Group updates

Recent group updates from Sustainable Energy Transitions (SET) Group’s research findings and/or researchers

2024

January 2024

• Congratulations to Serena Patel and Youssef Shaker for completing their Masters thesis in Technology and Public Policy! Serena’s thesis focused on The Role Of Repurposing Coal Plants to Thermal Energy Storage in the Context of India  . Youssef’s thesis focused on Multi-vector Energy Systems Analysis for Heavy-duty Transportation Deep Decarbonization Using H₂ and Synthetic Fuels
• Welcome  Dr. Swapana Jerpoth to the SET group at NYU! Swapana joins the team after completing her PhD in chemical engineering from Rowan University.

May 2024

• Welcome Dr. Chaitanya Vuppanapalli to the SET group at NYU! Chaitanya joins the team after completing his PhD in chemical engineering from IIT Madras, India.
• Congratulations to Michael Giovanniello for completing his Masters thesis in Technology and Public Policy on Modeling and Implementation of the U.S. Hydrogen Production Tax Credit, which was selected as the  best TPP thesis for 2024! Congrats Mike!
• Congratulations to Les Armstrong for completing his Masters thesis in Technology and Public Policy on the topic of Modeling the Impact of the Inflation Reduction Act and Hydrogen Storage in Salt Caverns in the Mid-Atlantic United States.
• Excited to have NYU undergraduates Ruthvik Mukkamala and Brendon Jiang join the SET group over the summer as part of Tandon Undegraduate Summer Research Program Ruthvik will be working on studying emissions and cost impacts of grid-connected electrolytic hydrogen production while Brendon will be working on energy infrastructure needs for industrial process decarbonization via electrification. Welceme Ruthvik and Brendon!

2023

December 2023

• SET group is moving to New York University Tandon School of Engineering!

February 2023

• Dharik Mallapragada is quoted on the impact of having abundant hydrogen supply in a Science story about natural hydrogen – a potentially abundant source available in geological formations – quite an interesting story!
• A paper by SET group, led by Marc Barbar, exploring the impact of energy storage on the long-term evolution of the Indian power system was published in Energy and Climate Change! The paper was part of the research carried out for the MITEI Future Of Energy Storage Study.

January 2023

• Dharik Mallapragada was quoted in a Bloomberg story related to emerging electrochemical storage start ups
• SET group led article on chemical industry decarbonization via electrification was published in Joule! The article was an outcome of a collaboration with researchers part of the DC-MUSE network
• SET group contributed to a research commentary on retail rate reforms necessary for accelerating economy-wide decarbonization via electrification  – kudos to my colleague Tim Schittekatte!

December 2022

• The Massachusetts Commission on Clean Heat, which Dharik Mallapragada participated in, released its final report with several recommendations to accelerate the decarbonization of the building sector in the State

November 2022

• SET group members (Edward Graham, Landon Schofield, Dharik Mallapragada) presented four presentations at the 2022 AIChE Annual meeting
• Dharik Mallapragada is interviewed for an episode on energy storage for Vox’s unexplainable podcast

October 2022

• SET group (Ruaridh Macdonald, Rahman Khorramfar, Dharik Mallapragada) presented three presentations at the 2022 INFORMS meeting

June 2022

• Sierra club just published a report analyzing decarbonization pathways for a Florida municipal utiity using the GenX electricity planning model – this is exactly the kind of use cases we had envisioned when open-sourcing the model!
• Published a new study in ACS Sustainable Chemistry & Engineering looking into Spatial Variation in Cost of Electricity-Driven Continuous Ammonia Production in the United States. This work was led by Abhishek Bose (TPP’21) and involved a collaboration with Prof. Karthish Manthiram’s group at MIT (now at Caltech). Congrats to all authors and particularly Abhishek for his first lead author publication!

May 2022

• MIT Energy Initiative’s Future of Energy storage report was released! Excited to be part of this 3 year long, interdisciplinary study, which covers: materials scalability for storage, grid modeling for 3 U.S. regions and India under various scenarios, tech. deep dives and power sector regulation for decarbonized grids. Full report: https://tinyurl.com/52suvpe6 . The SET group contributed to Chapter 6 and 7 of the report led by Cathy Wang, Cristian Junge and Marc Barbar. Congratulations to all the authors!
• Aaron Schwartz won the best TPP thesis award for academic year 2021-2022. Aaron’s thesis focused on exploring the role for natural gas in the deep decarbonization of the U.S. southeast electric grid. Congrats Aaron!

• Participated in the first annual meeting for The Center for Decarbonizing Chemical Manufacturing Using Sustainable Electrification. The full recording of the event is here. The open event had participation from > 50 attendees with a diverse mix from industry, academia, and government.
• New publication led by Marc Barbar on decision-making under uncertainty for deploying battery storage as a non-wire alternative in distribution networks – this work was part of the Future of Storage study – congrats Marc!
• Best of luck to Dr. Moataz Sheha as he leaves MIT for a position in industry. While at MITEI, Moataz contributed to the ARPA-E Flexible carbon capture project. Good luck Moataz!

April 2022

• Hearty congratulations to Marc Barbar for defending his PhD! Marc’s thesis contributed to methods and applications related to electricity system planning in emerging economies. This included demand-side analysis to understand impact of AC growth in India as well as accompanying network analysis. Stay tuned for more publications!
• Excited to kick-off a project with MIT researchers Emre Gencer, Ahmed Ghoniem, Bill Green and Robert Stoner and IHI corporation on exploring the role for ammonia as an energy carrier and low-carbon fuel source in a future decarbonized energy system. We will be advertising multiple postdoc positions on this project soon – stay tuned!

