From DOE’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (US) : “Hydrogen Can Play Key Role in U.S. Decarbonization”

From DOE’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (US)

October 8, 2021
Kiran Julin
media@lbl.gov
(510) 486-5183

A Q&A with Berkeley Lab scientists on how hydrogen can help achieve net-zero emissions.

Berkeley Lab scientists Adam Weber (left) and Ahmet Kusoglu. Credit: Berkeley Lab.

Earlier this summer, Energy Secretary Jennifer M. Granholm launched the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) Energy Earthshots Initiative, and the first Energy Earthshot is the “Hydrogen Shot,” with the goal of accelerating development and deployment of clean hydrogen across sectors.

DOE’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) plays a leading role in the research and development of clean hydrogen, on both the fundamental science and applied technologies sides.

Adam Weber is Berkeley Lab’s Hydrogen and Fuel Cell Technologies Program Manager and leads Berkeley Lab’s Energy Conversion Group (ECG), and Ahmet Kusoglu is a staff scientist in the ECG, a multidisciplinary team of electrochemists, chemical engineers, mechanical engineers, theorists, and material scientists with active collaborations across industry, academia, and national laboratories.

October 8th is Hydrogen and Fuel Cell Day, chosen because the atomic weight of hydrogen is 1.008. Weber and Kusoglu took some time to discuss the benefits of a hydrogen economy.

Q. What makes hydrogen such a promising, clean energy source?

Kusoglu: Hydrogen is not really an energy source. It is rather an energy carrier or what we often call an energy vector. So, you have to produce hydrogen from another energy source, store it, and then use or convert it. Hydrogen is a versatile and flexible energy carrier because it can be produced from various sources and for different applications. This flexibility is a key benefit of hydrogen versus other hydrocarbon fuels or energy storage technologies like batteries.

Weber: Hydrogen is a clean energy carrier because it doesn’t contain any carbon at all. And so if we talk about decarbonized energy, it’s storing it all in a hydrogen-to-hydrogen bond. It’s also a relatively small and simple molecule, which makes it easier to put electricity or energy into the bonds and to remove it when we use it.

Q. We have been talking about hydrogen on and off for years. Why is it more of a game-changer now and how can hydrogen be used across sectors?

Weber: The recent focus on decarbonization and climate change means that we will see the hydrogen economy happen much sooner than we previously predicted. We see hydrogen as something that can really help decarbonize hard-to-decarbonize sectors. Such applications include industrial usages such as a reductant in steel manufacturing or making green ammonia for fertilizers, using its thermal energy for thermal processes, or heavy-duty transportation such as long-haul trucking, maritime, trains, and aviation, to name a few. While we can make hydrogen and then make electricity from it, this is not going to be as efficient as a traditional redox flow or lithium-ion battery, although it could be an answer for very long-duration storage.

The fact that hydrogen is such a central molecule to so many different areas and it has so many different attributes of thermal, chemical, and electrochemical energy, enables it to be a critical energy carrier. In addition, since electrochemical processes are inherently scalable and modular, one can avoid associated environmental costs of transportation by making and using hydrogen where it is needed, such as making fertilizer efficiently on a farm instead of needing to transport it.

Kusoglu: Hydrogen has the potential to provide a cleaner pathway for different industrial and chemical products throughout the supply chain and sectors. It’s not just for electrification, or electric vehicles. For example, hydrogen is used as a reducing agent in steel and iron production, and tied to ammonia production in agriculture, and hydrogen-based fuels could eventually be used for shipping and aviation.

Q. What role is Berkeley Lab playing in moving hydrogen research forward?

Weber: I would say one of the strengths of Berkeley Lab is our deep understanding and breadth that enables us to conduct research that can have diverse impacts that range from basic research discoveries to immediate market impact. So, we can take something that is at the very fundamental level of a single interaction or single phenomenon, and we know how to propagate that knowledge up towards something that’s going to be relevant for an application.

Kusoglu: Berkeley Lab, as part of the MillionMile Fuel Truck consortium, has been working on fuel-cell trucks, especially for long-haul trucking. I think hydrogen will provide a unique solution for decarbonizing the fleets of heavy-duty vehicles and freight transportation. It is not just that hydrogen will help displace diesel engines for freight transportation, but it will also improve air quality and help communities adjacent to freight corridors, railyards, or ports where people are impacted most by diesel particulate emissions.

Weber: There’s the environmental justice impact. The fact that it is cleaner is great, but the fact that it’s cleaner in communities that are more likely to experience negative impacts from fossil fuel emissions is going to be even better. For example, communities near trucking corridors or ports have been shown to experience detrimental health impacts from diesel truck emissions. Hydrogen can also actually democratize energy. You can now have better energy production and capabilities in places that don’t have a lot of energy infrastructure today, such as tribal lands.

Q. DOE has announced an Energy Earthshot for long duration energy storage. What role could hydrogen play in that effort?

Weber: Chemical storage is really one of the key things for long-duration storage. By long duration, we mean multi-hours or multi-days, or even seasonal. Hydrogen can play an important role as one of the most efficient ways to store energy chemically, especially if coupled with geologic or large-scale storage. And that’s something that Berkeley Lab is planning to pursue – to look at the requirements for things like geologic storage or storage in porous media in general. The Lab is looking to explore questions like, what is the ability to get hydrogen in and out of those kinds of systems efficiently? And what does hydrogen do to that environment compared to when we use natural gas or methane in those environments?

Q. Describe the main challenges that you face with hydrogen research. How is your team addressing these challenges?

Weber: Overall these are extremely complex devices. So, although the molecule is simple, when we actually start to use it in a lot of different applications, there’s a lot of physics and chemistry occurring at multiple lengths and timescales. Getting a handle on all that is always a challenge, but I think it’s also a challenge that Berkeley Lab is very well suited to tackle with its advanced scientific user facilities and depth of expertise in these different research areas.

Hydrogen research at Berkeley Lab involves about nine different divisions at the Lab. I think it’s just a recognition that these problems are very crosscutting. Different labs have different sets of expertise, and really to solve this, it’s better to get everybody on board rather than competing with each other. So, working together to really bring to fruition the hydrogen economy – that’s really what we’re trying to do.

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LBNL campus

LBNL Molecular Foundry

Bringing Science Solutions to the World

In the world of science, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) (US) is synonymous with “excellence.” Thirteen Nobel prizes are associated with Berkeley Lab. Seventy Lab scientists are members of the The National Academy of Sciences (US), one of the highest honors for a scientist in the United States. Thirteen of our scientists have won the National Medal of Science, our nation’s highest award for lifetime achievement in fields of scientific research. Eighteen of our engineers have been elected to the The National Academy of Engineering (US), and three of our scientists have been elected into the Institute of Medicine. In addition, Berkeley Lab has trained thousands of university science and engineering students who are advancing technological innovations across the nation and around the world.

Berkeley Lab is a member of the national laboratory system supported by the U.S. Department of Energy through its Office of Science. It is managed by the University of California (US) and is charged with conducting unclassified research across a wide range of scientific disciplines. Located on a 202-acre site in the hills above the University of California- Berkeley campus that offers spectacular views of the San Francisco Bay, Berkeley Lab employs approximately 3,232 scientists, engineers and support staff. The Lab’s total costs for FY 2014 were $785 million. A recent study estimates the Laboratory’s overall economic impact through direct, indirect and induced spending on the nine counties that make up the San Francisco Bay Area to be nearly $700 million annually. The Lab was also responsible for creating 5,600 jobs locally and 12,000 nationally. The overall economic impact on the national economy is estimated at $1.6 billion a year. Technologies developed at Berkeley Lab have generated billions of dollars in revenues, and thousands of jobs. Savings as a result of Berkeley Lab developments in lighting and windows, and other energy-efficient technologies, have also been in the billions of dollars.

Berkeley Lab was founded in 1931 by Ernest Orlando Lawrence, a University of California-Berkeley (US) physicist who won the 1939 Nobel Prize in physics for his invention of the cyclotron, a circular particle accelerator that opened the door to high-energy physics. It was Lawrence’s belief that scientific research is best done through teams of individuals with different fields of expertise, working together. His teamwork concept is a Berkeley Lab legacy that continues today.

History

1931–1941

The laboratory was founded on August 26, 1931, by Ernest Lawrence, as the Radiation Laboratory of the University of California, Berkeley, associated with the Physics Department. It centered physics research around his new instrument, the cyclotron, a type of particle accelerator for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1939.

LBNL 88 inch cyclotron.

LBNL 88 inch cyclotron.

Throughout the 1930s, Lawrence pushed to create larger and larger machines for physics research, courting private philanthropists for funding. He was the first to develop a large team to build big projects to make discoveries in basic research. Eventually these machines grew too large to be held on the university grounds, and in 1940 the lab moved to its current site atop the hill above campus. Part of the team put together during this period includes two other young scientists who went on to establish large laboratories; J. Robert Oppenheimer founded DOE’s Los Alamos Laboratory (US), and Robert Wilson founded Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory(US).

1942–1950

Leslie Groves visited Lawrence’s Radiation Laboratory in late 1942 as he was organizing the Manhattan Project, meeting J. Robert Oppenheimer for the first time. Oppenheimer was tasked with organizing the nuclear bomb development effort and founded today’s Los Alamos National Laboratory to help keep the work secret. At the RadLab, Lawrence and his colleagues developed the technique of electromagnetic enrichment of uranium using their experience with cyclotrons. The “calutrons” (named after the University) became the basic unit of the massive Y-12 facility in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. Lawrence’s lab helped contribute to what have been judged to be the three most valuable technology developments of the war (the atomic bomb, proximity fuse, and radar). The cyclotron, whose construction was stalled during the war, was finished in November 1946. The Manhattan Project shut down two months later.

1951–2018

After the war, the Radiation Laboratory became one of the first laboratories to be incorporated into the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) (now Department of Energy (US). The most highly classified work remained at Los Alamos, but the RadLab remained involved. Edward Teller suggested setting up a second lab similar to Los Alamos to compete with their designs. This led to the creation of an offshoot of the RadLab (now the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (US)) in 1952. Some of the RadLab’s work was transferred to the new lab, but some classified research continued at Berkeley Lab until the 1970s, when it became a laboratory dedicated only to unclassified scientific research.

Shortly after the death of Lawrence in August 1958, the UC Radiation Laboratory (both branches) was renamed the Lawrence Radiation Laboratory. The Berkeley location became the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory in 1971, although many continued to call it the RadLab. Gradually, another shortened form came into common usage, LBNL. Its formal name was amended to Ernest Orlando Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in 1995, when “National” was added to the names of all DOE labs. “Ernest Orlando” was later dropped to shorten the name. Today, the lab is commonly referred to as “Berkeley Lab”.

The Alvarez Physics Memos are a set of informal working papers of the large group of physicists, engineers, computer programmers, and technicians led by Luis W. Alvarez from the early 1950s until his death in 1988. Over 1700 memos are available on-line, hosted by the Laboratory.

The lab remains owned by the Department of Energy (US), with management from the University of California (US). Companies such as Intel were funding the lab’s research into computing chips.

Science mission

From the 1950s through the present, Berkeley Lab has maintained its status as a major international center for physics research, and has also diversified its research program into almost every realm of scientific investigation. Its mission is to solve the most pressing and profound scientific problems facing humanity, conduct basic research for a secure energy future, understand living systems to improve the environment, health, and energy supply, understand matter and energy in the universe, build and safely operate leading scientific facilities for the nation, and train the next generation of scientists and engineers.

The Laboratory’s 20 scientific divisions are organized within six areas of research: Computing Sciences; Physical Sciences; Earth and Environmental Sciences; Biosciences; Energy Sciences; and Energy Technologies. Berkeley Lab has six main science thrusts: advancing integrated fundamental energy science; integrative biological and environmental system science; advanced computing for science impact; discovering the fundamental properties of matter and energy; accelerators for the future; and developing energy technology innovations for a sustainable future. It was Lawrence’s belief that scientific research is best done through teams of individuals with different fields of expertise, working together. His teamwork concept is a Berkeley Lab tradition that continues today.

Berkeley Lab operates five major National User Facilities for the DOE Office of Science (US):

The Advanced Light Source (ALS) is a synchrotron light source with 41 beam lines providing ultraviolet, soft x-ray, and hard x-ray light to scientific experiments.

LBNL/ALS

DOE’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (US) Advanced Light Source .

The ALS is one of the world’s brightest sources of soft x-rays, which are used to characterize the electronic structure of matter and to reveal microscopic structures with elemental and chemical specificity. About 2,500 scientist-users carry out research at ALS every year. Berkeley Lab is proposing an upgrade of ALS which would increase the coherent flux of soft x-rays by two-three orders of magnitude.

The DOE Joint Genome Institute (US) supports genomic research in support of the DOE missions in alternative energy, global carbon cycling, and environmental management. The JGI’s partner laboratories are Berkeley Lab, DOE’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (US), DOE’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory (US)(ORNL), DOE’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (US) (PNNL), and the HudsonAlpha Institute for Biotechnology (US). The JGI’s central role is the development of a diversity of large-scale experimental and computational capabilities to link sequence to biological insights relevant to energy and environmental research. Approximately 1,200 scientist-users take advantage of JGI’s capabilities for their research every year.

The LBNL Molecular Foundry (US) [above] is a multidisciplinary nanoscience research facility. Its seven research facilities focus on Imaging and Manipulation of Nanostructures; Nanofabrication; Theory of Nanostructured Materials; Inorganic Nanostructures; Biological Nanostructures; Organic and Macromolecular Synthesis; and Electron Microscopy. Approximately 700 scientist-users make use of these facilities in their research every year.

The DOE’s NERSC National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (US) is the scientific computing facility that provides large-scale computing for the DOE’s unclassified research programs. Its current systems provide over 3 billion computational hours annually. NERSC supports 6,000 scientific users from universities, national laboratories, and industry.

DOE’s NERSC National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center(US) at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory

Cray Cori II supercomputer at National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center(US) at DOE’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory(US), named after Gerty Cori, the first American woman to win a Nobel Prize in science.

NERSC Hopper Cray XE6 supercomputer.

NERSC Cray XC30 Edison supercomputer

NERSC GPFS for Life Sciences.

The Genepool system is a cluster dedicated to the DOE Joint Genome Institute’s computing needs. Denovo is a smaller test system for Genepool that is primarily used by NERSC staff to test new system configurations and software.

NERSC PDSF computer cluster in 2003.

PDSF is a networked distributed computing cluster designed primarily to meet the detector simulation and data analysis requirements of physics, astrophysics and nuclear science collaborations.

Cray Shasta Perlmutter SC18 AMD Epyc Nvidia pre-exascale supercomputer.

NERSC is a DOE Office of Science User Facility.

The DOE’s Energy Science Network (US) is a high-speed network infrastructure optimized for very large scientific data flows. ESNet provides connectivity for all major DOE sites and facilities, and the network transports roughly 35 petabytes of traffic each month.

Berkeley Lab is the lead partner in the DOE’s Joint Bioenergy Institute (US) (JBEI), located in Emeryville, California. Other partners are the DOE’s Sandia National Laboratory (US), the University of California (UC) campuses of Berkeley and Davis, the Carnegie Institution for Science (US), and DOE’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (US) (LLNL). JBEI’s primary scientific mission is to advance the development of the next generation of biofuels – liquid fuels derived from the solar energy stored in plant biomass. JBEI is one of three new U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Bioenergy Research Centers (BRCs).

Berkeley Lab has a major role in two DOE Energy Innovation Hubs. The mission of the Joint Center for Artificial Photosynthesis (JCAP) is to find a cost-effective method to produce fuels using only sunlight, water, and carbon dioxide. The lead institution for JCAP is the California Institute of Technology (US) and Berkeley Lab is the second institutional center. The mission of the Joint Center for Energy Storage Research (JCESR) is to create next-generation battery technologies that will transform transportation and the electricity grid. DOE’s Argonne National Laboratory (US) leads JCESR and Berkeley Lab is a major partner.

From Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne [EPFL-École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne] (CH): “A heating plant that combines renewable energy sources”

From Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne [EPFL-École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne] (CH)

08.09.21
Emmanuelle Marendaz Colle

EPFL has recently brought an innovative heating plant online and will soon connect it to a large data center. The plant will help the Ecublens campus optimize how it generates and consumes energy, with the goal of achieving carbon neutrality.

Seen from the metro, the new structure’s design is quite striking: red blocks clad entirely in solar panels. In reality, this is merely the visible portion of a vast underground network that extends from Lake Geneva to the campus’s Innovation Park. Opened this year, EPFL’s new heat-pump-powered plant stands out for its aesthetic appeal, innovative approach and energy-saving performance. It will be presented as part of CISBAT 2021, a conference focusing on the energy and environmental efficiency of the built environment, to be held at EPFL from 8 to 10 September.

Adjacent to the building are two chimneys connected to gas boilers. These provided heat to the EPFL campus for two years while the plant was under construction. In the future, they will be used only in the case of a system failure. “The new plant was put to the test one weekend this past February, when the temperature fell below freezing. It passed with flying colors,” says Pascal Gebhard, who is part of the Infrastructure group within the Vice Presidency for Operations (VPO). With his colleagues from the construction and operations teams, he has been overseeing the project since it got underway in 2014, and particularly since 2019, when the old heating plant was demolished.

Before construction on the new plant got underway, the campus buildings had been using lake water in their heating system since 1985. EPFL has actually been a trailblazer in this field since the late 1970s, when it built its first pumping station for cooling purposes. But during that time, two oil-fired turbines were used to supplement heating needs, particularly following an increase in the number of buildings on campus.

An innovative solution

When it came time to upgrade the outdated heating plant, EPFL’s Sustainability Unit – and in particular its former head Philippe Vollichard, who has now retired – pushed hard for an innovative solution. Rather than opting for gas, which would save money in the short run, but at the cost of CO2 emissions, the decision was made to build an integrated system that combined multiple renewable energy sources.

The new pumping station draws water deeper from the lake at a constant temperature of 7°C. It is connected to next-generation heat pumps that raise the water temperature to 67°C thanks to a thermodynamic process that involves compression, condensation, expansion and evaporation, thus delivering significantly better energy performance.

The other major advance is that the plant makes use of thermal waste generated by a data center built on top of it, with server racks whose doors are designed to accommodate filtered industrial water cooled by lake water. This solution is energy-efficient but technically quite bold – normally, water and electronics are best kept far apart.

Cooling the servers to heat the rest of EPFL generates considerable electricity savings, particularly in comparison with the conventional approach of cooling the servers with refrigeration units. In a standard system, 3.3 units of electricity are needed to deliver one unit of electricity to the servers. Here, after factoring in savings in heating, this figure is 1.3 units, a 60% reduction.

What about plant waste?

The innovation doesn’t stop there. With solar panels covering the sides and roof of the building and a large space for pilot tests in the works, the plant could one day make use of a nearby composting facility, where plant waste from the neighboring campus’s parks and gardens is deposited. A digester for food waste from campus cafeterias could be another step towards small-scale local biogas production.

Nevertheless, the very small quantities of biogas produced would be insufficient to supply all of EPFL’s needs, according to David Gremaud, Energy Project Manager at the VP.

Energy savings

Switching from the oil-fired turbines to heat pumps will cut EPFL’s CO2 emissions by 1,800 metric tons a year. The energy savings from the solar panels will only be marginal, however, since they will generate a total of just 160 kW, whereas a single heat pump requires 2,000 kW. But according to Gianluca Paglia, a project manager for energy systems and construction methods at EPFL’s Sustainability Unit, having the solar panels installed directly on the building that houses a heating plant is a rare and instructive example of building-integrated photovoltaics – one of the topics addressed at CISBAT.

The construction work itself was delayed several times due to COVID – but also due to an infiltration of quagga mussels. These creatures, which live in the deep waters of Lake Geneva, colonized the heating system’s piping and other equipment. Engineers had to clean out the equipment thoroughly and install a new, removable strainer that allows for easier surface cleaning. They also introduced new filters.

Another issue that had to be dealt with was the discharge of wastewater from the cooling system into the local stream. The engineers designed a mechanism whereby the discharge valves could be regulated so as to preserve the local biotope, paving the way for the canton to approve the project’s environmental impact statement.

New data center will soon be up and running

The delays in the new heating plant also affected EPFL’s new data center, which is still under construction. The project managers are now waiting for the server racks to be delivered. “We’re operating on a tight schedule,” says Aristide Boisseau, the head of data center operations at EPFL. The new heating plant will be linked to a 1,000 m² data center that will eventually house 12 rows of servers, including one for the University of Lausanne. The server racks used at the data center will be slightly higher than conventional models and have water-cooled doors. It’s a design that’s already used in other buildings, but until now only for cooling purposes. The plan is to have the heat generated by the servers recycled into the heating plant, which should start this winter. That will increase the campus’ data storage and processing capacity, initially to half capacity at 2 MW, and then to 4 MW.

Space for running pilot tests

The last major advantage – and not the least – of the new heating plant is that it will include a large, raised area for running pilot tests. This space will be the size of six badminton courts and span an entire side of the plant’s building. Here, engineers will be able to run all kinds of experiments and demonstrations. “Before Philippe left, we made a shortlist of possible projects in the areas of both teaching and research,” says François Maréchal, a chemical engineer and professor of mechanical engineering at EPFL.

Indeed, the area lends itself to teaching purposes in a variety of ways, such as to explain system design and comparison, track operations data, reconcile measurements, improve process control and generate forecasts. It also opens the door to an array of synergies between EPFL labs, especially within the School of Engineering. For instance, Maréchal’s colleague Jan van Herle, a senior scientist at EPFL’s Group of Energy Materials (GEM) in Sion, is working on a fuel cell that can be installed at the heating plant to convert the biogas produced from organic waste into heat and electricity. Jürg Schiffmann, an associate professor at EPFL’s Laboratory for Applied Mechanical Design, has developed a new kind of compressor for heat pumps, and Prof. Mario Paolone at EPFL’s Distributed Electrical Systems Laboratory has come up with a way of integrating the heating plant into the smart system used to manage the campus’ electricity use.

Heating-system design is a field with much promise for the future, and Maréchal is encouraged by how EPFL’s own heating plant has evolved over the years.

Another promising development is the growing number of students who sign up for Maréchal’s class on energy system optimization. In this class, whose size has risen from 15 to 60 students in just a few years, Maréchal uses EPFL’s new heating plant as a case study. “Every engineer who is involved in energy systems must have one eye on the energy transition. It’s a crucial issue, and a highly motivating one for engineering students. While it requires a lot of work, it also shows students how important it is to analyze systemic ways of incorporating renewable energy in their designs. In the end, they’re quite proud of what they achieve.”

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EPFL campus

The Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne [EPFL-École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne] (CH) is a research institute and university in Lausanne, Switzerland, that specializes in natural sciences and engineering. It is one of the two Swiss Federal Institutes of Technology, and it has three main missions: education, research and technology transfer.

The QS World University Rankings ranks EPFL(CH) 14th in the world across all fields in their 2020/2021 ranking, whereas Times Higher Education World University Rankings ranks EPFL(CH) as the world’s 19th best school for Engineering and Technology in 2020.

EPFL(CH) is located in the French-speaking part of Switzerland; the sister institution in the German-speaking part of Switzerland is the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology ETH Zürich [Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule Zürich)](CH) . Associated with several specialized research institutes, the two universities form the Domain of the Swiss Federal Institutes of Technology (ETH Domain) [ETH-Bereich; Domaine des Écoles polytechniques fédérales] (CH) which is directly dependent on the Federal Department of Economic Affairs, Education and Research. In connection with research and teaching activities, EPFL(CH) operates a nuclear reactor CROCUS; a Tokamak Fusion reactor; a Blue Gene/Q Supercomputer; and P3 bio-hazard facilities.

ETH Zürich, EPFL (Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne) [École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne](CH), and four associated research institutes form the Domain of the Swiss Federal Institutes of Technology (ETH Domain) [ETH-Bereich; Domaine des Écoles polytechniques fédérales] (CH) with the aim of collaborating on scientific projects.

The roots of modern-day EPFL(CH) can be traced back to the foundation of a private school under the name École spéciale de Lausanne in 1853 at the initiative of Lois Rivier, a graduate of the École Centrale Paris (FR) and John Gay the then professor and rector of the Académie de Lausanne. At its inception it had only 11 students and the offices was located at Rue du Valentin in Lausanne. In 1869, it became the technical department of the public Académie de Lausanne. When the Académie was reorganised and acquired the status of a university in 1890, the technical faculty changed its name to École d’ingénieurs de l’Université de Lausanne. In 1946, it was renamed the École polytechnique de l’Université de Lausanne (EPUL). In 1969, the EPUL was separated from the rest of the University of Lausanne and became a federal institute under its current name. EPFL(CH), like ETH Zürich(CH), is thus directly controlled by the Swiss federal government. In contrast, all other universities in Switzerland are controlled by their respective cantonal governments. Following the nomination of Patrick Aebischer as president in 2000, EPFL(CH) has started to develop into the field of life sciences. It absorbed the Swiss Institute for Experimental Cancer Research (ISREC) in 2008.

In 1946, there were 360 students. In 1969, EPFL(CH) had 1,400 students and 55 professors. In the past two decades the university has grown rapidly and as of 2012 roughly 14,000 people study or work on campus, about 9,300 of these being Bachelor, Master or PhD students. The environment at modern day EPFL(CH) is highly international with the school attracting students and researchers from all over the world. More than 125 countries are represented on the campus and the university has two official languages, French and English.

Organization

EPFL is organised into eight schools, themselves formed of institutes that group research units (laboratories or chairs) around common themes:

School of Basic Sciences (SB, Jan S. Hesthaven)

Institute of Mathematics (MATH, Victor Panaretos)
Institute of Chemical Sciences and Engineering (ISIC, Emsley Lyndon)
Institute of Physics (IPHYS, Harald Brune)
European Centre of Atomic and Molecular Computations (CECAM, Ignacio Pagonabarraga Mora)
Bernoulli Center (CIB, Nicolas Monod)
Biomedical Imaging Research Center (CIBM, Rolf Gruetter)
Interdisciplinary Center for Electron Microscopy (CIME, Cécile Hébert)
Max Planck-EPFL Centre for Molecular Nanosciences and Technology (CMNT, Thomas Rizzo)
Swiss Plasma Center (SPC, Ambrogio Fasoli)
Laboratory of Astrophysics (LASTRO, Jean-Paul Kneib)

School of Engineering (STI, Ali Sayed)

Institute of Electrical Engineering (IEL, Giovanni De Micheli)
Institute of Mechanical Engineering (IGM, Thomas Gmür)
Institute of Materials (IMX, Michaud Véronique)
Institute of Microengineering (IMT, Olivier Martin)
Institute of Bioengineering (IBI, Matthias Lütolf)

School of Architecture, Civil and Environmental Engineering (ENAC, Claudia R. Binder)

Institute of Architecture (IA, Luca Ortelli)
Civil Engineering Institute (IIC, Eugen Brühwiler)
Institute of Urban and Regional Sciences (INTER, Philippe Thalmann)
Environmental Engineering Institute (IIE, David Andrew Barry)

School of Computer and Communication Sciences (IC, James Larus)

Algorithms & Theoretical Computer Science
Artificial Intelligence & Machine Learning
Computational Biology
Computer Architecture & Integrated Systems
Data Management & Information Retrieval
Graphics & Vision
Human-Computer Interaction
Information & Communication Theory
Networking
Programming Languages & Formal Methods
Security & Cryptography
Signal & Image Processing
Systems

School of Life Sciences (SV, Gisou van der Goot)

Bachelor-Master Teaching Section in Life Sciences and Technologies (SSV)
Brain Mind Institute (BMI, Carmen Sandi)
Institute of Bioengineering (IBI, Melody Swartz)
Swiss Institute for Experimental Cancer Research (ISREC, Douglas Hanahan)
Global Health Institute (GHI, Bruno Lemaitre)
Ten Technology Platforms & Core Facilities (PTECH)
Center for Phenogenomics (CPG)
NCCR Synaptic Bases of Mental Diseases (NCCR-SYNAPSY)

College of Management of Technology (CDM)

Swiss Finance Institute at EPFL (CDM-SFI, Damir Filipovic)
Section of Management of Technology and Entrepreneurship (CDM-PMTE, Daniel Kuhn)
Institute of Technology and Public Policy (CDM-ITPP, Matthias Finger)
Institute of Management of Technology and Entrepreneurship (CDM-MTEI, Ralf Seifert)
Section of Financial Engineering (CDM-IF, Julien Hugonnier)

College of Humanities (CDH, Thomas David)

Human and social sciences teaching program (CDH-SHS, Thomas David)

EPFL Middle East (EME, Dr. Franco Vigliotti)[62]

Section of Energy Management and Sustainability (MES, Prof. Maher Kayal)

In addition to the eight schools there are seven closely related institutions

Swiss Cancer Centre
Center for Biomedical Imaging (CIBM)
Centre for Advanced Modelling Science (CADMOS)
École cantonale d’art de Lausanne (ECAL)
Campus Biotech
Wyss Center for Bio- and Neuro-engineering
Swiss National Supercomputing Centre

From MIT Technology Review (US) : “Building a better chemical factory—out of microbes”

From MIT Technology Review (US)

August 24, 2021
Leigh Buchanan

Credit: Sasha Israel.

Professor Kristala Jones Prather ’94 has made it practical to turn microbes into efficient producers of desired chemicals. She’s also working to reduce our dependence on petroleum.

Metabolic engineers have a problem: cells are selfish. The scientists want to use microbes to produce chemical compounds for industrial applications. The microbes prefer to concentrate on their own growth.

Kristala L. Jones Prather ’94 has devised a tool that satisfies both conflicting objectives. Her metabolite valve acts like a train switch: it senses when a cell culture has reproduced enough to sustain itself and then redirects metabolic flux—the movement of molecules in a pathway—down the track that synthesizes the desired compound. The results: greater yield of the product and sufficient cell growth to keep the culture healthy and productive.

William E. Bentley, a professor of bioengineering at The University of Maryland (US), has been following Prather’s work for more than two decades. He calls the valves “a new principle in engineering” that he anticipates will be highly valued in the research community. Their ability to eliminate bottlenecks can prove so essential to those attempting to synthesize a particular molecule in useful quantities that “in many cases it might decide whether it is a successful endeavor or not,” says Bentley.

Prather, The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (US)’s Arthur D. Little Professor of Chemical Engineering, labors in the intersecting fields of synthetic biology and metabolic engineering: a place where science, rather than art, imitates life. The valves play a major role in her larger goal of programming microbes—chiefly E. coli—to produce chemicals that can be used in a wide range of fields, including energy and medicine. She does that by observing what nature can do. Then she hypothesizes what it should be able to do with an assist from strategically inserted DNA.

“We are increasing the synthetic capacity of biological systems,” says Prather, who made MIT Technology Review’s TR35 list in 2007. “We need to push beyond what biology can naturally do and start getting it to make compounds that it doesn’t normally make.”

Prather describes her work as creating a new kind of chemical factory inside microbial cells—one that makes ultra-pure compounds efficiently at scale. Coaxing microbes into producing desired compounds is safer and more environmentally friendly than relying on traditional chemical synthesis, which typically involves high temperatures, high pressures, and complicated instrumentation—and, often, toxic by-products. She didn’t originate the idea of turning microbes into chemical factories, but her lab is known for developing tools and fine-tuning processes that make it efficient and practical.

