The Tech Square Microgrid, which was approved by the Georgia Public Service Commission and will begin operating this fall, will be used to evaluate how a microgrid can effectively integrate into and operate as part of the overall electrical grid. Additionally, it will serve as a living laboratory for Georgia Tech professors and students who will use the asset to gather data on controllers, cybersecurity devices, and energy economics.

“The Tech Square Microgrid project will give us a better understanding of the resiliency, sustainability, and cost of microgrids to help develop emerging energy solutions to better serve our customers now and in the future,” said Paul Bowers, chairman, president, and CEO of Georgia Power. “Working with Georgia Tech gives us an opportunity to drive innovation by collaborating with one of the nation’s leading research institutions while students and faculty get a firsthand learning experience on an operating power system.”

The microgrid will provide Georgia Power with insight into how smart energy management systems, such as the one being installed at the Coda data center that is currently under construction, can interact with the grid to achieve optimal utilization of energy. In addition, it will also provide teaching and learning opportunities for Georgia Tech faculty and students.

“Georgia Tech and Georgia Power have partnered on a number of important initiatives over the years, and we are very excited about our latest collaborative effort, the new microgrid in Tech Square,” said Georgia Tech President G.P. “Bud” Peterson. “In addition to actually delivering power, it will also serve as a ‘research microgrid,’ allowing Georgia Power, Southern Company, Georgia Tech, and other partners to study the microgrid performance and conduct controlled experiments to develop and test new and innovative energy solutions for the future.”

The installation will include fuel cells, battery storage, diesel generators, and a natural gas generator, but it is adaptive to new and additional distributed energy resources. It is designed to also accommodate microturbines, solar panels, and electric vehicle chargers in the future. All components will be placed on a platform and obscured from view with seven-foot-high fencing and gate access along nearby Williams Street.

A new study from the Georgia Institute of Technology School of Public Policy harnesses machine learning techniques to provide the best insight yet into the attitudes of electric vehicle (EV) drivers about the existing charger network. The findings could help policymakers focus their efforts.

In the paper, published in the June 2020 issue the journal Nature Sustainability, a team led by Assistant Professor Omar Isaac Asensio describes training a machine learning algorithm to analyze unstructured consumer data from 12,270 electric vehicle charging stations across the U.S.

The study demonstrates how machine learning tools can be used to quickly analyze streaming data for policy evaluation in near-real time. Streaming data refers to data that comes in a continuous feed, such as user reviews from an app. The study also revealed surprising findings about how EV drivers feel about charging stations. 

For instance, the conventional wisdom that drivers prefer private stations to public ones appears to be wrong. The study also finds potential problems with charging stations in larger cities, presaging challenges yet to come in creating a robust charging system that meets all drivers' needs.

“Based on evidence from consumer data, we argue that it is not enough to just invest money into increasing the quantity of stations, it is also important to invest in the quality of the charging experience,” Asensio wrote.

Perceived Lack of Charging Stations a Barrier to Adoption

Electric vehicles are considered a crucial part of the solution to climate change: transportation is now the leading contributor of climate-warming emissions. But one major barrier to broader adoption of electric vehicles is the perception of a lack of charging stations, and the attending “range anxiety” that makes many drivers nervous about buying an EV.

While that infrastructure has grown considerably in recent years, the work hasn’t taken into account what consumers actually want, Asensio said.

“In the early years of EV infrastructure development, most policies were geared to using incentives to increase the quantity of charging stations,” Asensio said. “We haven’t had enough focus on building out reliable infrastructure that can give confidence to users.”

This study helps rectify that shortcoming by offering evidence-based, national analysis of actual consumer sentiment, as opposed to indirect travel surveys or simulated data used in many analyses.

Asensio directed the study with a team of five students in public policy, engineering, and computing. Two were from Georgia Tech: Catharina Hollauer, a recent graduate of the H. Milton School of Industrial and Systems Engineering, and Sooji Ha, a dual Ph.D. student in the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering and the School of Computational Science and Engineering.

The other three were participants in the 2018 Georgia Tech Civic Data Science Fellows program, which draws talented students from around the country to the Georgia Tech campus for a summer of research and learning. They are Kevin Alvarez of North Carolina State University, Arielle Dror of Smith College, and Emerson Wenzel of Tufts University.

EV Charging Sore Spots Revealed

Asensio’s team used deep learning text classification algorithms to analyze data from a popular EV users smartphone app. It would have taken most of a year using conventional methods. But the team’s approach cut the task down to minutes while classifying sentiment with accuracy similar to that of human experts.

The study found that workplace and mixed-use residential stations get low ratings, with frequent complaints about lack of accessibility and signage. Fee-based charging stations tend to get more poor reviews than free charging stations. But it is stations in dense urban centers that really draw complaints, according to the study.

