Contact
Assistant
Principal Investigator Lorna Gibson
MIT has identified climate and sustainability as the “greatest scientific and societal challenge of this or any age” and has developed a plan to “do bigger things faster.” The 2024 MIT Sustainability Conference will highlight leading MIT faculty, researchers, and MIT-connected startups aligned with this mission.
Sustainability is a broad and popular topic. Renewable energy; energy transition; recycling and the circular economy; climate and environment; water and food – these topics are quickly maturing into fields of their own. But what is next for sustainability? What lies beyond what we now consider sustainable technologies and business practices, and how will they affect your industry? What does emerging government policy suggest will be the hot sustainability topics of the future? Join MIT faculty, researchers, and startups as we review core topics like energy and climate, but also explore new ones, like digital sustainability, sustainability for the built environment, and how we teach sustainability – both to the workforce of the present and the workforce of the future.
Principal Investigator Jose Estabil
Global electricity demand is projected to nearly double by 2050, driven by the rapid electrification of buildings, transportation, and manufacturing. Compounding this pressure is the exponential growth of AI. While AI offers transformative potential across industries, it is also emerging as a significant energy consumer. Data centers, the digital engines powering AI, have more than doubled their electricity consumption since 2018 and now account for 4.4% of global demand. In the U.S., they are expected to consume up to 12% of total electricity by 2028.
This track will explore how the world can meet rising energy needs through the rapid expansion of sustainable energy production. From fusion and next-generation nuclear to renewables, grid-scale storage, decentralized systems, and forward-looking policies, we will examine the innovations and frameworks critical to building a resilient, low-carbon energy future. Addressing this challenge will require a bold vision, accelerated technological advancement, and unprecedented global collaboration.
This talk will present some of our recent work on advanced materials and systems at the energy and water nexus, including thermoelectric and thermogalvanic materials and systems for direct conversion of heat into electricity, high thermal conductivity semiconductors and polymers, optically opaque and infrared transparent fabrics, clean water technologies, and grid level energy storage systems. Thermoelectric materials have seen significant improvements over last two decades, but innovations are needed to develop their applications since their heat-to-electricity conversion efficiencies are still limited. In addition, electrochemical systems such as batteries can also be used to convert heat into electricity, which could be especially attractive for low temperature waste heat recovery. Although thermoelectric energy conversion calls for low thermal conductivity materials, many other applications require high thermal conductivity materials. We are developing materials with high thermal conductivity ranging from semiconductors to polymers, including BAs which has second highest thermal conductivity behind diamond. As another example, we show that polymers can be made as thermally conductive as metals by aligning molecular orientations despite that they start with low thermal conductivity. After these examples, we turn attention to energy and water technologies based on engineering thermal radiation. With properly chosen polymer fiber diameters, we design fabrics so that they are opaque to visible light and yet allow thermal radiation from human body to escape to environment for passively cooling of human body. We also demonstrate the ability of boiling water and even creating super-heated steam under unconcentrated sunlight. The talk will conclude with a discussion of a novel approach to grid level energy storage.