That’s the approach she has taken with glucaric acid, which has multiple commercial applications, some of them green. Water treatment plants, for example, have long relied on phosphates to prevent corrosion in pipes and to bind with metals like lead and copper so they don’t leach into the water supply. But phosphates also feed algae blooms in lakes and oceans. Glucaric acid does the same work as phosphates without feeding those toxic blooms.

Producing glucaric acid the usual way—through chemical oxidation of glucose—is expensive, often yields product that isn’t very pure, and creates a lot of hazardous waste. Prather’s microbial factories produce it with high levels of purity and without the toxic by-products, at a reasonable cost. She cofounded the startup Kalion in 2011 to put her microbial-factory approach into practice. (Prather is Kalion’s chief science officer. Her husband, Darcy Prather ’91, is its president.)

The company, which is lining up large-scale production in Slovakia, has several prospective customers. Although the largest of these are in oil services, “it also turns out, in the wonderful, wacky way chemistry works, that the same compound is used in pharmaceutical manufacturing,” Prather says. It’s required, for example, in production of the ADHD drug Adderall. And it can be used to make textiles stronger, which could lead to more effective recycling of cotton and other natural materials.

Kalion’s first target is phosphates, because of their immediate commercial applications. But in her wider research, Prather has also drawn a great big bull’s-eye on petroleum. Eager to produce greener alternatives to gasoline and plastics, she and her research group at MIT are using bacteria to synthesize molecules that would normally be derived from petroleum. “Big picture, if we are successful,” Prather says, “what we are doing is moving things one by one off the shelf to say, ‘That no longer is made from petroleum. That now is made from biomass.’”

From East Texas to MIT

Born in Cincinnati, Prather grew up in Longview, Texas, against a backdrop of oilfield pumps and derricks. Her father died before she turned two. Her mother worked at Wylie College, a small, historically Black school—and earned a bachelor’s degree there herself in 2004, Prather is quick to add.

Her high school’s first valedictorian of color, Prather had only vague ideas about academic and professional opportunities outside her state. With college brochures flooding the family’s mailbox in her junior year, she sought advice from a history teacher. “Math was my favorite subject in high school, and I was enjoying chemistry,” says Prather. The teacher told her that math plus chemistry equaled chemical engineering, and that if she wanted to be an engineer she should go to The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (US). “What’s MIT?” asked Prather.

Others in the community were no better informed. What was then the DeVry Institute of Technology, a for-profit school with a less-than-stellar academic reputation and campuses around the country, was advertising heavily on television. When she told people she was going to MIT, they assumed it was a DeVry branch in Massachusetts. “They were disappointed, because they thought I was going to do great things,” says Prather. “But here I was going to this trade school to be a plumber’s assistant.”

In June 1990 Prather arrived on campus to participate in Interphase, a program offered through MIT’s Office of Minority Education. Designed to ease the transition for incoming students, Interphase “was a game-changer,” says Prather. The program introduced her to an enduring group of friends and familiarized her with the campus. Most important, it instilled confidence. Coming from a school without AP classes, Prather had worried about starting off behind the curve. When she found she knew the material in her Interphase math class, it came as a relief. “When I was bored, I thought, ‘I belong here,’” she says.

As an undergraduate Prather was exposed to bioprocess engineering, which uses living cells to induce desired chemical or physical changes in a material. At that time scientists treated the cells from which the process starts as something fixed. Prather became intrigued by the idea that you could engineer not only the process but also the biology of the cell itself. “The way you could copy and cut and paste DNA appealed to the part of me that liked math,” she says.

After graduating in 1994, Prather got her PhD at The University of California-Berkeley (US), where her advisor was Jay Keasling, a professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering who was at the forefront of the new field of synthetic biology. At Berkeley, Prather sought ways to move DNA in and out of cells to optimize the creation of desirable proteins.

The practice at that time was to bulk up cells with lots of DNA, which would in turn produce lots of protein, which would generate lots of the desired chemical compound. But there was a problem, which Prather—who lives near a scenic state park—explains with a local analogy. “I can go for a light hike in the Blue Hills Reservation,” she says, “but not if you put a 50-pound pack on my back.” Similarly, an overloaded cell “can sometimes respond by saying, ‘I am too tired.’” Prather’s doctoral thesis explored systems that efficiently produce a lot of a desired chemical using less DNA.

In her fourth year at Berkeley, Prather received a fellowship from DuPont and traveled to Delaware for her first full-length presentation. Following standard conference practice, she laid out for her audience the three motivations underlying her research. Afterward, one of the company’s scientists politely explained to her why all three were misguided. “He said, ‘What you are doing is interesting and important, but you are motivated by what you think is important in industry,’” says Prather. “‘And we just don’t care about any of that stuff.’”

Humbled, Prather decided a sojourn in the corporate world would reduce the risk that her academic career would be consigned to real-world irrelevance. She spent the next four years at Merck, in a group developing processes to make things like therapeutic proteins and vaccines. There she learned about the kinds of projects and problems that matter most to practitioners like her DuPont critic.

Merck employed hordes of chemists to produce large quantities of chemical compounds for use in new drugs. When part of that process seemed better suited to biology than to chemistry, they would hand it off to the department Prather worked in, which used enzymes to perform the next step. “They were typically not very complicated reactions,” says Prather. “A single step converting A to B.”

Prather was intrigued by the possibility of performing not just individual steps but the entire chemical synthesis within cells, using chains of reactions called metabolic pathways. That work inspired what would become some of her most acclaimed research at MIT, where she joined the faculty in 2004.

Finding the production switch

It wasn’t long after returning to MIT that this young woman from the Texas oil patch took aim at fossil fuels and their by-­products. Many of her lab’s projects focus on replacing petroleum as a feedstock. In one—a collaboration with MIT colleagues Brad Olsen ’03, a chemical engineer, and Desiree Plata, PhD ’09, a civil and environmental engineer—Prather is using biomass to create renewable polymers that could lead to a greener kind of plastic. Her lab is figuring out how to induce microbes to convert sugar from plants into monomers that can then be chemically converted into polymers to create plastic. At the end of the plastic’s usable life, it biodegrades and turns back into nutrients. Those nutrients “will give you more plants from which you can extract more sugar that you can turn into new chemicals to go into new plastics,” says Prather. “It’s the circle of life there.”

These days she is drawing the most attention for her research in optimizing metabolic pathways—research that she and other scientists can then use to maximize the yield of a desired product.

The challenge is that cells prioritize the use of nutrients, such as glucose, to grow rather than to manufacture these desirable compounds. More growth for the cell means less product for the scientist. “So you run into a competition problem,” says Prather.

Take glucaric acid, the chemical produced by Prather’s company—and one that Keasling says is extremely important to industry. (“These molecules are not trivial to produce, particularly at the levels that are needed industrially,” he says.) Prather and her lab had been adding three genes—drawn from mice, yeast, and a bacterium—to E. coli, enabling the bacteria to transform a type of simple sugar into glucaric acid. But the bacteria also needed that sugar for a metabolic pathway that breaks down glucose to feed its own growth and reproduction.

Prather’s team wanted to shut down the pathway nourishing growth and divert the sugar into a pathway producing glucaric acid—but only after the bacterial culture had grown enough to sustain itself as a productive chemical factory. To do so they used quorum sensing, a kind of communication through which bacteria share information about changes in the number of cells in their colony, which allows them to coordinate colony-wide functions such as gene regulation. The team engineered each cell to produce a protein that then creates a molecule called AHL. When quorum sensing detects a certain amount of AHL—the amount produced in the time it takes for the culture to reach a sustainable size—it activates a switch that turns off production of an enzyme that is part of the glucose breakdown process. The glucose shifts to the chemical-synthesis pathway, greatly increasing the amount of glucaric acid produced.

Prather’s switches, called metabolite valves, are now used in processes that harness microbes to produce a wide range of desired chemicals. The valves open or close in response to changes in the density of particular molecules in a pathway. These switches can be fine-tuned to optimize production without compromising the health of the bacteria, dramatically increasing output. The researchers’ flagship paper, which was published in Nature Biology in 2017, has been cited almost 200 times. The goal at this point is to step up the scale.

Like many of the mechanisms Prather uses in her research, such switches already exist in biology. Cells whose resources are threatened by neighboring foreign cells will switch from growth mode to producing antibiotics to kill off their competitors, for example. “Cells that make things like antibiotics have a natural way of first making more of themselves, then putting their resources into making product,” she says. “We developed a synthetic way of mimicking nature.”

Prather’s Berkeley advisor, Keasling, has been using a derivative of the switch inspired by her research. “The tool for channeling metabolic flux—the flow of material through a metabolic pathway—is super-important work that I think will be widely used in the future by metabolic engineers,” he says. “When Kristala publishes something, you know it is going to work.”

Mentoring young scientists

Prather receives at least as much recognition for teaching and mentoring as for her research. “She cares deeply about education and is invested in her students in a way that really stands out,” says Keasling. Students describe her optimism and supportiveness, saying that she motivates without commanding. “She created an environment where I was free to make my own mistakes and learn and grow,” says Kevin V. Solomon, SM ’08, PhD ’12, who studied with Prather between 2007 and 2012 and is now an assistant professor of chemical and biomedical engineering at The University of Delaware (US). In some other labs, he notes, “you have hard deadlines, and you perform or you freak out.”

It was at Merck that Prather realized how much she loves working with young scientists—and it was also where she assembled the management arsenal she uses to run her lab. So, for example, she makes sure to get to know each student’s preferences about communication style, because “treating everyone fairly is not the same as treating everyone the same,” she says. One-on-one meetings commence with a few minutes of chat about general topics, so Prather can suss out students’ states of mind and make sure they are okay. She sets clear standards, intent on avoiding the uncertainty about expectations that is common in academic labs. And when students do raise concerns, “it is important to document and confirm that they have been heard,” she says.

The most effective leaders model the behaviors they want to see in others. Prather, who received MIT’s Martin Luther King Leadership Award in 2017, expects commitment and high performance from her grad students and postdocs, but not at the cost of their physical or mental health. She discourages working on weekends—to the extent that is possible in biology—and insists that lab members take vacations. And from the beginning she has demonstrated that it is possible to simultaneously do first-class science and have a personal life.

Prather’s two daughters were both campus kids. She was 31, with a two-month-old baby, when she joined the faculty, and she would nurse her daughter in her office before leaving her at the Institute’s new infant-care facility. Later, she set up a small table and chairs near her desk as a play area. The children have accompanied her on work trips—Prather and her husband took turns watching them when they were small—and frequently attend their mother’s evening and weekend events. Prather recalls turning up for a presentation in 32-123 with both children in tow and setting them up with snacks in the front row. “My daughter promptly dropped the marinara sauce to go with her mozzarella sticks on the floor,” she says. “I was on my hands and knees wiping up red sauce 15 minutes before giving a talk.”

Prather does set boundaries. She turns down almost every invitation for Friday nights, which is family time. Trips are limited to two a month, and she won’t travel on any family member’s birthday or on her anniversary. But she also welcomes students into her home, where she hosts barbecues and Thanksgiving dinners for anyone without a place to go. “I bring them into my home and into my life,” she says.

When Solomon was Prather’s student, she even hosted his parents. That hospitality continued after he graduated, when he and his mother ran into his former professor at a conference in Germany. “She graciously kept my mom occupied because she knew I was networking to further my career,” says Solomon.

It was an act in keeping with Prather’s priorities. Beyond the innovations, beyond the discoveries, her overarching objective is to create independently successful scientists. “The most important thing we do as scientists is to train students and postdocs,” she says. “If your students are well trained and ready to advance knowledge—even if the thing we are working on goes nowhere—to me that is a win.”

On being Black at MIT-Bearing witness to racism

As a student at MIT, Kristala Jones Prather ’94 was never the target of racist behavior. But she says other Black students weren’t so lucky. Even though no one challenged her directly, “there was a general atmosphere on campus that questioned the validity of my existence,” she says. Articles in The Tech claimed that affirmative action was diluting the quality of the student pool.

During her junior year, a group standing on the roof of a frat hurled racial slurs at Black students walking back to their dorm. In response, Prather and another student collaborated with Clarence G. Williams, HM ’09, special assistant to the president, to produce a documentary called It’s Intuitively Obvious about the experience of Black students at MIT.

“I was involved in a lot of activism to create a climate where students didn’t have to be subjected to the notion that MIT was doing charity,” says Prather. Rather, “it was providing an opportunity for students who had demonstrated their capacity to represent the institution proudly.”

Prather’s decision to return to MIT as a faculty member was difficult, in part because her Black former classmates, many of whom had experienced overt racism, were discouraging their own children from attending. She worried, too, that she wouldn’t be able to avoid personal attacks this time around. “I didn’t want all the positive feelings I had about MIT to be ruined,” she says.

Those fears turned out to be unfounded. Prather says she has received tremendous support from her department head and colleagues, as well as abundant leadership opportunities. But she recognizes that not all her peers can say the same. She is guardedly optimistic about the Institute’s current diversity initiative. “We are making progress,” she says. “I am waiting to see if there’s a real commitment to creating an environment where students of color can feel like the Institute is a home for them.”

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The mission of MIT Technology Review (US) is to equip its audiences with the intelligence to understand a world shaped by technology.

From Department of Energy (US) : “Wind Turbines-the Bigger the Better”

From Department of Energy (US)

August 30, 2021

Since the early 2000s, wind turbines have grown in size—in both height and blade lengths—and generate more energy. What’s driving this growth? Let’s take a closer look.

Average turbine hub height, rotor diameter, and nameplate capacity for land-based wind projects from the Land-Based Wind Market Report: 2021 Edition.

A wind turbine’s hub height is the distance from the ground to the middle of the turbine’s rotor. The hub height for utility-scale land-based wind turbines has increased 59% since 1998–1999, to about 90 meters (295 feet) in 2020. That’s about as tall as the Statue of Liberty! The average hub height for offshore turbines in the United States is projected to grow even taller—from 100 meters (330 feet) in 2016 to about 150 meters (500 feet), or about the height of the Washington Monument, in 2035.

Illustration of increasing turbine heights and blades lengths over time.

Turbine towers are becoming taller to capture more energy, since winds generally increase as altitudes increase. The change in wind speed with altitude is called wind shear. At higher heights above the ground, wind can flow more freely, with less friction from obstacles on the earth’s surface such as trees and other vegetation, buildings, and mountains. Most wind turbine towers taller than 100 meters tend to be concentrated in the Midwest and Northeast, two regions with higher-than-average wind shear.

Location of tall-tower turbine installations from the Land-Based Wind Market Report: 2021 Edition.

Rotor Diameter

A turbine’s rotor diameter, or the width of the circle swept by the rotating blades (the dotted circles in the second illustration), has also grown over the years. Back in 2010, no turbines in the United States employed rotors that were 115 meters (380 feet) in diameter or larger. In 2020, 91% of newly installed turbines featured such rotors. The average rotor diameter in 2020 was about 125 meters (410 feet)—longer than a football field.

Larger rotor diameters allow wind turbines to sweep more area, capture more wind, and produce more electricity. A turbine with longer blades will be able to capture more of the available wind than shorter blades—even in areas with relatively less wind. Being able to harvest more wind at lower wind speeds can increase the number of areas available for wind development nationwide. Due to this trend, rotor swept areas have grown 570% since 1998–1999.

Nameplate Capacity

In addition to getting taller and bigger, wind turbines have also increased in maximum power rating, or capacity, since the early 2000s. The average capacity of newly installed U.S. wind turbines in 2020 was 2.75 megawatts (MW), up 8% since 2019 and 284% since 1998–1999. In 2020, there was a sharp increase for turbines installed in the 2.75–3.5 MW range. More wind energy per turbine means that fewer turbines are needed to generate a desired capacity across a wind plant—ultimately leading to lower costs.

