Energy

MIT Innovation Fellow Brian Deese speaks with CNBC host Andrew Ross Sorkin about the state of the U.S. economy and the impact of “Bidenomics,” President Joe Biden’s economic philosophy.

Studies by researchers at MIT have found “that shifting to electric vehicles delivers a 30% to 50% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions over combustion vehicles,” reports Tom Krisher for Associated Press. According to Prof. Jessika Trancik, “electric vehicles are cleaner over their lifetimes, even after taking into account the pollution caused by the mining of metals for batteries,” writes Krisher.

Fast Company reporter Adele Peters writes that MIT researchers have developed a new type of concrete that can store energy, potentially enabling roads to be transformed into EV chargers and home foundations into sources of energy. “All of a sudden, you have a material which can not only carry load, but it can also store energy,” says Prof. Franz-Josef Ulm.

MIT engineers have uncovered a new way of creating an energy supercapacitor by combining cement, carbon black and water  that could one day be used to power homes or electric vehicles, reports Jeremy Hsu for New Scientist. “The materials are available for everyone all over the place, all over the world,” explains Prof. Franz-Josef Ulm. “Which means we don’t have the same restriction as with batteries.”

MIT researchers have discovered that when combined with water, carbon black and cement can produce a low-cost supercapacitor capable of storing electricity for later use, reports Andrew Paul for Popular Science. “With some further fine-tuning and experimentation, the team believes their enriched cement material could one day compose portions of buildings’ foundations, or even create wireless charging,” writes Paul.

Researchers at MIT have found that cement and carbon black can be combined with water to create a battery alternative, reports Robert Service for Science. Professor Franz-Josef Ulm and his colleagues “mixed a small percent of carbon black with cement powder and added water,” explains Service. “The water readily combines with the cement. But because the particles of carbon black repel water, they tend to clump together, forming long interconnected tendrils within the hardening cement that act like a network of wires.”

In this video for Wired, Prof. Anne White explains the nature of nuclear fusion in five levels of increasing difficulty to a child, a teen, a college student, a grad student, and an expert. “Fusion is so exciting because it is extraordinarily beautiful physics, which underpins some of the most basic processes in our universe," says White. “Nuclear processes have a tremendously valuable application for humankind, a virtually limitless, clean, safe, carbon-free form of energy.”

Researchers from MIT’s Plasma Science and Fusion Center and Commonwealth Fusion Systems (CFS) are using high-temperature superconducting tape as a key part of the design for their tokamak reactor, reports Tom Clynes for IEEE Spectrum. The researchers believe that “this novel approach will allow it to build a high-performance tokamak that is much smaller and less expensive than would be possible with previous approaches,” Clynes notes.

MIT researchers are hoping to use Dyson maps “to translate the language of classical physics into terms that a quantum computer—a machine designed to solve complex quandaries by leveraging the unique properties of quantum particles—can understand,” reports Darren Orf for Popular Mechanics. 

Sublime Systems, a startup founded by Prof. Yet-Ming Chiang and former MIT postdoc Leah Ellis, is working to decarbonize cement making – a process which currently accounts for eight percent of global carbon emissions. “The world has a huge appetite for cement, and Sublime is working to scale its production to meet it,” writes Casey Crownhart for The Spark, MIT Technology Review’s weekly climate newsletter. 

Writing for the Financial Times, Prof. Robert Pindyck makes the case that households, private businesses and governments must "invest in adaptation to climate change, in order to counter its possible impact.” Pindyck writes, “Now is the time to put more effort into efficient CO₂ emission reduction, and invest in adaptation to limit the impacts of climate change.”

Prof. Yet-Ming Chiang co-founded Sublime Systems, a company that has developed a new method for producing cement that is powered by electrochemistry instead of fossil fuel-powered heat, reports Catherine Clifford for CNBC. “I believe climate change has pushed all of us into an extremely fertile, creative period that will be looked back on as a true renaissance,” says Chiang. “After all, we're trying to re-invent the technological tools of the industrial revolution. There's no shortage of great problems to work on!  And time is short.”

Sublime Systems, an MIT startup, is on a mission to manufacture emissions-free cement, writes David Abel for The Boston Globe. “If we’re successful, this could be a way of making cement for millennia to come,” said Leah Ellis, chief executive of Sublime Systems. “What we’ve found is that we can bring tools from our technical training to these problems, and use them in new and creative ways,” said Prof. Yet-Ming Chiang, co-founder of Sublime Systems. “I believe it’s a very fertile time for this kind of reinvention.”

Darby Dunn ’08 speaks with CNBC reporter Catherine Clifford about her journey from building rockets for SpaceX to working on making fusion energy a reality at Commonwealth Fusion Systems (CFS). “For me, it really came down to wanting to use my energy to clean up the planet instead of get off it,” says Dunn. “So that was the huge shift for me to come to CFS.” 

Founded by MIT engineers, CubicPV is building a solar-component factory, reports Phred Dvorak for The Wall Street Journal. CubicPV’s process “peels a thin layer of crystallized silicon off the top of the molten material, a technique the company says is faster, cheaper and less wasteful,” explains Dvorak.