When researchers controlled for location and other characteristics, stations in dense urban areas showed a 12 – 15% increase in negative sentiment compared to nonurban locations.

This could indicate a broad range of service quality issues in the largest EV markets, including things like malfunctioning equipment and an insufficient number of chargers, Asensio said.

The highest rated stations are often located at hotels, restaurants, and convenience stores, a finding that may support incentive-based management practices in which chargers are installed to draw customers. Stations at public parks and recreation facilities, RV parks, and visitor centers also do well, according to the study.

But, contrary to theories predicting that private stations should provide more efficient services, the study found no statistically significant difference in user preferences when it comes to public versus private chargers.

That finding could be an inducement to invest in public charging infrastructure to meet future growth, Asensio said. Such a network was cited in a study by the National Research Council as key to helping overcome barriers to EV adoption.

Improving Policy Evaluation Beyond EV’s

Overall, Asensio said the study points to the need to prioritize consumer data when considering how to build out infrastructure, especially when it comes to requirements for charging stations in new buildings. 

But EV policy is not the only way the study’s deep learning techniques can be used to analyze this kind of material. They could be adapted to a broad range of energy and transportation issues, allowing researchers to deliver rapid analysis with just minutes of computation, compared to time lags measured sometimes in months or years using more traditional methods.

“The follow-on potential for energy policy is to move toward automated forms of infrastructure management powered by machine learning, particularly for critical linkages between energy and transportation systems and smart cities,” Asensio said.

The article, “Real-time Data from Mobile Platforms to Evaluate Sustainable Transportation Infrastructure,” was published in Nature Sustainability on June 1. The article is available at https://doi.org/10.1038/s41893-020-0533-6.

The research was supported by National Science Foundation Award No. 1931980, the Civic Data Science REU program at Georgia Tech (NSF Award No. IIS-1659757), the Anthony and Jeanne Pritzker Family Foundation, and the Sustainable LA Grand Challenge.

The School of Public Policy is a unit of the Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts.

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Flow of lithium ions into and out of alloy battery anodes has long been a limiting factor in how much energy batteries could hold using conventional materials. Too much ion flow causes anode materials to swell and then shrink during charge-discharge cycles, causing mechanical degradation that shortens battery life. To address that issue, researchers have previously developed hollow “yolk-shell” nanoparticles that accommodate the volume change caused by ion flow, but fabricating them has been complex and costly.

Now, a research team has discovered that particles a thousand times smaller than the width of a human hair spontaneously form hollow structures during the charge-discharge cycle without changing size, allowing more ion flow without damaging the anodes. The research was reported June 1 in the journal Nature Nanotechnology.

“Intentionally engineering hollow nanomaterials has been done for a while now, and it is a promising approach for improving the lifetime and stability of batteries with high energy density,” said Matthew McDowell, assistant professor in the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering and the School of Materials Science and Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology. “The problem has been that directly synthesizing these hollow nanostructures at the large scales needed for commercial applications is challenging and expensive. Our discovery could offer an easier, streamlined process that could lead to improved performance in a way that is similar to the intentionally engineered hollow structures.”

The researchers made their discovery using a high-resolution electron microscope that allowed them to directly visualize battery reactions as they occur at the nanoscale. “This is a tricky type of experiment, but if you are patient and do the experiments right, you can learn really important things about how the materials behave in batteries,” McDowell said.

The team, which included researchers from ETH Zürich and Oak Ridge National Laboratory, also used modeling to create a theoretical framework for understanding why the nanoparticles spontaneously hollow — instead of shrinking — during removal of lithium from the battery.

The ability to form and reversibly fill hollow particles during battery cycling occurs only in oxide-coated antimony nanocrystals that are less than approximately 30 nanometers in diameter. The research team found that the behavior arises from a resilient native oxide layer that allows for initial expansion during lithiation — flow of ions into the anode — but mechanically prevents shrinkage as antimony forms voids during the removal of ions, a process known as delithiation.

The finding was a bit of a surprise because earlier work on related materials had been performed on larger particles, which expand and shrink instead of forming hollow structures. “When we first observed the distinctive hollowing behavior, it was very exciting and we immediately knew this could have important implications for battery performance,” McDowell said.

Antimony is relatively expensive and not currently used in commercial battery electrodes. But McDowell believes the spontaneous hollowing may also occur in less costly related materials such as tin. Next steps would include testing other materials and mapping a pathway to commercial scale-up.

“It would be interesting to test other materials to see if they transform according to a similar hollowing mechanism,” he said. “This could expand the range of materials available for use in batteries. The small test batteries we fabricated showed promising charge-discharge performance, so we would like to evaluate the materials in larger batteries.”