Transportation and Installation Challenges

If bigger is better, why aren’t even larger turbines used currently? Although turbine heights and rotor diameters are increasing, there are a few limitations. Transporting and installing large turbine blades for land-based wind is not easy, since they cannot be folded or bent once constructed. This limits the routes trucks can take and the radius of their turns. Turbine tower diameters are also difficult to manage, since they may not fit under bridges or highway overpasses. DOE is addressing these challenges through its research projects. For instance, DOE is designing turbines with more slender and flexible blades that can navigate through curves in roads and rail lines that conventional blades cannot. DOE is also supporting efforts to develop tall turbine towers that can be produced on site, thus eliminating tower transportation issues.

See the full article here.

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The Department of Energy (US) is a cabinet-level department of the United States Government concerned with the United States’ policies regarding energy and safety in handling nuclear material. Its responsibilities include the nation’s nuclear weapons program; nuclear reactor production for the United States Navy; energy conservation; energy-related research; radioactive waste disposal; and domestic energy production. It also directs research in genomics. the Human Genome Project originated in a DOE initiative. DOE sponsors more research in the physical sciences than any other U.S. federal agency, the majority of which is conducted through its system of National Laboratories. The agency is led by the United States Secretary of Energy, and its headquarters are located in Southwest Washington, D.C., on Independence Avenue in the James V. Forrestal Building, named for James Forrestal, as well as in Germantown, Maryland.

Formation and consolidation

In 1942, during World War II, the United States started the Manhattan Project, a project to develop the atomic bomb, under the eye of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. After the war in 1946, the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) was created to control the future of the project. The Atomic Energy Act of 1946 also created the framework for the first National Laboratories. Among other nuclear projects, the AEC produced fabricated uranium fuel cores at locations such as Fernald Feed Materials Production Center in Cincinnati, Ohio. In 1974, the AEC gave way to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, which was tasked with regulating the nuclear power industry and the Energy Research and Development Administration, which was tasked to manage the nuclear weapon; naval reactor; and energy development programs.

The 1973 oil crisis called attention to the need to consolidate energy policy. On August 4, 1977, President Jimmy Carter signed into law The Department of Energy Organization Act of 1977 (Pub.L. 95–91, 91 Stat. 565, enacted August 4, 1977), which created the Department of Energy(US). The new agency, which began operations on October 1, 1977, consolidated the Federal Energy Administration; the Energy Research and Development Administration; the Federal Power Commission; and programs of various other agencies. Former Secretary of Defense James Schlesinger, who served under Presidents Nixon and Ford during the Vietnam War, was appointed as the first secretary.

President Carter created the Department of Energy with the goal of promoting energy conservation and developing alternative sources of energy. He wanted to not be dependent on foreign oil and reduce the use of fossil fuels. With international energy’s future uncertain for America, Carter acted quickly to have the department come into action the first year of his presidency. This was an extremely important issue of the time as the oil crisis was causing shortages and inflation. With the Three-Mile Island disaster, Carter was able to intervene with the help of the department. Carter made switches within the Nuclear Regulatory Commission in this case to fix the management and procedures. This was possible as nuclear energy and weapons are responsibility of the Department of Energy.

Recent

On March 28, 2017, a supervisor in the Office of International Climate and Clean Energy asked staff to avoid the phrases “climate change,” “emissions reduction,” or “Paris Agreement” in written memos, briefings or other written communication. A DOE spokesperson denied that phrases had been banned.

In a May 2019 press release concerning natural gas exports from a Texas facility, the DOE used the term ‘freedom gas’ to refer to natural gas. The phrase originated from a speech made by Secretary Rick Perry in Brussels earlier that month. Washington Governor Jay Inslee decried the term “a joke”.

Facilities

The Department of Energy operates a system of national laboratories and technical facilities for research and development, as follows:

Ames Laboratory
Argonne National Laboratory
Brookhaven National Laboratory
Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory
Idaho National Laboratory
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
Los Alamos National Laboratory
National Energy Technology Laboratory
National Renewable Energy Laboratory
Oak Ridge National Laboratory
Pacific Northwest National Laboratory
Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory
Sandia National Laboratories
Savannah River National Laboratory
SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory
Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility

Other major DOE facilities include:
Albany Research Center
Bannister Federal Complex
Bettis Atomic Power Laboratory – focuses on the design and development of nuclear power for the U.S. Navy
Kansas City Plant
Knolls Atomic Power Laboratory – operates for Naval Reactors Program Research under the DOE (not a National Laboratory)
National Petroleum Technology Office
Nevada Test Site
New Brunswick Laboratory
Office of Fossil Energy
Office of River Protection
Pantex
Radiological and Environmental Sciences Laboratory
Y-12 National Security Complex
Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository
Other:

Pahute Mesa Airstrip – Nye County, Nevada, in supporting Nevada National Security Site

From DOE’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (US): “New Report Shows Technology Advancement and Value of Wind Energy”

From DOE’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (US)

August 30, 2021
Media Relations
mnerzig@lbl.gov
(510) 486-5183

A wind farm in Spain. (Credit: inakiantonana/iStock.)

Wind energy continues to see strong growth; solid performance; and low prices in the U.S., according to a report released by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) and prepared by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab). With levelized costs of just over $30 per megawatt-hour (MWh) for newly built projects, the cost of wind is well below its grid-system, health, and climate benefits.

“Wind energy prices ­– ­particularly in the central United States, and supported by federal tax incentives – remain low, with utilities and corporate buyers selecting wind as a low-cost option,” said Berkeley Lab Senior Scientist Ryan Wiser. “Considering the health and climate benefits of wind energy makes the economics even better.”

Key findings from the DOE’s annual “Land-Based Wind Market Report” include:

Wind comprises a growing share of electricity supply. U.S. wind power capacity grew at a record pace in 2020, with nearly $25 billion invested in 16.8 gigawatts (GW) of capacity. Wind energy output rose to account for more than 8% of the entire nation’s electricity supply, and is more than 20% in 10 states. At least 209 GW of wind are seeking access to the transmission system; 61 GW of this capacity are offshore wind and 13 GW are hybrid plants that pair wind with storage or solar.

Credit: Berkeley Lab.

Wind project performance has increased over time. The average capacity factor (a measure of project performance) among projects built over the last five years was above 40%, considerably higher than projects built earlier. The highest capacity factors are seen in the interior of the country.

Turbines continue to get larger. Improved plant performance has been driven by larger turbines mounted on taller towers and featuring longer blades. In 2010, no turbines employed blades that were 115 meters in diameter or larger, but in 2020, 91% of newly installed turbines featured such rotors. Proposed projects indicate that total turbine height will continue to rise.

Low wind turbine pricing has pushed down installed project costs over the last decade. Wind turbine prices are averaging $775 to $850/kilowatt (kW). The average installed cost of wind projects in 2020 was $1,460/kW, down more than 40% since the peak in 2010, though stable for the last three years. The lowest costs were found in Texas.

Credit: Berkeley Lab.

Wind energy prices remain low-around $20/MWh in the interior “wind belt” of the country. After topping out at $70/MWh for power purchase agreements executed in 2009, the national average price of wind has dropped. In the interior “wind belt” of the country, recent pricing is around $20/MWh. In the West and East, prices tend to average $30/MWh or more. These prices, which are possible in part due to federal tax support, fall below the projected future fuel costs of gas-fired generation.

Wind prices are often attractive compared to wind’s grid-system market value. The value of wind energy sold in wholesale power markets is affected by the location of wind plants, their hourly output profiles, and how those characteristics correlate with real-time electricity prices and capacity markets. The market value of wind declined in 2020 given the drop in natural gas prices, averaging under $15/MWh in much of the interior of the country; higher values were seen in the Northeast and in California.

The average levelized cost of wind energy is down to $33/MWh. Levelized costs vary across time and geography, but the national average stood at $33/MWh in 2020—down substantially historically, though consistent with the previous two years. (Cost estimates do not count the effect of federal tax incentives for wind.)

Credit: Berkeley Lab.

The health and climate benefits of wind in 2020 were larger than its grid-system value, and the combination of all three far exceeds the current levelized cost of wind. Wind generation reduces power-sector emissions of carbon dioxide, nitrogen oxides, and sulfur dioxide. These reductions, in turn, provide public health and climate benefits that vary regionally, but together are economically valued at an average of $76/MWh-wind nationwide in 2020.

See the full article here .

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LBNL campus

LBNL Molecular Foundry

Bringing Science Solutions to the World

In the world of science, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) (US) is synonymous with “excellence.” Thirteen Nobel prizes are associated with Berkeley Lab. Seventy Lab scientists are members of the The National Academy of Sciences (US), one of the highest honors for a scientist in the United States. Thirteen of our scientists have won the National Medal of Science, our nation’s highest award for lifetime achievement in fields of scientific research. Eighteen of our engineers have been elected to the The National Academy of Engineering (US), and three of our scientists have been elected into the Institute of Medicine. In addition, Berkeley Lab has trained thousands of university science and engineering students who are advancing technological innovations across the nation and around the world.

Berkeley Lab is a member of the national laboratory system supported by the U.S. Department of Energy through its Office of Science. It is managed by the University of California (US) and is charged with conducting unclassified research across a wide range of scientific disciplines. Located on a 202-acre site in the hills above the University of California- Berkeley campus that offers spectacular views of the San Francisco Bay, Berkeley Lab employs approximately 3,232 scientists, engineers and support staff. The Lab’s total costs for FY 2014 were $785 million. A recent study estimates the Laboratory’s overall economic impact through direct, indirect and induced spending on the nine counties that make up the San Francisco Bay Area to be nearly $700 million annually. The Lab was also responsible for creating 5,600 jobs locally and 12,000 nationally. The overall economic impact on the national economy is estimated at $1.6 billion a year. Technologies developed at Berkeley Lab have generated billions of dollars in revenues, and thousands of jobs. Savings as a result of Berkeley Lab developments in lighting and windows, and other energy-efficient technologies, have also been in the billions of dollars.

Berkeley Lab was founded in 1931 by Ernest Orlando Lawrence, a University of California-Berkeley (US) physicist who won the 1939 Nobel Prize in physics for his invention of the cyclotron, a circular particle accelerator that opened the door to high-energy physics. It was Lawrence’s belief that scientific research is best done through teams of individuals with different fields of expertise, working together. His teamwork concept is a Berkeley Lab legacy that continues today.

History

1931–1941

The laboratory was founded on August 26, 1931, by Ernest Lawrence, as the Radiation Laboratory of the University of California, Berkeley, associated with the Physics Department. It centered physics research around his new instrument, the cyclotron, a type of particle accelerator for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1939.

LBNL 88 inch cyclotron.

LBNL 88 inch cyclotron.

Throughout the 1930s, Lawrence pushed to create larger and larger machines for physics research, courting private philanthropists for funding. He was the first to develop a large team to build big projects to make discoveries in basic research. Eventually these machines grew too large to be held on the university grounds, and in 1940 the lab moved to its current site atop the hill above campus. Part of the team put together during this period includes two other young scientists who went on to establish large laboratories; J. Robert Oppenheimer founded DOE’s Los Alamos Laboratory (US), and Robert Wilson founded Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory(US).

1942–1950

Leslie Groves visited Lawrence’s Radiation Laboratory in late 1942 as he was organizing the Manhattan Project, meeting J. Robert Oppenheimer for the first time. Oppenheimer was tasked with organizing the nuclear bomb development effort and founded today’s Los Alamos National Laboratory to help keep the work secret. At the RadLab, Lawrence and his colleagues developed the technique of electromagnetic enrichment of uranium using their experience with cyclotrons. The “calutrons” (named after the University) became the basic unit of the massive Y-12 facility in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. Lawrence’s lab helped contribute to what have been judged to be the three most valuable technology developments of the war (the atomic bomb, proximity fuse, and radar). The cyclotron, whose construction was stalled during the war, was finished in November 1946. The Manhattan Project shut down two months later.

1951–2018

After the war, the Radiation Laboratory became one of the first laboratories to be incorporated into the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) (now Department of Energy (US). The most highly classified work remained at Los Alamos, but the RadLab remained involved. Edward Teller suggested setting up a second lab similar to Los Alamos to compete with their designs. This led to the creation of an offshoot of the RadLab (now the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (US)) in 1952. Some of the RadLab’s work was transferred to the new lab, but some classified research continued at Berkeley Lab until the 1970s, when it became a laboratory dedicated only to unclassified scientific research.

Shortly after the death of Lawrence in August 1958, the UC Radiation Laboratory (both branches) was renamed the Lawrence Radiation Laboratory. The Berkeley location became the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory in 1971, although many continued to call it the RadLab. Gradually, another shortened form came into common usage, LBNL. Its formal name was amended to Ernest Orlando Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in 1995, when “National” was added to the names of all DOE labs. “Ernest Orlando” was later dropped to shorten the name. Today, the lab is commonly referred to as “Berkeley Lab”.

The Alvarez Physics Memos are a set of informal working papers of the large group of physicists, engineers, computer programmers, and technicians led by Luis W. Alvarez from the early 1950s until his death in 1988. Over 1700 memos are available on-line, hosted by the Laboratory.

The lab remains owned by the Department of Energy (US), with management from the University of California (US). Companies such as Intel were funding the lab’s research into computing chips.

Science mission

From the 1950s through the present, Berkeley Lab has maintained its status as a major international center for physics research, and has also diversified its research program into almost every realm of scientific investigation. Its mission is to solve the most pressing and profound scientific problems facing humanity, conduct basic research for a secure energy future, understand living systems to improve the environment, health, and energy supply, understand matter and energy in the universe, build and safely operate leading scientific facilities for the nation, and train the next generation of scientists and engineers.

The Laboratory’s 20 scientific divisions are organized within six areas of research: Computing Sciences; Physical Sciences; Earth and Environmental Sciences; Biosciences; Energy Sciences; and Energy Technologies. Berkeley Lab has six main science thrusts: advancing integrated fundamental energy science; integrative biological and environmental system science; advanced computing for science impact; discovering the fundamental properties of matter and energy; accelerators for the future; and developing energy technology innovations for a sustainable future. It was Lawrence’s belief that scientific research is best done through teams of individuals with different fields of expertise, working together. His teamwork concept is a Berkeley Lab tradition that continues today.

Berkeley Lab operates five major National User Facilities for the DOE Office of Science (US):

The Advanced Light Source (ALS) is a synchrotron light source with 41 beam lines providing ultraviolet, soft x-ray, and hard x-ray light to scientific experiments.

LBNL/ALS

DOE’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (US) Advanced Light Source .

The ALS is one of the world’s brightest sources of soft x-rays, which are used to characterize the electronic structure of matter and to reveal microscopic structures with elemental and chemical specificity. About 2,500 scientist-users carry out research at ALS every year. Berkeley Lab is proposing an upgrade of ALS which would increase the coherent flux of soft x-rays by two-three orders of magnitude.

The DOE Joint Genome Institute (US) supports genomic research in support of the DOE missions in alternative energy, global carbon cycling, and environmental management. The JGI’s partner laboratories are Berkeley Lab, DOE’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (US), DOE’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory (US)(ORNL), DOE’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (US) (PNNL), and the HudsonAlpha Institute for Biotechnology (US). The JGI’s central role is the development of a diversity of large-scale experimental and computational capabilities to link sequence to biological insights relevant to energy and environmental research. Approximately 1,200 scientist-users take advantage of JGI’s capabilities for their research every year.

The LBNL Molecular Foundry (US) [above] is a multidisciplinary nanoscience research facility. Its seven research facilities focus on Imaging and Manipulation of Nanostructures; Nanofabrication; Theory of Nanostructured Materials; Inorganic Nanostructures; Biological Nanostructures; Organic and Macromolecular Synthesis; and Electron Microscopy. Approximately 700 scientist-users make use of these facilities in their research every year.