March 2022

• Participated in CERA Week 2022 by moderating a session on hydrogen transportation. Great to be back to in-person meetings!
• Moderated a panel on “Deploying the Hydrogen Economy” at the MIT Energy Conference.

Feb 2022

• Excited to kick off a new-project with ExxonMobil on macro-scale net-zero energy systems analysis. The project focuses on developing on open-source macro-scale energy system models and its applications to study decarbonization pathways for the continental U.S. energy system.

Jan 2022

• Landon Schofield, a first year PhDCEP student in Chemical Engineering, has joined the SET group to pursue research on design and operations of electrified chemical processes and coordination with a low-carbon electric grid. He will be co-advised by Prof. Robert C Armstrong, MITEI director  and professor of chemical engineering.
• Jun Wen Law, a first year PhD student in Chemical Engineering, has joined the SET group to pursue research on development and application of macro-scale energy systems models for net-zero emissions scenario analysis. He will be co-advised by Prof. Robert C Armstrong, MITEI director  and professor of chemical engineering.
• Nicole Shi, a first year Technology and Policy Program (TPP) student has joined the SET group to pursue research on related to assessing  Electricity-H₂-CO₂ infrastructure interactions in a deeply decarbonized energy system
• Dharik began serving on the Massachusetts State Commision on Clean Heat, a group setup by the Governor to advise the State administration on a framework for long-term greenhouse gas emission reductions from heating fuels.
• Dharik is quoted in an article by Wired magazine assessing the potential for Gravity Storage.
• The paper ” Energy Storage Investment and Operation in Efficient Electric Power Systems” was published in the Energy Journal. The work was led by Cristian Junge and is part of the forthcoming MITEI Future of Energy Storage Study.
• Our group particpated in ARPA-E’s annual meeting about the Flexible Carbon Capture (FLECCS) program, where we provided an update on the research progres on our FLECCS project.

Dec 2021

• The paper, “Integrating hydrogen in single-price electricity systems: The effects of spatial economic signals” was published  in Energy Policy. This work was led by Frederik vom Scheidt, who visited the group while finishing his PhD in 2019. Frederik provides a nice summary of the paper here.
• The paper “Climate and air pollution implications of potential energy infrastructure and policy measures in India” was published in Energy and Climate Change. This was work was led by Brinda Yarlagadda, then a researcher at the Joint Global Change Research Institute.

Nov 2021

• Members of the SET group made three research presentations at the Annual AIChE meeting, related to electrified ammonia production(paper 1, paper 2) and flexible carbon capture at natural gas power plants.
• Dr. Rahman Khorramfar, who finished his PhD recently from North Carolina State University, joined the group to work on a project focused on resillent, low-carbon energy system planning. He will be co-supervised by Prof. Saurabh Amin in Civil and Environmental Engineering.

Oct 2021

• Dharik was quoted in an episode of the radio show, MarketPlace, related to the topic of Energy Storage
• For a third year running, Dharik organized a session at the annual INFORMS meeting on energy systems integration (page 117/137 of the pdf) that included research presentations from the Open Energy Outlook Project, and the ZERO lab at Princeton University.

Sept 2021

• Youssef Shaker, a first year TPP student, has joined the SET group to pursue research on multi-vector energy systems modeling for assessing deep decarbonization pathways. He will be co-advised by Dr. Audun Botterud from Laboratory of Information and Decision Systems at MIT.
• Les Armstrong, a first year TPP student, has joined the SET group to work on a project on assessing technical and economic potential of geological H2 storage in salt deposits in the United States. He will be co-advised by Prof. Bradford Hager in Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences at MIT.
• Morgan Santoni-Colvin, a first year TPP student, has joined the SET group to work on a project focused on evaluating the role for electrification in decarbonizing heating in residential and commercial buildings in the U.S. Northeast. Morgan will co-advised by Prof. Leslie Norford in the School of Archictecture at MIT.
• Serena Patel, a first year TPP student, has joined the SET group to work on a project to evaluate the technical and economic potential for thermal storage retrofits of coal power plants in India. Serena will be co-adivsed by Dr. Robert Stoner, Deputy Director at MITEI and Director of the Tata Center forTechnology and Design

Aug 2021

• Congrats to Aaron Schwartz for completing his TPP degree Aaron’s thesis focused on evaluating “The role of natural gas in future low-carbon energy systems”
• Congrats to Abhishek Bose for completing his TPP degree! Abhishek’s thesis focsed on  “Techno-economic analysis of H2 use in industrial and transportation sectors”.
• Congrats to Cristian Junge for completing his SDM degree! Cristian’s thesis focused on “Role for long-duration storage in grid decarbonization and implications for economy-wide electrification”
• Congrats to Dr. Guannan He for starting his new position as an assistant professor at Peking University!
• Our paper “Sector coupling via hydrogen to lower the cost of energy system decarbonization” was published in Energy & Environmental Science. Congrats to the lead author, Guannan He and the rest of the team for this work!

Jul 2021

• Congrats to Dr. Thaneer Narayanan for defending his PhD thesis, “Experimental and technoeconomic analysis of alternative energy storage systems”
• The paper “Scenarios of future Indian electricity demand accounting for space cooling and electric vehicle adoption“, was published in Nature Scientific Data. The work was led by Marc Barbar and is part of the forthcoming MITEI Future of Energy Storage Study.