
Lithium-ion battery technologies currently dominate the advanced energy storage market — a sector of increasing importance as more focus is put on variable renewable energy generation and reliability...
View ArticleRevamped MIT Climate Portal aims to inform and empower the public
Stepping up its ongoing efforts to inform and empower the public on the issue of climate change, MIT today announced a dramatic overhaul of the MIT Climate Portal, climate.mit.edu, which provides...
View ArticlePowering the energy transition with better storage
“The overall question for me is how to decarbonize society in the most affordable way,” says Nestor Sepulveda SM ’16, PhD ’20. As a postdoc at MIT and a researcher with the MIT Energy Initiative...
View ArticleAsegun Henry has a big idea for tackling climate change: Store up the sun
Asegun Henry has a bold idea to save the world. He believes the key to reducing carbon emissions, and mitigating further climate change, lies in our ability to box up the sun. Today, much of the...
View Article3 Questions: Secretary Kathleen Theoharides on climate and energy in...
Massachusetts is poised to be a national and global leader in the fight against climate change. This spring, Kathleen Theoharides, secretary of the Executive Office of Energy and Environmental Affairs...
View ArticleMaking the case for hydrogen in a zero-carbon economy
As the United States races to achieve its goal of zero-carbon electricity generation by 2035, energy providers are swiftly ramping up renewable resources such as solar and wind. But because these...
View ArticleCoupling power and hydrogen sector pathways to benefit decarbonization
Governments and companies worldwide are increasing their investments in hydrogen research and development, indicating a growing recognition that hydrogen could play a significant role in meeting global...
View ArticleMIT Energy Initiative awards seven Seed Fund grants for early-stage energy...
The MIT Energy Initiative (MITEI) has awarded seven Seed Fund grants to support novel, early-stage energy research by faculty and researchers at MIT. The awardees hail from a range of disciplines, but...
View ArticleAt UN climate change conference, trying to “keep 1.5 alive”
After a one-year delay caused by the Covid-19 pandemic, negotiators from nearly 200 countries met this month in Glasgow, Scotland, at COP26, the United Nations climate change conference, to hammer out...
View ArticleAn energy-storage solution that flows like soft-serve ice cream
Batteries made from an electrically conductive mixture the consistency of molasses could help solve a critical piece of the decarbonization puzzle. An interdisciplinary team from MIT has found that an...
View ArticleBringing climate reporting to local newsrooms
Last summer, Nora Hertel, a reporter for the St. Cloud Times in central Minnesota, visited a farm just northeast of the Twin Cities run by the Native American-led nonprofit Dream of Wild Health. The...
View ArticleMIT Energy Initiative launches the Future Energy Systems Center
The MIT Energy Initiative (MITEI) has launched a new research consortium — the Future Energy Systems Center — to address the climate crisis and the role energy systems can play in solving it. This...
View ArticlePreparing global online learners for the clean energy transition
After a career devoted to making the electric power system more efficient and resilient, Marija Ilic came to MIT in 2018 eager not just to extend her research in new directions, but to prepare a new...
View ArticleNew power sources
In the mid-1990s, a few energy activists in Massachusetts had a vision: What if citizens had choice about the energy they consumed? Instead of being force-fed electricity sources selected by a utility...
View ArticleNew England renewables + Canadian hydropower
The urgent need to cut carbonemissions has prompted a growing number of U.S. states to commit to achieving 100 percent clean electricity by 2040 or 2050. But figuring out how to meet those commitments...
View ArticleEnergy storage important to creating affordable, reliable, deeply...
In deeply decarbonized energy systems utilizing high penetrations of variable renewable energy (VRE), energy storage is needed to keep the lights on and the electricity flowing when the sun isn’t...
View ArticleMIT unveils new Wright Brothers Wind Tunnel
When Mark Drela first set foot in Cambridge to study aerospace engineering at MIT in 1978, he was no stranger to wind tunnels. Just two years before, he constructed a 1-foot-by-1-foot wind tunnel for...
View ArticleHurricane-resistant construction may be undervalued by billions of dollars...
In Florida, June typically marks the beginning of hurricane season. Preparation for a storm may appear as otherworldly as it is routine: businesses and homes board up windows and doors, bottled water...
View ArticleA new method boosts wind farms’ energy output, without new equipment
Virtually all wind turbines, which produce more than 5 percent of the world’s electricity, are controlled as if they were individual, free-standing units. In fact, the vast majority are part of larger...
View ArticleA simple way to significantly increase lifetimes of fuel cells and other devices
In research that could jump-start work on a range of technologies including fuel cells, which are key to storing solar and wind energy, MIT researchers have found a relatively simple way to increase...
View Article3 Questions: Janelle Knox-Hayes on producing renewable energy that...
Wind power accounted for 8 percent of U.S. electricity consumption in 2020, and is growing rapidly in the country’s energy portfolio. But some projects, like the now-defunct Cape Wind proposal for...
View ArticleMining for the clean energy transition
In a world powered increasingly by clean energy, drilling for oil and gas will gradually give way to digging for metals and minerals. Today, the “critical minerals” used to make electric cars, solar...
View ArticleA healthy wind
Nearly 10 percent of today’s electricity in the United States comes from wind power. The renewable energy source benefits climate, air quality, and public health by displacing emissions of greenhouse...
View ArticleMichael Howland gives wind energy a lift
Michael Howland was in his office at MIT, watching real-time data from a wind farm 7,000 miles away in northwest India, when he noticed something odd: Some of the turbines weren’t producing the...