The DOE’s NERSC National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (US) is the scientific computing facility that provides large-scale computing for the DOE’s unclassified research programs. Its current systems provide over 3 billion computational hours annually. NERSC supports 6,000 scientific users from universities, national laboratories, and industry.

DOE’s NERSC National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center(US) at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory

Cray Cori II supercomputer at National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center(US) at DOE’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory(US), named after Gerty Cori, the first American woman to win a Nobel Prize in science.

NERSC Hopper Cray XE6 supercomputer.

NERSC Cray XC30 Edison supercomputer

NERSC GPFS for Life Sciences.

The Genepool system is a cluster dedicated to the DOE Joint Genome Institute’s computing needs. Denovo is a smaller test system for Genepool that is primarily used by NERSC staff to test new system configurations and software.

NERSC PDSF computer cluster in 2003.

PDSF is a networked distributed computing cluster designed primarily to meet the detector simulation and data analysis requirements of physics, astrophysics and nuclear science collaborations.

Cray Shasta Perlmutter SC18 AMD Epyc Nvidia pre-exascale supercomputer.

NERSC is a DOE Office of Science User Facility.

The DOE’s Energy Science Network (US) is a high-speed network infrastructure optimized for very large scientific data flows. ESNet provides connectivity for all major DOE sites and facilities, and the network transports roughly 35 petabytes of traffic each month.

Berkeley Lab is the lead partner in the DOE’s Joint Bioenergy Institute (US) (JBEI), located in Emeryville, California. Other partners are the DOE’s Sandia National Laboratory (US), the University of California (UC) campuses of Berkeley and Davis, the Carnegie Institution for Science (US), and DOE’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (US) (LLNL). JBEI’s primary scientific mission is to advance the development of the next generation of biofuels – liquid fuels derived from the solar energy stored in plant biomass. JBEI is one of three new U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Bioenergy Research Centers (BRCs).

Berkeley Lab has a major role in two DOE Energy Innovation Hubs. The mission of the Joint Center for Artificial Photosynthesis (JCAP) is to find a cost-effective method to produce fuels using only sunlight, water, and carbon dioxide. The lead institution for JCAP is the California Institute of Technology (US) and Berkeley Lab is the second institutional center. The mission of the Joint Center for Energy Storage Research (JCESR) is to create next-generation battery technologies that will transform transportation and the electricity grid. DOE’s Argonne National Laboratory (US) leads JCESR and Berkeley Lab is a major partner.

From Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne [EPFL-École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne] (CH): “Charging stations can combine hydrogen production and energy storage”

From Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne [EPFL-École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne] (CH)

30.08.21
Clara Marc

EPFL scientists have developed a new system that addresses two top priorities of the energy transition: clean hydrogen production and large-scale energy storage. Their technology could be particularly useful in transportation applications.

The need for reliable renewable energy is growing fast, as countries around the world – including Switzerland – step up their efforts to fight climate change, find alternatives to fossil fuels and reach the energy-transition targets set by their governments. But renewable energy can’t be incorporated into power grids efficiently until there is a way to store it on a large scale.

“Most forms of renewable energy are dependent on weather conditions, which results in large fluctuations in the power they supply,” says Danick Reynard, a PhD student at EPFL’s Laboratory of Physical and Analytical Electrochemistry (LEPA). “But power grids aren’t designed to manage these kinds of fluctuations.” Hydrogen, because it can supply energy consistently regardless of the weather, is now attracting growing attention.

LEPA scientists have been working for several years on the dual challenges of clean hydrogen production and energy storage. They have just unveiled a new system that combines a conventional redox flow battery – currently one of the most promising methods for large-scale stationary energy storage – with catalytic reactors that produce clean hydrogen from the fluid running through the battery. The LEPA system is just as efficient as conventional ones but offers greater flexibility and energy storage capacity. It also produces clean hydrogen at a lower cost. The scientists’ research appears in Cell Reports Physical Science.

Redox flow batteries hold the most promise for energy storage

Redox flow batteries consist of two tanks separated by an electrochemical cell. Two highly conductive electrolyte fluids – one with a positive charge, one with a negative charge – circulate through the tanks and past the cell to trigger a chemical reaction where electrons are exchanged. These batteries store energy in electrochemical form, just like the lithium-ion batteries used in smartphones, but with a much longer lifetime and with flexible energy generation and storage capabilities, meaning they can respond quickly to fluctuations in power supply and demand.

To create their system, the LEPA scientists took a conventional redox flow battery and enhanced it by adding two catalytic reactors. These reactors produce hydrogen from the fluid circulating through the tanks. “The hydrogen is made through a catalytic process that uses energy from the battery to split water molecules into their two components, hydrogen and oxygen,” says Reynard. “But this hydrogen can be considered clean only if the energy used to charge the batteries is renewable.”

Clean, pure hydrogen with enhanced and flexible storage capacity

LEPA’s technology offers several advantages for both hydrogen production and energy storage. With conventional redox flow batteries, once they’re fully charged, they can’t store any more energy. “However, in our system, once the battery is fully charged, it can discharge fluid into the external reactors. They in turn generate hydrogen that can be stored and used later, freeing up storage space in the battery itself,” says Reynard.

The hydrogen produced by the LEPA system is pure and only needs to be dried and compressed for optimal storage. That system is also safer than conventional ones, because it generates the oxygen and hydrogen separately rather than simultaneously, so there is less risk of an explosion.

The future of charging stations for hydrogen vehicles?

LEPA’s technology could be particularly useful in transportation applications. As more and more drivers adopt electric vehicles, demand for electricity and clean hydrogen will soar. Charging these vehicles puts pressure on power grids and creates spikes in load that are difficult for grid operators to plan for. “According to 2020 data from the Swiss Federal Office of Energy, the transportation sector accounts for some 33% of the energy consumption in Switzerland,” says Reynard. “Our batteries, in addition to producing hydrogen, could also serve as buffers for smoothing out peaks in that demand.”

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EPFL campus

The Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne [EPFL-École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne] (CH) is a research institute and university in Lausanne, Switzerland, that specializes in natural sciences and engineering. It is one of the two Swiss Federal Institutes of Technology, and it has three main missions: education, research and technology transfer.

The QS World University Rankings ranks EPFL(CH) 14th in the world across all fields in their 2020/2021 ranking, whereas Times Higher Education World University Rankings ranks EPFL(CH) as the world’s 19th best school for Engineering and Technology in 2020.

EPFL(CH) is located in the French-speaking part of Switzerland; the sister institution in the German-speaking part of Switzerland is the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology ETH Zürich [Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule Zürich)](CH) . Associated with several specialized research institutes, the two universities form the Domain of the Swiss Federal Institutes of Technology (ETH Domain) [ETH-Bereich; Domaine des Écoles polytechniques fédérales] (CH) which is directly dependent on the Federal Department of Economic Affairs, Education and Research. In connection with research and teaching activities, EPFL(CH) operates a nuclear reactor CROCUS; a Tokamak Fusion reactor; a Blue Gene/Q Supercomputer; and P3 bio-hazard facilities.

ETH Zürich, EPFL (Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne) [École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne](CH), and four associated research institutes form the Domain of the Swiss Federal Institutes of Technology (ETH Domain) [ETH-Bereich; Domaine des Écoles polytechniques fédérales] (CH) with the aim of collaborating on scientific projects.

The roots of modern-day EPFL(CH) can be traced back to the foundation of a private school under the name École spéciale de Lausanne in 1853 at the initiative of Lois Rivier, a graduate of the École Centrale Paris (FR) and John Gay the then professor and rector of the Académie de Lausanne. At its inception it had only 11 students and the offices was located at Rue du Valentin in Lausanne. In 1869, it became the technical department of the public Académie de Lausanne. When the Académie was reorganised and acquired the status of a university in 1890, the technical faculty changed its name to École d’ingénieurs de l’Université de Lausanne. In 1946, it was renamed the École polytechnique de l’Université de Lausanne (EPUL). In 1969, the EPUL was separated from the rest of the University of Lausanne and became a federal institute under its current name. EPFL(CH), like ETH Zürich(CH), is thus directly controlled by the Swiss federal government. In contrast, all other universities in Switzerland are controlled by their respective cantonal governments. Following the nomination of Patrick Aebischer as president in 2000, EPFL(CH) has started to develop into the field of life sciences. It absorbed the Swiss Institute for Experimental Cancer Research (ISREC) in 2008.

In 1946, there were 360 students. In 1969, EPFL(CH) had 1,400 students and 55 professors. In the past two decades the university has grown rapidly and as of 2012 roughly 14,000 people study or work on campus, about 9,300 of these being Bachelor, Master or PhD students. The environment at modern day EPFL(CH) is highly international with the school attracting students and researchers from all over the world. More than 125 countries are represented on the campus and the university has two official languages, French and English.

Organization

EPFL is organised into eight schools, themselves formed of institutes that group research units (laboratories or chairs) around common themes:

School of Basic Sciences (SB, Jan S. Hesthaven)

Institute of Mathematics (MATH, Victor Panaretos)
Institute of Chemical Sciences and Engineering (ISIC, Emsley Lyndon)
Institute of Physics (IPHYS, Harald Brune)
European Centre of Atomic and Molecular Computations (CECAM, Ignacio Pagonabarraga Mora)
Bernoulli Center (CIB, Nicolas Monod)
Biomedical Imaging Research Center (CIBM, Rolf Gruetter)
Interdisciplinary Center for Electron Microscopy (CIME, Cécile Hébert)
Max Planck-EPFL Centre for Molecular Nanosciences and Technology (CMNT, Thomas Rizzo)
Swiss Plasma Center (SPC, Ambrogio Fasoli)
Laboratory of Astrophysics (LASTRO, Jean-Paul Kneib)

School of Engineering (STI, Ali Sayed)

Institute of Electrical Engineering (IEL, Giovanni De Micheli)
Institute of Mechanical Engineering (IGM, Thomas Gmür)
Institute of Materials (IMX, Michaud Véronique)
Institute of Microengineering (IMT, Olivier Martin)
Institute of Bioengineering (IBI, Matthias Lütolf)

School of Architecture, Civil and Environmental Engineering (ENAC, Claudia R. Binder)

Institute of Architecture (IA, Luca Ortelli)
Civil Engineering Institute (IIC, Eugen Brühwiler)
Institute of Urban and Regional Sciences (INTER, Philippe Thalmann)
Environmental Engineering Institute (IIE, David Andrew Barry)

School of Computer and Communication Sciences (IC, James Larus)

Algorithms & Theoretical Computer Science
Artificial Intelligence & Machine Learning
Computational Biology
Computer Architecture & Integrated Systems
Data Management & Information Retrieval
Graphics & Vision
Human-Computer Interaction
Information & Communication Theory
Networking
Programming Languages & Formal Methods
Security & Cryptography
Signal & Image Processing
Systems

School of Life Sciences (SV, Gisou van der Goot)

Bachelor-Master Teaching Section in Life Sciences and Technologies (SSV)
Brain Mind Institute (BMI, Carmen Sandi)
Institute of Bioengineering (IBI, Melody Swartz)
Swiss Institute for Experimental Cancer Research (ISREC, Douglas Hanahan)
Global Health Institute (GHI, Bruno Lemaitre)
Ten Technology Platforms & Core Facilities (PTECH)
Center for Phenogenomics (CPG)
NCCR Synaptic Bases of Mental Diseases (NCCR-SYNAPSY)

College of Management of Technology (CDM)

Swiss Finance Institute at EPFL (CDM-SFI, Damir Filipovic)
Section of Management of Technology and Entrepreneurship (CDM-PMTE, Daniel Kuhn)
Institute of Technology and Public Policy (CDM-ITPP, Matthias Finger)
Institute of Management of Technology and Entrepreneurship (CDM-MTEI, Ralf Seifert)
Section of Financial Engineering (CDM-IF, Julien Hugonnier)

College of Humanities (CDH, Thomas David)

Human and social sciences teaching program (CDH-SHS, Thomas David)

EPFL Middle East (EME, Dr. Franco Vigliotti)[62]

Section of Energy Management and Sustainability (MES, Prof. Maher Kayal)

In addition to the eight schools there are seven closely related institutions

Swiss Cancer Centre
Center for Biomedical Imaging (CIBM)
Centre for Advanced Modelling Science (CADMOS)
École cantonale d’art de Lausanne (ECAL)
Campus Biotech
Wyss Center for Bio- and Neuro-engineering
Swiss National Supercomputing Centre

From Massachusetts Institute of Technology (US) : “Energy storage from a chemistry perspective”

From Massachusetts Institute of Technology (US)

August 16, 2021
Daniel de Wolff

Eli Paster SM ’10, PhD ’14 is the CEO of PolyJoule, a startup working to reinvent energy storage technology to increase efficiency and reduce costs.

PolyJoule is a Massachusetts-based startup co-founded by MIT professors Ian Hunter and Tim Swager, that’s looking to reinvent energy storage from a chemistry perspective. Courtesy of PolyJoule.

The transition toward a more sustainable, environmentally sound electrical grid has driven an upsurge in renewables like solar and wind. But something as simple as cloud cover can cause grid instability, and wind power is inherently unpredictable. This intermittent nature of renewables has invigorated the competitive landscape for energy storage companies looking to enhance power system flexibility while enabling the integration of renewables.

“Impact is what drives PolyJoule more than anything else,” says CEO Eli Paster. “We see impact from a renewable integration standpoint, from a curtailment standpoint, and also from the standpoint of transitioning from a centralized to a decentralized model of energy-power delivery.”

PolyJoule is a Billerica, Massachusetts-based startup that’s looking to reinvent energy storage from a chemistry perspective. Co-founders Ian Hunter of MIT’s Department of Mechanical Engineering and Tim Swager of the Department of Chemistry are longstanding MIT professors considered luminaries in their respective fields. Meanwhile, the core team is a small but highly skilled collection of chemists, manufacturing specialists, supply chain optimizers, and entrepreneurs, many of whom have called MIT home at one point or another.

“The ideas that we work on in the lab, you’ll see turned into products three to four years from now, and they will still be innovative and well ahead of the curve when they get to market,” Paster says. “But the concepts come from the foresight of thinking five to 10 years in advance. That’s what we have in our back pocket, thanks to great minds like Ian and Tim.”

PolyJoule takes a systems-level approach married to high-throughput, analytical electrochemistry that has allowed the company to pinpoint a chemical cell design based on 10,000 trials. The result is a battery that is low-cost, safe, and has a long lifetime. It’s capable of responding to base loads and peak loads in microseconds, allowing the same battery to participate in multiple power markets and deployment use cases.

In the energy storage sphere, interesting technologies abound, but workable solutions are few and far between. But Paster says PolyJoule has managed to bridge the gap between the lab and the real world by taking industry concerns into account from the beginning. “We’ve taken a slightly contrarian view to all of the other energy storage companies that have come before us that have said, ‘If we build it, they will come.’ Instead, we’ve gone directly to the customer and asked, ‘If you could have a better battery storage platform, what would it look like?’”

With commercial input feeding into the thought processes behind their technological and commercial deployment, PolyJoule says they’ve designed a battery that is less expensive to make, less expensive to operate, safer, and easier to deploy.

Traditionally lithium-ion batteries have been the go-to energy storage solution. But lithium has its drawbacks including cost; safety issues; and detrimental effects on the environment. But PolyJoule isn’t interested in lithium-or metals of any kind-in fact. “We start with the periodic table of organic elements,” says Paster, “and from there, we derive what works at economies of scale-what is easy to converge and convert chemically.”

Having an inherently safer chemistry allows PolyJoule to save on system integration costs, among other things. PolyJoule batteries don’t contain flammable solvents, which means no added expenses related to fire mitigation. Safer chemistry also means ease of storage, and PolyJoule batteries are currently undergoing global safety certification (UL approval) to be allowed indoors and on airplanes. Finally, with high power built into the chemistry, PolyJoule’s cells can be charged and discharged to extremes, without the need for heating or cooling systems.