Though they may be costly, the self-hollowing antimony nanocrystals have another interesting property: they could also be used in sodium-ion and potassium-ion batteries, emerging systems for which much more research must be done.

“This work advances our understanding of how this type of material evolves inside batteries,” McDowell said. “This information will be critical for implementing the material or related materials in the next generation of lithium-ion batteries, which will be able to store more energy and be just as durable as the batteries we have today.”

In addition to McDowell, the paper’s authors include Matthew Boebinger from Georgia Tech; Olesya Yarema, Maksym Yarema, and Vanessa Wood from the Department of Information Technology and Electrical Engineering at ETH Zürich , and Kinga Unocic and Raymond Unocic from the Center for Nanophase Materials Science at Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

This work was performed at the Georgia Tech Materials Characterization Facility and the Institute for Electronics and Nanotechnology, a member of the National Nanotechnology Coordinated Infrastructure, which is supported by the National Science Foundation (Grant ECCS-1542174). Support also came from the Department of Energy Office of Science Graduate Student Research Program for research performed at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. A portion of this research was conducted at the Center for Nanophase Materials Sciences, which is a DOE Office of Science User Facility. Support was also provided by a Sloan Research Fellowship in Chemistry from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and by the Swiss National Science foundation via an Ambizione Fellowship (no. 161249). The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the sponsoring organizations.

CITATION: Matthew G. Boebinger, et al., “Spontaneous and reversible hollowing of alloy anode nanocrystals for stable battery cycling” (Nature Nanotechnology, 2020). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41565-020-0690-9

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Brown’s June 11 presentation for the National Academies’ Geographical Sciences Committee, Geospatial Dimensions of Energy Inefficiency and Equity, explored the need for a “global energy system that fairly distributes both the benefits and costs of energy services, and one that contributes to more representative and inclusive energy decision-making.”

She discussed the high energy burden experienced by low-income customers, the impact of the coming transition to renewable energy on lower-income people, and the need to include distributional and procedural equity in all steps of the process.

“Now is the time to ensure that our future is powered by clean energy that benefits all,” she said.

Brown is an international leader in clean energy policy known for her pioneering work developing economic-engineering models incorporating behavioral and social science principles into policy analysis of energy systems. She was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in April. She also is a member of the National Academy of Engineering.

The School of Public Policy is a unit of the Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts.

Fractionation of crude oil mixtures using heat-based distillation is a large-scale, energy-intensive process that accounts for nearly 1% of the world’s energy use: 1,100 terawatt-hours per year (TWh/yr), which is equivalent to the total energy consumed by the state of New York in a year. By substituting the low-energy membranes for certain steps in the distillation process, the new technology might one day allow implementation of a hybrid refining system that could help reduce carbon emissions and energy consumption significantly compared to traditional refining processes.

“Much in our modern lives comes from oil, so the separation of these molecules makes our modern civilization possible,” said M.G. Finn, professor and chair of Georgia Tech’s School of Chemistry and Biochemistry. Finn also holds the James A. Carlos Family Chair for Pediatric Technology. “The scale of the separation required to provide the products we use is incredibly large. This membrane technology could make a significant impact on global energy consumption and the resulting emissions of petroleum processing.”

Reported in the July 17 issue of the journal Science, the paper is believed to be the first report of a synthetic membrane specifically designed for the separation of crude oil and crude-oil fractions. Additional research and development will be needed to advance this technology to industrial scale. 

Membrane technology is already widely used in such applications as seawater desalination, but the complexity of petroleum refining has until now limited the use of membranes. To overcome that challenge, the research team developed a novel spirocyclic polymer that was applied to a robust substrate to create membranes able to separate complex hydrocarbon mixtures through the application of pressure rather than heat.

Membranes separate molecules from mixtures according to differences such as size and shape. When molecules are very close in size, that separation becomes more challenging. Using a well-known process for making bonds between nitrogen and carbon atoms, the polymers were constructed by connecting building blocks having a kinked structure to create disordered materials with built-in void spaces. 

The team was able to balance a variety of factors to create the right combination of solubility – to enable membranes to be formed by simple and scalable processing – and structural rigidity – to allow some small molecules to pass through more easily than others. Unexpectedly, the researchers found that the materials needed a small amount of structural flexibility to improve size discrimination, as well as the ability to be slightly “sticky” toward certain types of molecules that are found abundantly in crude oil. 

After designing the novel polymers and achieving some success with a synthetic gasoline, jet fuel, and diesel fuel mixture, the team decided to try to separate a crude oil sample and discovered that the new membrane was quite effective at recovering gasoline and jet fuel from the complex mixture.

“We were initially trying to fractionate a mixture of molecules that were too similar,” said Ben McCool, a senior research associate at ExxonMobil and one of the paper’s coauthors. “When we took on a more complex feed, crude oil, we got fractionalization that looked like it could have come from a distillation column, indicating the concept’s great potential.”