View ArticleAn interdisciplinary approach to fighting climate change through clean energy...
In early 2021, the U.S. government set an ambitious goal: to decarbonize its power grid, the system that generates and transmits electricity throughout the country, by 2035. It’s an important goal in...
View ArticleMIT Energy Conference grapples with geopolitics
As Russia’s war in Ukraine rages on, this year’s MIT Energy Conference spotlighted the role of geopolitics in the world’s efforts to lower greenhouse gas emissions and mitigate the worst effects of...
View ArticleThe answer may be blowing in the wind
Capturing energy from the winds gusting off the coasts of the United States could more than double the nation’s electricity generation. It’s no wonder the Biden administration views this immense,...
View ArticleMike Barrett: Climate goals may take longer, but we’ll get there
The Covid-19 pandemic, inflation, and the war in Ukraine have combined to cause unavoidable delays in implementation of Massachusetts’s ambitious goals to tackle climate change, state Senator Mike...
View ArticleSix ways MIT is taking action on climate
From reuse and recycling to new carbon markets, events during Earth Month at MIT spanned an astonishing range of ideas and approaches to tackling the climate crisis. The MIT Climate Nucleus offered...
View ArticleMIT engineers create an energy-storing supercapacitor from ancient materials
Two of humanity's most ubiquitous historical materials, cement and carbon black (which resembles very fine charcoal), may form the basis for a novel, low-cost energy storage system, according to a new...
View ArticleEmbracing the future we need
When you picture MIT doctoral students taking small PhD courses together, you probably don’t imagine them going on class field trips. But it does happen, sometimes, and one of those trips changed Andy...
View ArticleAlumnus’ thermal battery helps industry eliminate fossil fuels
The explosion of renewable energy projects around the globe is leading to a saturation problem. As more renewable power contributes to the grid, the value of electricity is plummeting during the times...
View ArticleAccelerated climate action needed to sharply reduce current risks to life and...
Hottest day on record. Hottest month on record. Extreme marine heatwaves. Record-low Antarctic sea-ice.While El Niño is a short-term factor in this year’s record-breaking heat, human-caused climate...
View ArticlePower when the sun doesn’t shine
In 2016, at the huge Houston energy conference CERAWeek, MIT materials scientist Yet-Ming Chiang found himself talking to a Tesla executive about a thorny problem: how to store the output of solar...
View ArticleCutting carbon emissions on the US power grid
To help curb climate change, theUnited States is working to reduce carbon emissions from all sectors of the energy economy. Much of the current effort involves electrification — switching to electric...
View ArticleMaking the clean energy transition work for everyone
The clean energy transition is already underway, but how do we make sure it happens in a manner that is affordable, sustainable, and fair for everyone?That was the overarching question at this year’s...
View ArticleThe MIT Edgerton Center’s third annual showcase dazzles onlookers
On April 9, a trailer with the words “Born by Fire” emblazoned on the back pulled down MIT's North Corridor (a.k.a. the Outfinite). Students, clad in orange construction vests, maneuvered their...
View ArticleThe origin of the sun’s magnetic field could lie close to its surface
The sun’s surface is a brilliant display of sunspots and flares driven by the solar magnetic field, which is internally generated through a process called dynamo action. Astrophysicists have assumed...
View ArticleGoing Dutch on climate
When MIT senior Rudiba Laiba saw that stores in the Netherlands eschewed plastic bags to save the planet, her first thought was, “that doesn’t happen in Bangladesh.”Laiba is one of eight MIT students...
View ArticleMIT researchers use large language models to flag problems in complex systems
Identifying one faulty turbine in a wind farm, which can involve looking at hundreds of signals and millions of data points, is akin to finding a needle in a haystack.Engineers often streamline this...
View ArticleMIT engineers’ new theory could improve the design and operation of wind farms
The blades of propellers and wind turbines are designed based on aerodynamics principles that were first described mathematically more than a century ago. But engineers have long realized that these...
View ArticleStartup turns mining waste into critical metals for the U.S.
At the heart of the energy transition is a metal transition. Wind farms, solar panels, and electric cars require many times more copper, zinc, and nickel than their gas-powered alternatives. They also...
View ArticleConsortium led by MIT, Harvard University, and Mass General Brigham spurs...
MIT is co-leading an effort to enable the development of two new large-scale renewable energy projects in regions with carbon-intensive electrical grids: Big Elm Solar in Bell County, Texas, came...
View ArticleIs there enough land on Earth to fight climate change and feed the world?
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...
View ArticleSo you want to build a solar or wind farm? Here’s how to decide where.
Deciding where to build new solar or wind installations is often left up to individual developers or utilities, with limited overall coordination. But a new study shows that regional-level planning...
View ArticleHow hard is it to prevent recurring blackouts in Puerto Rico?
Researchers at MIT’s Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems (LIDS) have shown that using decision-making software and dynamic monitoring of weather and energy use can significantly improve...
View ArticleA platform to expedite clean energy projects
Businesses and developers often face a steep learning curve when installing clean energy technologies, such as solar installations and EV chargers. To get a fair deal, they need to navigate a complex...
View ArticleUsing liquid air for grid-scale energy storage
As the world moves to reduce carbon emissions, solar and wind power will play an increasing role on electricity grids. But those renewable sources only generate electricity when it’s sunny or windy. So...
View ArticleHow can India decarbonize its coal-dependent electric power system?
As the world struggles to reduce climate-warming carbon emissions, India has pledged to do its part, and its success is critical: In 2023, India was the third-largest carbon emitter worldwide. The...
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