“From raw material to product delivery, we examine each step in the value chain with an eye towards reducing costs,” says Paster. It all starts with designing the chemistry around earth-abundant elements which allows the small startup to compete with larger suppliers even at smaller scales. Consider the fact that PolyJoule’s differentiating material cost is less than $1 per kilogram, whereas lithium carbonate sells for $20 per kilogram.

On the manufacturing side, Paster explains that PolyJoule cuts costs by making their cells in old paper mills and warehouses, employing off-the-shelf equipment previously used for tissue paper or newspaper printing. “We use equipment that has been around for decades because we don’t want to create a cutting-edge technology that requires cutting-edge manufacturing,” he says. “We want to create a cutting-edge technology that can be deployed in industrialized nations and in other nations that can benefit the most from energy storage.”

PolyJoule’s first customer is an industrial distributed energy consumer with baseline energy consumption that increases by a factor of 10 when the heavy machinery kicks on twice a day. In the early morning and late afternoon, it consumes about 50 kilowatts for 20 minutes to an hour, compared to a baseline rate of 5 kilowatts. It’s an application model that is translatable to a variety of industries. Think wastewater treatment, food processing, and server farms — anything with a fluctuation in power consumption over a 24-hour period.

By the end of the year PolyJoule will have delivered its first 10 kilowatt-hour system exiting stealth mode and adding commercial viability to demonstrated technological superiority. “What we’re seeing, now is massive amounts of energy storage being added to renewables and grid-edge applications,” says Paster. “We anticipated that by 12-18 months, and now we’re ramping up to catch up with some of the bigger players.”

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USPS “Forever” postage stamps celebrating Innovation at MIT.

Massachusetts Institute of Technology (US) is a private land-grant research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The institute has an urban campus that extends more than a mile (1.6 km) alongside the Charles River. The institute also encompasses a number of major off-campus facilities such as the MIT Lincoln Laboratory (US), the MIT Bates Research and Engineering Center (US), and the Haystack Observatory (US), as well as affiliated laboratories such as the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard(US) and Whitehead Institute (US).

Massachusettes Institute of Technology-Haystack Observatory(US) Westford, Massachusetts, USA, Altitude 131 m (430 ft).

Founded in 1861 in response to the increasing industrialization of the United States, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (US) adopted a European polytechnic university model and stressed laboratory instruction in applied science and engineering. It has since played a key role in the development of many aspects of modern science, engineering, mathematics, and technology, and is widely known for its innovation and academic strength. It is frequently regarded as one of the most prestigious universities in the world.

As of December 2020, 97 Nobel laureates, 26 Turing Award winners, and 8 Fields Medalists have been affiliated with MIT as alumni, faculty members, or researchers. In addition, 58 National Medal of Science recipients, 29 National Medals of Technology and Innovation recipients, 50 MacArthur Fellows, 80 Marshall Scholars, 3 Mitchell Scholars, 22 Schwarzman Scholars, 41 astronauts, and 16 Chief Scientists of the U.S. Air Force have been affiliated with Massachusetts Institute of Technology (US) . The university also has a strong entrepreneurial culture and MIT alumni have founded or co-founded many notable companies. Massachusetts Institute of Technology (US) is a member of the Association of American Universities (AAU).

Foundation and vision

In 1859, a proposal was submitted to the Massachusetts General Court to use newly filled lands in Back Bay, Boston for a “Conservatory of Art and Science”, but the proposal failed. A charter for the incorporation of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, proposed by William Barton Rogers, was signed by John Albion Andrew, the governor of Massachusetts, on April 10, 1861.

Rogers, a professor from the University of Virginia (US), wanted to establish an institution to address rapid scientific and technological advances. He did not wish to found a professional school, but a combination with elements of both professional and liberal education, proposing that:

“The true and only practicable object of a polytechnic school is, as I conceive, the teaching, not of the minute details and manipulations of the arts, which can be done only in the workshop, but the inculcation of those scientific principles which form the basis and explanation of them, and along with this, a full and methodical review of all their leading processes and operations in connection with physical laws.”

The Rogers Plan reflected the German research university model, emphasizing an independent faculty engaged in research, as well as instruction oriented around seminars and laboratories.

Early developments

Two days after Massachusetts Institute of Technology (US) was chartered, the first battle of the Civil War broke out. After a long delay through the war years, MIT’s first classes were held in the Mercantile Building in Boston in 1865. The new institute was founded as part of the Morrill Land-Grant Colleges Act to fund institutions “to promote the liberal and practical education of the industrial classes” and was a land-grant school. In 1863 under the same act, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts founded the Massachusetts Agricultural College, which developed as the University of Massachusetts Amherst (US)). In 1866, the proceeds from land sales went toward new buildings in the Back Bay.

Massachusetts Institute of Technology (US) was informally called “Boston Tech”. The institute adopted the European polytechnic university model and emphasized laboratory instruction from an early date. Despite chronic financial problems, the institute saw growth in the last two decades of the 19th century under President Francis Amasa Walker. Programs in electrical, chemical, marine, and sanitary engineering were introduced, new buildings were built, and the size of the student body increased to more than one thousand.

The curriculum drifted to a vocational emphasis, with less focus on theoretical science. The fledgling school still suffered from chronic financial shortages which diverted the attention of the MIT leadership. During these “Boston Tech” years, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (US) faculty and alumni rebuffed Harvard University (US) president (and former MIT faculty) Charles W. Eliot’s repeated attempts to merge MIT with Harvard College’s Lawrence Scientific School. There would be at least six attempts to absorb MIT into Harvard. In its cramped Back Bay location, MIT could not afford to expand its overcrowded facilities, driving a desperate search for a new campus and funding. Eventually, the MIT Corporation approved a formal agreement to merge with Harvard, over the vehement objections of MIT faculty, students, and alumni. However, a 1917 decision by the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court effectively put an end to the merger scheme.

In 1916, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (US) administration and the MIT charter crossed the Charles River on the ceremonial barge Bucentaur built for the occasion, to signify MIT’s move to a spacious new campus largely consisting of filled land on a one-mile-long (1.6 km) tract along the Cambridge side of the Charles River. The neoclassical “New Technology” campus was designed by William W. Bosworth and had been funded largely by anonymous donations from a mysterious “Mr. Smith”, starting in 1912. In January 1920, the donor was revealed to be the industrialist George Eastman of Rochester, New York, who had invented methods of film production and processing, and founded Eastman Kodak. Between 1912 and 1920, Eastman donated $20 million ($236.6 million in 2015 dollars) in cash and Kodak stock to MIT.

Curricular reforms

In the 1930s, President Karl Taylor Compton and Vice-President (effectively Provost) Vannevar Bush emphasized the importance of pure sciences like physics and chemistry and reduced the vocational practice required in shops and drafting studios. The Compton reforms “renewed confidence in the ability of the Institute to develop leadership in science as well as in engineering”. Unlike Ivy League schools, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (US) catered more to middle-class families, and depended more on tuition than on endowments or grants for its funding. The school was elected to the Association of American Universities (US)in 1934.

Still, as late as 1949, the Lewis Committee lamented in its report on the state of education at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (US) that “the Institute is widely conceived as basically a vocational school”, a “partly unjustified” perception the committee sought to change. The report comprehensively reviewed the undergraduate curriculum, recommended offering a broader education, and warned against letting engineering and government-sponsored research detract from the sciences and humanities. The School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences and the MIT Sloan School of Management were formed in 1950 to compete with the powerful Schools of Science and Engineering. Previously marginalized faculties in the areas of economics, management, political science, and linguistics emerged into cohesive and assertive departments by attracting respected professors and launching competitive graduate programs. The School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences continued to develop under the successive terms of the more humanistically oriented presidents Howard W. Johnson and Jerome Wiesner between 1966 and 1980.

Massachusetts Institute of Technology (US)‘s involvement in military science surged during World War II. In 1941, Vannevar Bush was appointed head of the federal Office of Scientific Research and Development and directed funding to only a select group of universities, including MIT. Engineers and scientists from across the country gathered at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (US)’s Radiation Laboratory, established in 1940 to assist the British military in developing microwave radar. The work done there significantly affected both the war and subsequent research in the area. Other defense projects included gyroscope-based and other complex control systems for gunsight, bombsight, and inertial navigation under Charles Stark Draper’s Instrumentation Laboratory; the development of a digital computer for flight simulations under Project Whirlwind; and high-speed and high-altitude photography under Harold Edgerton. By the end of the war, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (US) became the nation’s largest wartime R&D contractor (attracting some criticism of Bush), employing nearly 4000 in the Radiation Laboratory alone and receiving in excess of $100 million ($1.2 billion in 2015 dollars) before 1946. Work on defense projects continued even after then. Post-war government-sponsored research at MIT included SAGE and guidance systems for ballistic missiles and Project Apollo.

These activities affected Massachusetts Institute of Technology (US) profoundly. A 1949 report noted the lack of “any great slackening in the pace of life at the Institute” to match the return to peacetime, remembering the “academic tranquility of the prewar years”, though acknowledging the significant contributions of military research to the increased emphasis on graduate education and rapid growth of personnel and facilities. The faculty doubled and the graduate student body quintupled during the terms of Karl Taylor Compton, president of Massachusetts Institute of Technology (US) between 1930 and 1948; James Rhyne Killian, president from 1948 to 1957; and Julius Adams Stratton, chancellor from 1952 to 1957, whose institution-building strategies shaped the expanding university. By the 1950s, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (US) no longer simply benefited the industries with which it had worked for three decades, and it had developed closer working relationships with new patrons, philanthropic foundations and the federal government.

In late 1960s and early 1970s, student and faculty activists protested against the Vietnam War and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (US)’s defense research. In this period Massachusetts Institute of Technology (US)’s various departments were researching helicopters, smart bombs and counterinsurgency techniques for the war in Vietnam as well as guidance systems for nuclear missiles. The Union of Concerned Scientists was founded on March 4, 1969 during a meeting of faculty members and students seeking to shift the emphasis on military research toward environmental and social problems. Massachusetts Institute of Technology (US) ultimately divested itself from the Instrumentation Laboratory and moved all classified research off-campus to the MIT (US) Lincoln Laboratory facility in 1973 in response to the protests. The student body, faculty, and administration remained comparatively unpolarized during what was a tumultuous time for many other universities. Johnson was seen to be highly successful in leading his institution to “greater strength and unity” after these times of turmoil. However six Massachusetts Institute of Technology (US) students were sentenced to prison terms at this time and some former student leaders, such as Michael Albert and George Katsiaficas, are still indignant about MIT’s role in military research and its suppression of these protests. (Richard Leacock’s film, November Actions, records some of these tumultuous events.)

In the 1980s, there was more controversy at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (US) over its involvement in SDI (space weaponry) and CBW (chemical and biological warfare) research. More recently, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (US)’s research for the military has included work on robots, drones and ‘battle suits’.

Recent history

Massachusetts Institute of Technology (US) has kept pace with and helped to advance the digital age. In addition to developing the predecessors to modern computing and networking technologies, students, staff, and faculty members at Project MAC, the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, and the Tech Model Railroad Club wrote some of the earliest interactive computer video games like Spacewar! and created much of modern hacker slang and culture. Several major computer-related organizations have originated at MIT since the 1980s: Richard Stallman’s GNU Project and the subsequent Free Software Foundation were founded in the mid-1980s at the AI Lab; the MIT Media Lab was founded in 1985 by Nicholas Negroponte and Jerome Wiesner to promote research into novel uses of computer technology; the World Wide Web Consortium standards organization was founded at the Laboratory for Computer Science in 1994 by Tim Berners-Lee; the MIT OpenCourseWare project has made course materials for over 2,000 Massachusetts Institute of Technology (US) classes available online free of charge since 2002; and the One Laptop per Child initiative to expand computer education and connectivity to children worldwide was launched in 2005.

Massachusetts Institute of Technology (US) was named a sea-grant college in 1976 to support its programs in oceanography and marine sciences and was named a space-grant college in 1989 to support its aeronautics and astronautics programs. Despite diminishing government financial support over the past quarter century, MIT launched several successful development campaigns to significantly expand the campus: new dormitories and athletics buildings on west campus; the Tang Center for Management Education; several buildings in the northeast corner of campus supporting research into biology, brain and cognitive sciences, genomics, biotechnology, and cancer research; and a number of new “backlot” buildings on Vassar Street including the Stata Center. Construction on campus in the 2000s included expansions of the Media Lab, the Sloan School’s eastern campus, and graduate residences in the northwest. In 2006, President Hockfield launched the MIT Energy Research Council to investigate the interdisciplinary challenges posed by increasing global energy consumption.

In 2001, inspired by the open source and open access movements, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (US) launched OpenCourseWare to make the lecture notes, problem sets, syllabi, exams, and lectures from the great majority of its courses available online for no charge, though without any formal accreditation for coursework completed. While the cost of supporting and hosting the project is high, OCW expanded in 2005 to include other universities as a part of the OpenCourseWare Consortium, which currently includes more than 250 academic institutions with content available in at least six languages. In 2011, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (US) announced it would offer formal certification (but not credits or degrees) to online participants completing coursework in its “MITx” program, for a modest fee. The “edX” online platform supporting MITx was initially developed in partnership with Harvard and its analogous “Harvardx” initiative. The courseware platform is open source, and other universities have already joined and added their own course content. In March 2009 the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (US) faculty adopted an open-access policy to make its scholarship publicly accessible online.

Massachusetts Institute of Technology (US) has its own police force. Three days after the Boston Marathon bombing of April 2013, MIT Police patrol officer Sean Collier was fatally shot by the suspects Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev, setting off a violent manhunt that shut down the campus and much of the Boston metropolitan area for a day. One week later, Collier’s memorial service was attended by more than 10,000 people, in a ceremony hosted by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (US) community with thousands of police officers from the New England region and Canada. On November 25, 2013, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (US) announced the creation of the Collier Medal, to be awarded annually to “an individual or group that embodies the character and qualities that Officer Collier exhibited as a member of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (US) community and in all aspects of his life”. The announcement further stated that “Future recipients of the award will include those whose contributions exceed the boundaries of their profession, those who have contributed to building bridges across the community, and those who consistently and selflessly perform acts of kindness”.

In September 2017, the school announced the creation of an artificial intelligence research lab called the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab. IBM will spend $240 million over the next decade, and the lab will be staffed by MIT and IBM scientists. In October 2018 MIT announced that it would open a new Schwarzman College of Computing dedicated to the study of artificial intelligence, named after lead donor and The Blackstone Group CEO Stephen Schwarzman. The focus of the new college is to study not just AI, but interdisciplinary AI education, and how AI can be used in fields as diverse as history and biology. The cost of buildings and new faculty for the new college is expected to be $1 billion upon completion.

The Caltech/MIT Advanced aLIGO (US) was designed and constructed by a team of scientists from California Institute of Technology (US), Massachusetts Institute of Technology (US), and industrial contractors, and funded by the National Science Foundation (US) .

MIT/Caltech Advanced aLigo .

It was designed to open the field of gravitational-wave astronomy through the detection of gravitational waves predicted by general relativity. Gravitational waves were detected for the first time by the LIGO detector in 2015. For contributions to the LIGO detector and the observation of gravitational waves, two Caltech physicists, Kip Thorne and Barry Barish, and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (US) physicist Rainer Weiss won the Nobel Prize in physics in 2017. Weiss, who is also an Massachusetts Institute of Technology (US) graduate, designed the laser interferometric technique, which served as the essential blueprint for the LIGO.

The mission of Massachusetts Institute of Technology (US) is to advance knowledge and educate students in science, technology, and other areas of scholarship that will best serve the nation and the world in the twenty-first century. We seek to develop in each member of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (US) community the ability and passion to work wisely, creatively, and effectively for the betterment of humankind.

