The MIT Energy Initiative’s (MITEI) Future Energy Systems Center will fund ten new research projects aimed at accelerating decarbonization through system analysis and insights. The selected projects will receive a combined total of $1.75 million in funding. Topics range from the potential of geological hydrogen for sustainable energy systems to the impact of slow charging on electric vehicle adoption.
The Future Energy Systems Center is an industry research consortium created to examine the clean energy transition as new technologies, policies, demographics, and economics impact energy supply and demand. To date, the Center has supported 43 system modeling and analysis projects geared toward achieving this goal.
This was the Center’s fifth round of project selections, which are selected twice a year by a Steering Committee comprised of MIT faculty members based on nominations from MITEI Member companies, project impact, and balancing of the Center’s portfolio. MITEI will host kick-off meetings for each of these new projects at the Center’s November 2024 Workshop.
Brief descriptions of each of the new projects follow.
Distributed energy resources and the grid
Due to climate change concerns and decreasing costs, distributed energy resources (DERs) are expected to make up more of the energy distribution grid in the coming years. DERs are small-scale energy generation systems, such as roof top solar, wind-generating units, and energy storage devices. Increased integration of DERs can introduce complexities in grid operation and variability and intermittency in generation, but they also offer opportunities for alleviating stress on overall grid infrastructure. This project aims to quantify the impact of DERs on the grid and explore methods for removing some of the barriers for efficient DER integration and improving grid reliability.
PI: Anuradha Annaswamy, senior research scientist in the Department of Mechanical Engineering
Affordable multiday energy storage
Affordable multiday energy storage is key to reliable grid decarbonization due to the variable nature of renewable energy sources and the growing impacts of severe weather on electricity supply and demand. But battery-based multiday storage can be challenging due to high costs and large space requirements. This project will analyze an alternative energy storage system based on low-carbon liquid fuels (such as ammonia, methanol, and hydrogen) produced with renewable electricity. The team will analyze fuel production, fuel storage, and fuel-to-electricity subsystems of this approach, as well as identify the most promising pathways and their costs and environmental impacts.
PIs: Daniel Cohn, research scientist at MITEI; Guiyan Zang, research scientist at MITEI; and Leslie Bromberg, research engineer at Plasma Science and Fusion Center
Modeling for better evaluation of grid resiliency
Grid reliability is a key consideration when planning future investments in the evolving electricity sector as it decarbonizes. The goal of this project is to develop an agent-based capacity expansion model that explicitly simulates the investment and operation of electricity grids as they decarbonize. This will be an advancement over existing optimization-based models, which only consider the outcome of these evolutions and undervalue solutions that provide reliability during the transition.
PI: Ruaridh Macdonald, research scientist at MITEI
Enabling widespread CCUS adoption
This project is investigating cost-effective strategies to implement carbon capture, transport, and storage infrastructure at scale for industries that are difficult to decarbonize. Seeking opportunities to lower cost barriers, the team will explore the potential for a large-scale pipeline network based around the location of “carbon hubs” (collections of nearby industrial facilities).
PIs: Elizabeth Moore, research scientist at MIT Concrete Sustainability HUB, Materials Systems Laboratory; Hessam Azarijafari, deputy director of MIT Concrete Sustainability HUB; Randolph Kirchain, principal research scientist at Materials Research Laboratory; and Franz Ulm, a professor of civil and environmental engineering
Enhancing infrastructure resilience
Renewable energy systems, which are critical for mitigating climate change, can also be highly susceptible to its impacts. Extreme weather events such as high temperatures, severe droughts, and flooding, can reduce the efficiency and lifespan of renewable energy installations and in turn affect energy supply and demand. This project plans to leverage advanced technologies such as satellite Earth Observation (EO) data, AI, and advanced data visualizations to inform the resilience of renewable energy infrastructure and site selection as severe climate-related events become more frequent.
PIs: Dava Newman, director of MIT Media Lab and professor of astronautics, and Minoo Rathnasabapathy, research engineer at MIT Media Lab
Hydrogen production and renewable fuel synthesis
Hydrogen is a promising fuel option for meeting decarbonization goals, but its adoption faces challenges due to high retail delivery costs when transported as a cryogenic liquid or compressed gas. A potential option to address these challenges is to convert hydrogen to liquid energy carriers such as ammonia, methanol, and liquid organic hydrogen carriers, which have relatively lower delivery costs. This project examines the production of hydrogen by using the waste heat from these conversion processes to improve system efficiency and emissions. The team will perform techno-economic analysis to quantify the optimal pairing of hydrogen production and liquid energy carrier conversion processes, keeping in mind that the favorability of each process is location-dependent due to utility pricing and local resources.
PI: William H. Green, director of MITEI and professor of chemical engineering
Accessible and affordable EV charging
Electric vehicle (EV) charging must be accessible and affordable to enable widespread EV adoption. Much attention has been devoted to advancing fast charging for long-distance travel, but slow charging is less costly and sufficient for most daily commuting needs as it can adequately charge for this range during work hours or overnight. This project will evaluate the benefits and challenges of slow charging and identify any technological advancements required to leverage slow charging for mass EV adoption.
PI: Samantha Coday, assistant professor of electrical engineering
Small modular reactors for industry
Small modular reactors (SMRs) hold promise as a dispatchable carbon-free electricity source. And due to their size and smaller overall installation scope, these small nuclear fission reactors could overcome the financing hurdles facing large reactor construction projects. The objective of this project is to quantify cost, schedule, and licensing hurdles for SMRs, focusing on two SMR technologies and two specific industrial sites.
PI: Koroush Shirvan, professor in nuclear science and engineering
Modeling for energy storage investment
As more renewable energy sources are integrated into the energy mix, energy storage technologies become increasingly critical as a means of balancing the variability they introduce and for maintaining grid reliability. But for those seeking to invest in storage, accurately characterizing its value proves challenging as traditional metrics such as the levelized cost of storage inaccurately capture its value, neglecting system-specific factors and uncertainties. This project will address this problem by taking a multi-scale production cost modeling approach, focusing on capturing energy storage operations at sub-hourly time scales and quantifying uncertainties.
PI: Sungho Shin, assistant professor of chemical engineering
The potential of geologic hydrogen
Geologic hydrogen has been identified as a potential source of low-cost clean hydrogen, which could be a promising solution for decarbonizing electricity and hard-to-abate sectors such as industry and transportation. Through detailed modeling, cost, and emissions analysis, this project will assess the viability of geologic hydrogen and provide critical insights for sustainable and cost-effective hydrogen production.
PI: Guiyan Zang, research scientist at MITEI