Energy

Boston Citywide Energy Model simulated energy use in a 200-by-200-meter grid for the City of Boston.

MIT researchers create citywide building energy model for Boston

Detailed model can help planners meet climate goals, increase resilience.

February 22, 2016

Professor of mechanical engineering Amos Winter (left) and graduate students Natasha Wright (on ladder) and Georgia Van de Zande assemble their desalination system a day before the USAID Desal Prize competition, which they won.

Cleaning water without the grid

MIT researchers have developed a solar-powered desalination system that could significantly increase the groundwater available for drinking in Indian villages.

February 16, 2016

MIT students and staff explored a wind turbine inside and out in Hull, Massachusetts.

Students see clean energy in action on IAP wind turbine tour

Tour gives students a chance to reflect on what drives their interest in renewables.

February 9, 2016

“Using carbon pricing in combination with energy price reforms and renewable energy support, China could reach significant levels of emissions reduction without undermining economic growth,” says Valerie Karplus. Pictured is a photo of Beijing.

Study: China’s new policies will lower CO2 emissions faster, without preventing economic growth

MIT professor sees coal use peaking within next decade and emissions dropping soon after.

February 9, 2016

Priyanka Chatterjee ’15, a grad student in the Institute for Data, Systems, and Society, acts out the welcome video for a gardening app that could help homeowners reduce carbon emissions. Chatterjee and her teammates Casey Stelmach, a grad student at the MIT Sloan School of Management, and James Minor, a grad student in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, won the “be...

Coming together on climate

Hackathon for Climate brings students, faculty, staff, and alumni together on climate change solutions.

February 8, 2016

On Mapdwell’s satellite-map website, people can click on an individual roof to receive information about installation price, energy and financial savings, and environmental impact.

Realizing your true (solar) potential

Mapping website tells building owners if going solar is worth the cost of installation.

February 5, 2016

Welcome the MIT Siebel Scholars for 2016

Graduate students from bioengineering, business, computer science, and energy science join a distinguished intellectual community.

February 4, 2016

MIT assistant professor of physics Liang Fu seeks to identify new materials that can process and store quantum information robustly.

Faculty highlight: Liang Fu

MIT theoretical physicist’s research bridges abstract math and exotic computing materials.

February 3, 2016

Dispatches from the Paris climate talks

MIT attendees of COP21 share experiences, perspectives on outcomes

February 2, 2016

Images produced by the researchers show the molecular structure of different samples of kerogen and reveal the significant structural differences between "mature" kerogens, at top, and "immature" kerogens, at bottom.

Structure of kerogen revealed

Nanopores may be trapping oil and gas in the ancient hydrocarbon instead of allowing them to flow.

February 1, 2016

Marcia McNutt, editor-in-chief of the journal Science

Symposium calls for science-based climate action

Experts examine how MIT can be most effective in addressing climate-change issues.

January 29, 2016

Georgia Perakis, the William F. Pounds Professor of Management at the MIT Sloan School of Management

Georgia Perakis: On the road to better energy data

MIT professor uses operations research and optimization modeling to investigate topics from traffic flows to subsidies for green energy technologies.

January 27, 2016

In this image, the middle "explosion" is a cloud of hot electrons, inside graphene, that bounce off one another as they reach equilibrium and spread out. The red spheres are those electrons that are energetic enough to escape the hot cloud in less than 30 femtoseconds and generate an electric current. MIT researchers have developed a technique to access and control these ultrafast processes.

Physicists control electrons at femtosecond timescales

Results may help improve efficiency of solar cells, energy-harvesting devices.

January 22, 2016

This GridForm model of a village in Bihar, India, shows the optimal layout of hardware for the load profiles of the community. Each building, color-coded by the cost (in Indian rupees) of supplying electricity to that structure, is wired to a central generation/storage node (solid lines), and the nodes are connected to each other (dotted lines).

Going off grid: Tata researchers tackle rural electrification

At MIT’s Tata Center for Technology and Design, researchers are exploring ways to extend electricity access to rural communities in India using microgrids.

January 21, 2016

New finding may explain heat loss in fusion reactors

Solving a longstanding mystery, MIT experiments reveal two forms of turbulence interacting.