From University of Texas at Austin (US) : “Making Clean Hydrogen Is Hard But Researchers Just Solved a Major Hurdle”

From University of Texas at Austin (US)

July 15, 2021

For decades, researchers around the world have searched for ways to use solar power to generate the key reaction for producing hydrogen as a clean energy source — splitting water molecules to form hydrogen and oxygen. However, such efforts have mostly failed because doing it well was too costly, and trying to do it at a low cost led to poor performance.

Now, researchers from The University of Texas at Austin have found a low-cost way to solve one half of the equation, using sunlight to efficiently split off oxygen molecules from water. The finding, published recently in Nature Communications, represents a step forward toward greater adoption of hydrogen as a key part of our energy infrastructure.

As early as the 1970s, researchers were investigating the possibility of using solar energy to generate hydrogen. But the inability to find materials with the combination of properties needed for a device that can perform the key chemical reactions efficiently has kept it from becoming a mainstream method.

The team’s experimental water-splitting apparatus.

“You need materials that are good at absorbing sunlight and, at the same time, don’t degrade while the water-splitting reactions take place,” said Edward Yu, a professor in the Cockrell School’s Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. “It turns out materials that are good at absorbing sunlight tend to be unstable under the conditions required for the water-splitting reaction, while the materials that are stable tend to be poor absorbers of sunlight. These conflicting requirements drive you toward a seemingly inevitable tradeoff, but by combining multiple materials — one that efficiently absorbs sunlight, such as silicon, and another that provides good stability, such as silicon dioxide — into a single device, this conflict can be resolved.”

However, this creates another challenge — the electrons and holes created by absorption of sunlight in silicon must be able to move easily across the silicon dioxide layer. This usually requires the silicon dioxide layer to be no more than a few nanometers, which reduces its effectiveness in protecting the silicon absorber from degradation.

The key to this breakthrough came through a method of creating electrically conductive paths through a thick silicon dioxide layer that can be performed at low cost and scaled to high manufacturing volumes. To get there, Yu and his team used a technique first deployed in the manufacturing of semiconductor electronic chips. By coating the silicon dioxide layer with a thin film of aluminum and then heating the entire structure, arrays of nanoscale “spikes” of aluminum that completely bridge the silicon dioxide layer are formed. These can then easily be replaced by nickel or other materials that help catalyze the water-splitting reactions.

When illuminated by sunlight, the devices can efficiently oxidize water to form oxygen molecules while also generating hydrogen at a separate electrode and exhibit outstanding stability under extended operation. Because the techniques employed to create these devices are commonly used in manufacturing of semiconductor electronics, they should be easy to scale for mass production.

The team has filed a provisional patent application to commercialize the technology.

Improving the way hydrogen is generated is key to its emergence as a viable fuel source. Most hydrogen production today occurs through heating steam and methane, but that relies heavily on fossil fuels and produces carbon emissions.

There is a push toward “green hydrogen” which uses more environmentally friendly methods to generate hydrogen. And simplifying the water-splitting reaction is a key part of that effort.

Hydrogen has potential to become an important renewable resource with some unique qualities. It already has a major role in significant industrial processes, and it is starting to show up in the automotive industry. Fuel cell batteries look promising in long-haul trucking, and hydrogen technology could be a boon to energy storage, with the ability to store excess wind and solar energy produced when conditions are ripe for them.

Going forward, the team will work to improve the efficiency of the oxygen portion of water-splitting by increasing the reaction rate. The researchers’ next major challenge is then to move on to the other half of the equation.

“We were able to address the oxygen side of the reaction first, which is the more challenging part, ” Yu said, “but you need to perform both the hydrogen and oxygen evolution reactions to completely split the water molecules, so that’s why our next step is to look at applying these ideas to make devices for the hydrogen portion of the reaction.”

This research was funded by the National Science Foundation (US) through the Directorate for Engineering and the Materials Research Science and Engineering Centers (MRSEC) program. Yu worked on the project with UT Austin students Soonil Lee and Alex De Palma, along with Li Ji, a professor at Fudan University [復旦大學](CN).

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University Texas at Austin

U Texas Austin campus

The University of Texas at Austin is a public research university in Austin, Texas and the flagship institution of the University of Texas System. Founded in 1883, the University of Texas was inducted into the Association of American Universities (US) in 1929, becoming only the third university in the American South to be elected. The institution has the nation’s seventh-largest single-campus enrollment, with over 50,000 undergraduate and graduate students and over 24,000 faculty and staff.

A Public Ivy, it is a major center for academic research. The university houses seven museums and seventeen libraries, including the LBJ Presidential Library and the Blanton Museum of Art, and operates various auxiliary research facilities, such as the J. J. Pickle Research Campus and the McDonald Observatory. As of November 2020, 13 Nobel Prize winners, four Pulitzer Prize winners, two Turing Award winners, two Fields medalists, two Wolf Prize winners, and two Abel prize winners have been affiliated with the school as alumni, faculty members or researchers. The university has also been affiliated with three Primetime Emmy Award winners, and has produced a total of 143 Olympic medalists.

Student-athletes compete as the Texas Longhorns and are members of the Big 12 Conference. Its Longhorn Network is the only sports network featuring the college sports of a single university. The Longhorns have won four NCAA Division I National Football Championships, six NCAA Division I National Baseball Championships, thirteen NCAA Division I National Men’s Swimming and Diving Championships, and has claimed more titles in men’s and women’s sports than any other school in the Big 12 since the league was founded in 1996.

Establishment

The first mention of a public university in Texas can be traced to the 1827 constitution for the Mexican state of Coahuila y Tejas. Although Title 6, Article 217 of the Constitution promised to establish public education in the arts and sciences, no action was taken by the Mexican government. After Texas obtained its independence from Mexico in 1836, the Texas Congress adopted the Constitution of the Republic, which, under Section 5 of its General Provisions, stated “It shall be the duty of Congress, as soon as circumstances will permit, to provide, by law, a general system of education.”

On April 18, 1838, “An Act to Establish the University of Texas” was referred to a special committee of the Texas Congress, but was not reported back for further action. On January 26, 1839, the Texas Congress agreed to set aside fifty leagues of land—approximately 288,000 acres (117,000 ha)—towards the establishment of a publicly funded university. In addition, 40 acres (16 ha) in the new capital of Austin were reserved and designated “College Hill”. (The term “Forty Acres” is colloquially used to refer to the University as a whole. The original 40 acres is the area from Guadalupe to Speedway and 21st Street to 24th Street.)

In 1845, Texas was annexed into the United States. The state’s Constitution of 1845 failed to mention higher education. On February 11, 1858, the Seventh Texas Legislature approved O.B. 102, an act to establish the University of Texas, which set aside $100,000 in United States bonds toward construction of the state’s first publicly funded university (the $100,000 was an allocation from the $10 million the state received pursuant to the Compromise of 1850 and Texas’s relinquishing claims to lands outside its present boundaries). The legislature also designated land reserved for the encouragement of railroad construction toward the university’s endowment. On January 31, 1860, the state legislature, wanting to avoid raising taxes, passed an act authorizing the money set aside for the University of Texas to be used for frontier defense in west Texas to protect settlers from Indian attacks.

Texas’s secession from the Union and the American Civil War delayed repayment of the borrowed monies. At the end of the Civil War in 1865, The University of Texas’s endowment was just over $16,000 in warrants and nothing substantive had been done to organize the university’s operations. This effort to establish a University was again mandated by Article 7, Section 10 of the Texas Constitution of 1876 which directed the legislature to “establish, organize and provide for the maintenance, support and direction of a university of the first class, to be located by a vote of the people of this State, and styled “The University of Texas”.

Additionally, Article 7, Section 11 of the 1876 Constitution established the Permanent University Fund, a sovereign wealth fund managed by the Board of Regents of the University of Texas and dedicated to the maintenance of the university. Because some state legislators perceived an extravagance in the construction of academic buildings of other universities, Article 7, Section 14 of the Constitution expressly prohibited the legislature from using the state’s general revenue to fund construction of university buildings. Funds for constructing university buildings had to come from the university’s endowment or from private gifts to the university, but the university’s operating expenses could come from the state’s general revenues.

The 1876 Constitution also revoked the endowment of the railroad lands of the Act of 1858, but dedicated 1,000,000 acres (400,000 ha) of land, along with other property appropriated for the university, to the Permanent University Fund. This was greatly to the detriment of the university as the lands the Constitution of 1876 granted the university represented less than 5% of the value of the lands granted to the university under the Act of 1858 (the lands close to the railroads were quite valuable, while the lands granted the university were in far west Texas, distant from sources of transportation and water). The more valuable lands reverted to the fund to support general education in the state (the Special School Fund).

On April 10, 1883, the legislature supplemented the Permanent University Fund with another 1,000,000 acres (400,000 ha) of land in west Texas granted to the Texas and Pacific Railroad but returned to the state as seemingly too worthless to even survey. The legislature additionally appropriated $256,272.57 to repay the funds taken from the university in 1860 to pay for frontier defense and for transfers to the state’s General Fund in 1861 and 1862. The 1883 grant of land increased the land in the Permanent University Fund to almost 2.2 million acres. Under the Act of 1858, the university was entitled to just over 1,000 acres (400 ha) of land for every mile of railroad built in the state. Had the 1876 Constitution not revoked the original 1858 grant of land, by 1883, the university lands would have totaled 3.2 million acres, so the 1883 grant was to restore lands taken from the university by the 1876 Constitution, not an act of munificence.

On March 30, 1881, the legislature set forth the university’s structure and organization and called for an election to establish its location. By popular election on September 6, 1881, Austin (with 30,913 votes) was chosen as the site. Galveston, having come in second in the election (with 20,741 votes), was designated the location of the medical department (Houston was third with 12,586 votes). On November 17, 1882, on the original “College Hill,” an official ceremony commemorated the laying of the cornerstone of the Old Main building. University President Ashbel Smith, presiding over the ceremony, prophetically proclaimed “Texas holds embedded in its earth rocks and minerals which now lie idle because unknown, resources of incalculable industrial utility, of wealth and power. Smite the earth, smite the rocks with the rod of knowledge and fountains of unstinted wealth will gush forth.” The University of Texas officially opened its doors on September 15, 1883.

Expansion and growth

In 1890, George Washington Brackenridge donated $18,000 for the construction of a three-story brick mess hall known as Brackenridge Hall (affectionately known as “B.Hall”), one of the university’s most storied buildings and one that played an important place in university life until its demolition in 1952.

The old Victorian-Gothic Main Building served as the central point of the campus’s 40-acre (16 ha) site, and was used for nearly all purposes. But by the 1930s, discussions arose about the need for new library space, and the Main Building was razed in 1934 over the objections of many students and faculty. The modern-day tower and Main Building were constructed in its place.

In 1910, George Washington Brackenridge again displayed his philanthropy, this time donating 500 acres (200 ha) on the Colorado River to the university. A vote by the regents to move the campus to the donated land was met with outrage, and the land has only been used for auxiliary purposes such as graduate student housing. Part of the tract was sold in the late-1990s for luxury housing, and there are controversial proposals to sell the remainder of the tract. The Brackenridge Field Laboratory was established on 82 acres (33 ha) of the land in 1967.

In 1916, Gov. James E. Ferguson became involved in a serious quarrel with the University of Texas. The controversy grew out of the board of regents’ refusal to remove certain faculty members whom the governor found objectionable. When Ferguson found he could not have his way, he vetoed practically the entire appropriation for the university. Without sufficient funding, the university would have been forced to close its doors. In the middle of the controversy, Ferguson’s critics brought to light a number of irregularities on the part of the governor. Eventually, the Texas House of Representatives prepared 21 charges against Ferguson, and the Senate convicted him on 10 of them, including misapplication of public funds and receiving $156,000 from an unnamed source. The Texas Senate removed Ferguson as governor and declared him ineligible to hold office.

In 1921, the legislature appropriated $1.35 million for the purchase of land next to the main campus. However, expansion was hampered by the restriction against using state revenues to fund construction of university buildings as set forth in Article 7, Section 14 of the Constitution. With the completion of Santa Rita No. 1 well and the discovery of oil on university-owned lands in 1923, the university added significantly to its Permanent University Fund. The additional income from Permanent University Fund investments allowed for bond issues in 1931 and 1947, which allowed the legislature to address funding for the university along with the Agricultural and Mechanical College (now known as Texas A&M University). With sufficient funds to finance construction on both campuses, on April 8, 1931, the Forty Second Legislature passed H.B. 368. which dedicated the Agricultural and Mechanical College a 1/3 interest in the Available University Fund, the annual income from Permanent University Fund investments.

The University of Texas was inducted into the Association of American Universities in 1929. During World War II, the University of Texas was one of 131 colleges and universities nationally that took part in the V-12 Navy College Training Program which offered students a path to a Navy commission.

In 1950, following Sweatt v. Painter, the University of Texas was the first major university in the South to accept an African-American student. John S. Chase went on to become the first licensed African-American architect in Texas.

In the fall of 1956, the first black students entered the university’s undergraduate class. Black students were permitted to live in campus dorms, but were barred from campus cafeterias. The University of Texas integrated its facilities and desegregated its dorms in 1965. UT, which had had an open admissions policy, adopted standardized testing for admissions in the mid-1950s at least in part as a conscious strategy to minimize the number of Black undergraduates, given that they were no longer able to simply bar their entry after the Brown decision.

Following growth in enrollment after World War II, the university unveiled an ambitious master plan in 1960 designed for “10 years of growth” that was intended to “boost the University of Texas into the ranks of the top state universities in the nation.” In 1965, the Texas Legislature granted the university Board of Regents to use eminent domain to purchase additional properties surrounding the original 40 acres (160,000 m^2). The university began buying parcels of land to the north, south, and east of the existing campus, particularly in the Blackland neighborhood to the east and the Brackenridge tract to the southeast, in hopes of using the land to relocate the university’s intramural fields, baseball field, tennis courts, and parking lots.

On March 6, 1967, the Sixtieth Texas Legislature changed the university’s official name from “The University of Texas” to “The University of Texas at Austin” to reflect the growth of the University of Texas System.

Recent history

The first presidential library on a university campus was dedicated on May 22, 1971, with former President Johnson, Lady Bird Johnson and then-President Richard Nixon in attendance. Constructed on the eastern side of the main campus, the Lyndon Baines Johnson Library and Museum is one of 13 presidential libraries administered by the National Archives and Records Administration.

A statue of Martin Luther King Jr. was unveiled on campus in 1999 and subsequently vandalized. By 2004, John Butler, a professor at the McCombs School of Business suggested moving it to Morehouse College, a historically black college, “a place where he is loved”.

The University of Texas at Austin has experienced a wave of new construction recently with several significant buildings. On April 30, 2006, the school opened the Blanton Museum of Art. In August 2008, the AT&T Executive Education and Conference Center opened, with the hotel and conference center forming part of a new gateway to the university. Also in 2008, Darrell K Royal-Texas Memorial Stadium was expanded to a seating capacity of 100,119, making it the largest stadium (by capacity) in the state of Texas at the time.

On January 19, 2011, the university announced the creation of a 24-hour television network in partnership with ESPN, dubbed the Longhorn Network. ESPN agreed to pay a $300 million guaranteed rights fee over 20 years to the university and to IMG College, the school’s multimedia rights partner. The network covers the university’s intercollegiate athletics, music, cultural arts, and academics programs. The channel first aired in September 2011.

From Department of Energy (US) : “Department of Energy Awards $125 Million to Bring Innovative Clean Energy Technologies to Market”

From Department of Energy (US)

July 20, 2021

The U.S. Department of Energy continues to power the clean energy revolution among American small businesses and entrepreneurs with awards totaling $125 million to support 110 innovative projects – each focused on tackling the climate crisis by harnessing market-oriented solutions and emerging technologies.

DOE’s Office of Energy and Efficiency and Renewable Energy (US) will award $57 million to 53 projects by 51 American small businesses and entrepreneurs with phase II funding based on the initial success of their phase I awards, including follow-on awards to support projects closer to market.

Entrepreneurs from 20 states will advance bold ideas spanning a wide spectrum of technology breakthroughs, from harnessing energy and energy storage solutions to strengthening cybersecurity for solar networks.

Through DOE’s Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) and Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) program, the phase II awards support the research and development of innovative clean energy technologies toward commercialization. EERE phase II awards are awarded for a two-year project duration, with initial funding up to $1.1 million, and two potential follow-on awards of up to $1.1 million each.

This effort also reflects the Biden Administration’s commitment to ensuring that the clean energy revolution does not leave behind historically marginalized communities of color. Of the 51 companies, more than 25% identified as either woman-owned, socially and economically disadvantaged, or in a HUBZone, focusing on the growth of historically underutilized business zones.

“We are honored to support this diverse body of pioneering entrepreneurs committed to scaling clean energy technologies and creating good-paying American jobs,” said Acting Assistant Secretary for Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy Kelly Speakes-Backman. “Because of their example of ingenuity and creativity, I’m confident that we have the capacity to tackle the climate crisis by deploying a wide range of innovative solutions right here at home.”

Project highlights from among this year’s 53 EERE selections:

Low Total Cost of Hydrogen by Exploiting Offshore Wind and PEM Electrolysis Synergies by Giner Inc. in Newton, MA: This project will directly couple and evaluate the use of an electrolyzer stack with an offshore wind turbine for hydrogen production. The technology has the potential to enable increased green hydrogen production from renewable offshore wind energy, reducing global carbon dioxide emissions.

A High Energy Density Vehicle Battery with Drop-In Lithium Anode Enabled by a Stable Liquid Electrolyte by Automat Solutions, Inc. in Fremont, CA: This project will develop additives to improve the stability of liquid electrolytes for lithium metal batteries. Enabling high energy density lithium metal batteries improves the range and cost of batteries and could facilitate widespread adoption of electric vehicles, key to EERE’s goal of decarbonizing the transportation sector.

Near Infrared Biomass Probe and Deployment Methods for Real-time, Field-based, Biomass Quality Measurement by ANTARES Group Inc. in Edgewater, MD: This project will help further develop a novel way to identify and measure the quality of biomass. This new probe will provide more rapid assessment of biomass quality than traditional testing, thereby guiding real-time decisions on the need for additional quality improvements to produce conversion-ready feedstocks.

Intelligently Manufactured Homes with Factory Integrated Solar Systems Delivered to the Build Site Enabling Dramatic Soft Cost Reductions by Phase3 Photovoltaics in Portland, OR: This company is advancing its low-cost, pre-installed solar-plus-storage system for new factory-built homes. Building solar panels into the pre-manufactured-home fabrication process can substantially reduce the cost of the system relative to a traditional rooftop solar installation on a home. This solution will help low- to moderate-income consumers benefit from clean energy and supports the equitable transition to a clean energy economy by 2050. Phase3 Photovoltaics won the American-Made Solar Prize in 2019.

Tilt-Up Tower and Installation System to Reduce the Cost of Distributed Wind Turbines by Pecos Wind Power in Somerville, MA: Current small wind energy technologies require cost reductions to cost-effectively harness untapped clean energy. A first-of-its kind tilt-up tower and installation system will introduce new pathways for standardization and efficiency. The goal of phase II is to develop and test a full-scale prototype for technical validation prior to commercialization. The targeted 15% cost reduction will enable small, distributed wind systems to support the transition to a carbon-free electricity sector by 2050 and unlock good-paying clean energy jobs.

Sliding Element Energy Recovery (SEER) For Water Purification Systems by Amorphic Technology in Allentown, PA (HubZone): The SEER technology is based on recovering hydraulic energy from the brine in the turbine section of the device using a dual sliding vane rotor assembly that works like a “pressure exchanger” to feed mechanical energy into the pump. The SEER design minimizes the number of parts compared to conventional energy recovery devices, has high operational efficiency, and low-capital and operational costs. The project is focused on reducing energy and cost intensity for better performing and more sustainable water treatment systems.

Atomic Precision Manufacturing for CNTFETs by Carbon Technology Inc. in Irvine, CA: Carbon nanotubes (CNTs) have unique, remarkable properties that make possible an up to 90% reduction in power use for semiconductors with linear performance at high power. This project is focused on atomic precision manufacturing of CNTs to meet the demands of a rapidly expanding market while improving energy efficiency and moving us closer to net-zero carbon emissions by 2050.

More information about the awards announced today is available at the following link: https://science.osti.gov/sbir/Awards.

The mission of the Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy is to accelerate the research, development, demonstration, and deployment of technologies and solutions to equitably transition America to net-zero greenhouse gas emissions economy-wide by no later than 2050, and ensure the clean energy economy benefits all Americans, creating good paying jobs for the American people—especially workers and communities impacted by the energy transition and those historically underserved by the energy system and overburdened by pollution.

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The Department of Energy (US) is a cabinet-level department of the United States Government concerned with the United States’ policies regarding energy and safety in handling nuclear material. Its responsibilities include the nation’s nuclear weapons program; nuclear reactor production for the United States Navy; energy conservation; energy-related research; radioactive waste disposal; and domestic energy production. It also directs research in genomics. the Human Genome Project originated in a DOE initiative. DOE sponsors more research in the physical sciences than any other U.S. federal agency, the majority of which is conducted through its system of National Laboratories. The agency is led by the United States Secretary of Energy, and its headquarters are located in Southwest Washington, D.C., on Independence Avenue in the James V. Forrestal Building, named for James Forrestal, as well as in Germantown, Maryland.

Formation and consolidation

In 1942, during World War II, the United States started the Manhattan Project, a project to develop the atomic bomb, under the eye of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. After the war in 1946, the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) was created to control the future of the project. The Atomic Energy Act of 1946 also created the framework for the first National Laboratories. Among other nuclear projects, the AEC produced fabricated uranium fuel cores at locations such as Fernald Feed Materials Production Center in Cincinnati, Ohio. In 1974, the AEC gave way to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, which was tasked with regulating the nuclear power industry and the Energy Research and Development Administration, which was tasked to manage the nuclear weapon; naval reactor; and energy development programs.

The 1973 oil crisis called attention to the need to consolidate energy policy. On August 4, 1977, President Jimmy Carter signed into law The Department of Energy Organization Act of 1977 (Pub.L. 95–91, 91 Stat. 565, enacted August 4, 1977), which created the Department of Energy(US). The new agency, which began operations on October 1, 1977, consolidated the Federal Energy Administration; the Energy Research and Development Administration; the Federal Power Commission; and programs of various other agencies. Former Secretary of Defense James Schlesinger, who served under Presidents Nixon and Ford during the Vietnam War, was appointed as the first secretary.

President Carter created the Department of Energy with the goal of promoting energy conservation and developing alternative sources of energy. He wanted to not be dependent on foreign oil and reduce the use of fossil fuels. With international energy’s future uncertain for America, Carter acted quickly to have the department come into action the first year of his presidency. This was an extremely important issue of the time as the oil crisis was causing shortages and inflation. With the Three-Mile Island disaster, Carter was able to intervene with the help of the department. Carter made switches within the Nuclear Regulatory Commission in this case to fix the management and procedures. This was possible as nuclear energy and weapons are responsibility of the Department of Energy.

Recent

On March 28, 2017, a supervisor in the Office of International Climate and Clean Energy asked staff to avoid the phrases “climate change,” “emissions reduction,” or “Paris Agreement” in written memos, briefings or other written communication. A DOE spokesperson denied that phrases had been banned.

In a May 2019 press release concerning natural gas exports from a Texas facility, the DOE used the term ‘freedom gas’ to refer to natural gas. The phrase originated from a speech made by Secretary Rick Perry in Brussels earlier that month. Washington Governor Jay Inslee decried the term “a joke”.

Facilities

The Department of Energy operates a system of national laboratories and technical facilities for research and development, as follows:

Ames Laboratory
Argonne National Laboratory
Brookhaven National Laboratory
Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory
Idaho National Laboratory
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
Los Alamos National Laboratory
National Energy Technology Laboratory
National Renewable Energy Laboratory
Oak Ridge National Laboratory
Pacific Northwest National Laboratory
Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory
Sandia National Laboratories
Savannah River National Laboratory
SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory
Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility

Other major DOE facilities include:
Albany Research Center
Bannister Federal Complex
Bettis Atomic Power Laboratory – focuses on the design and development of nuclear power for the U.S. Navy
Kansas City Plant
Knolls Atomic Power Laboratory – operates for Naval Reactors Program Research under the DOE (not a National Laboratory)
National Petroleum Technology Office
Nevada Test Site
New Brunswick Laboratory
Office of Fossil Energy
Office of River Protection
Pantex
Radiological and Environmental Sciences Laboratory
Y-12 National Security Complex
Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository
Other:

Pahute Mesa Airstrip – Nye County, Nevada, in supporting Nevada National Security Site

From The New York Times : “Hydrogen Is One Answer to Climate Change. Getting It Is the Hard Part.”

From The New York Times

July 13, 2021
Stanley Reed
Jack Ewing

Hydrogen is one of the most plentiful elements in the universe, but producing it in a way that is emission-free is costly. Pioneering companies are working to change that.

An ITM Power factory in Sheffield, England, makes devices known as electrolyzers, which split water into hydrogen and oxygen.Credit: Andrew Testa for The New York Times.

Rachel Smith has lived through green hydrogen’s bumpy journey from scientists’ dream to an industry that may be on the verge of a commercial breakthrough. An engineer, she started out two decades ago working in a converted barn on early devices for making the clean-burning gas.

Now she is part of a team racing to build giant machines that will use electricity to separate hydrogen from water for major companies like Royal Dutch Shell and Orsted, the Danish offshore wind developer.

“We have gone through those toddler years,” said Ms. Smith, an executive director at ITM Power, which is run out of an expansive new factory in Sheffield, a faded center for steel mills and coal mining. “We are playing in the grown-up world rather than in research labs.”

A consensus is forming among governments; environmentalists; and energy companies that deep cuts in carbon emissions will require large amounts of a clean fuel like hydrogen.

Proponents of hydrogen have identified more than a score of potential applications of the element for cutting carbon emissions. It could be used to power long-haul trucks and train and air travel. Energy companies are experimenting with blending hydrogen with natural gas for home heating and cooking.

All told, more than 200 large-scale projects are underway to produce or transport hydrogen, comprising investments of more than $80 billion. Daimler and Volvo, the world’s largest truck makers, plan in a few years to begin mass producing long-haul electric trucks that run on devices called fuel cells that convert hydrogen to electricity. Water will be the trucks’ only emission.

“You could imagine an economy that is supported almost entirely by very clean electricity and very clean hydrogen,” said Ernest Moniz, secretary of energy in the Obama administration and now chief executive of the Energy Futures Initiative, a research organization.

But he warned that “a lot of things have to happen” for a gas now mainly used in specialty areas to become a “part of the backbone of the energy system.”

Among the obstacles that must be overcome: creating enough of the right sort of hydrogen, at a price industries and consumers can accept.

Hydrogen is the most plentiful element in the universe, but it must be separated from some other substance, like water or fossil fuels. For example, industries like oil refining use large quantities of so-called gray hydrogen that is mostly made by separating hydrogen from natural gas. And that process generates more greenhouse-gas emissions than burning diesel.

In fact, less than 5 percent of the hydrogen produced today is emission-free, and that kind costs more than twice as much to make as the gray version — $5 per kilogram versus $1 to $2 per kilogram, according to Bernstein, a research firm. It is also more expensive than conventional fuels, like diesel.

Ms. Smith’s company in Sheffield is one of the more promising sources for hydrogen made without producing emissions. It makes devices known as electrolyzers, which use electricity to split water into hydrogen and oxygen. This hydrogen is emission-free provided that the electricity comes from sources like wind and solar.

A prototype electrolyzer on display at ITM.Credit: Andrew Testa for The New York Times.

The water treatment part of a container-size electrolyzer at the factory.Credit: Andrew Testa for The New York Times.

Electrolyzers have been around for a century, but analysts say ITM’s technology, known as polymer electrolyte membrane, has the advantage of being able to turn on and off rapidly — a big advantage for machines intended to be coupled with wind and solar farms, whose output fluctuates with the sun and breeze.

ITM says the value of its contracts has tripled over the last year to 154 million pounds, or about $213 million. Analysts at Barclays, the British bank, estimate that a $65 billion market for such equipment could materialize during the next decade.

The prospect of buying into a weapon against climate change has investors piling into ITM, as well as similar companies like NEL in Norway and McPhy Energy in France. Even though ITM loses money, it has a stock market value of about £2.3 billion. The share price has quadrupled since early 2020.

Today ITM has 310 employees. When it was still a start-up, Peter Hargreaves, one of its original investors, had to rescue the company four times using his own money, he said.

“There was no guarantee that the company was going to succeed, that people were going to embrace the hydrogen economy,” said Mr. Hargreaves, a founder of Hargreaves Lansdown, a brokerage firm. He added that by now he had been “well rewarded.”

Until recently, ITM focused on building small devices for facilities like gas stations, some of them operated by Shell, that served a relative handful of vehicles that ran on hydrogen. Now it is pursuing much larger projects capable of turning out enough hydrogen to fuel fleets of trucks or buses. It has teamed up with Linde, the German industrial gas supplier, which holds a 17 percent stake in ITM. This year, it moved into the Sheffield factory — the size of two soccer fields, it is said to be the world’s largest electrolyzer plant — with the aim of producing industrial-scale facilities.

The guts of these gas plants are units with tightly stacked cells, like cafeteria trays, where the separation of hydrogen from water occurs. Many modules can be linked together to make very large facilities that will in turn be able to produce abundant clean hydrogen.

Recently, Shell began operating one of ITM’s larger electrolyzers at a refinery in Germany. The electricity will come from wind farms, and the hydrogen will be used to remove sulfur from fuels. Later, an expanded facility may produce hydrogen for an aviation fuel that burns with lower emissions.

ITM is also working on a plant intended to supply as much as 45 tons of hydrogen a day to an industrial area in the Humber region of northeast England. Power would come from an offshore wind farm.

Bigger machines coupled with cheaper renewable energy should improve the economics of hydrogen. Researchers at McKinsey, the consulting firm, expect green hydrogen to be inexpensive enough by 2030 to compete with other sources of energy.

A hydrogen fueling station in Sheffield. Credit: Andrew Testa for The New York Times.

For now, however, clean hydrogen projects require government subsidies, and customers still need to be willing to pay more for the energy they produce.

For hydrogen to become a major energy source, it will require other big changes, such as regulations that encourage the use of green hydrogen in industry and heating. It will also need better infrastructure and consumers willing to adopt new habits.

To take one example, hydrogen has been slow to catch on as a fuel for cars despite advantages that include longer ranges than contemporary electric batteries and the ability to refuel in a few minutes.

Shell has already built a network of hydrogen fueling stations in Europe, but the German car companies have chosen to focus on battery-powered vehicles. There are only 1,200 hydrogen fuel-cell vehicles in Germany, and Shell concedes hydrogen is attracting few customers. At one Shell gasoline station in Frankfurt, the hydrogen pump was in the back, where customers clean their car interiors. A digital sign designed to display the price of hydrogen was placed near the entrance to the station, but it was dark.

Industry projections “are overly optimistic about how easy this is going to be,” said Stephanie Searle, fuels program director at the International Council on Clean Transportation in Washington. “It’s going to take a lot of commitment to get there.”

Hydrogen is emissions free provided that the electricity comes from green energy sources like wind turbines.Credit: Andrew Testa for The New York Times.

See the full article here .

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