The researchers worked collaboratively, with polymers designed and tested at Georgia Tech, then converted to 200-nanometer-thick films, and incorporated into membrane modules at Imperial using a roll-to-roll process. Samples were then tested at all three organizations, providing multi-lab confirmation of the membrane capabilities. 

“We have the foundational experience of bringing organic solvent nanofiltration, a membrane technology becoming widely used in pharmaceuticals and chemicals industries, to market,” said Andrew Livingston, professor of chemical engineering at Imperial. “We worked extensively with ExxonMobil and Georgia Tech to demonstrate the scalability potential of this technology to the levels required by the petroleum industry.”

The research team created an innovation pipeline that extends from basic research all the way to technology that can be tested in real-world conditions.

“We brought together basic science and chemistry, applied membrane fabrication fundamentals, and engineering analysis of how membranes work,” said Ryan Lively, associate professor and John H. Woody faculty fellow in Georgia Tech’s School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering. “We were able to go from milligram-scale powders all the way to prototype membrane modules in commercial form factors that were challenged with real crude oil – it was fantastic to see this innovation pipeline in action.”

ExxonMobil’s relationship with Georgia Tech goes back nearly 15 years and has produced innovations in other separation technologies, including a new carbon-based molecular sieve membrane that could dramatically reduce the energy required to separate a class of hydrocarbon molecules known as alkyl aromatics. 

“Through collaboration with strong academic institutions like Georgia Tech and Imperial, we are constantly working to develop the lower-emissions energy solutions of the future," said Vijay Swarup, vice president of research and development at ExxonMobil Research and Engineering Company. 

In addition to Finn, Livingston, Lively, and McCool, the paper’s authors include Kirstie Thompson and Ronita Mathias, Georgia Tech graduate students who are co-first authors; Daeok Kim, Jihoon Kim, Irene Bechis, Andrew Tarzia, and Kim Jelfs of Imperial; and Neel Rangnekar, J.R. Johnson, and Scott Hoy of ExxonMobil.

CITATION: Kirstie Thompson, et al., “N-Aryl Linked Spirocyclic Polymers for Membrane Separations of Complex Hydrocarbon Mixtures” (Science 2020). https://science.sciencemag.org/content/369/6501/310

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They’re friends because clathrate-trapped natural gas could be another source of energy for the oil and gas industry. Yet clathrates are also foes if they heat up too fast inside offshore wells. They can rapidly expand with dangerous results, as was suggested in the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill. Clathrates buried deep within the Arctic permafrost can also trap methane, which is a major greenhouse gas, and rising global temperatures could unlock those chilly 'crystal cages' and add to climate change concerns. 

If science can figure out a safe, eco-friendly way to manipulate clathrates, then a wide range of disciplines and industries could benefit from the applications. A unique interdisciplinary team of Georgia Tech researchers may have found a way to accomplish that goal, using proteins embedded in bacteria from deep below the Earth’s surface to bind to clathrates and change them. 

“Mainly on the Plane: Deep Subsurface Bacterial Proteins Bind and Alter Clathrate Structure”, published July 23 in Crystal Growth & Design (an American Chemical Society publication) is the result of a 2018 grant from the NASA Exobiology program. The researchers are Abigail Johnson and Jennifer Glass from the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, Dustin Huard and Raquel Lieberman from the School of Chemistry and Biochemistry, Priyam Raut from the School of Biological Sciences, and Sheng Dai and Jongchan Kim from the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering.

The petroleum industry currently tries to slow and cool off clathrates in pipelines and wells with synthetic compounds, but “there is a strong need for alternative, ‘green,’ antifreeze materials” to lower the temperature at which hydrates (clathrates) will form, says Lieberman, a professor in the School of Chemistry and Biochemistry. “While antifreeze proteins derived from cold water fish show some promise, our unique proteins come from those found in microbes that natively inhabit gas clathrates, and thus hold promise as more potent and tailored inhibitors of natural gas clathrate.”

Making protein magic in the lab

The researchers found that their cocktail of protein-embedded bacteria changed the structure of clathrate crystal lattices to “polycrystalline and plate-like, instead of forming single, octahedral crystals,” as the study’s abstract notes. 

“A big takeaway here is that this is one of the very first times that any group has created proteins in the lab using bacterial gene sequences from Earth’s deep biosphere,” says Glass, an associate professor in the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences. “Deep biosphere” refers to organic materials found beneath the Earth’s surface. “Due to the great difficulty of culturing and isolating microbes from the deep biosphere, we have taken the approach of expressing these novel proteins recombinantly, using workhorse bacteria like E. coli.” 

Glass says the study shows scientists can make these proteins in the lab and that they are stable enough to use in experiments. “This opens up huge possibilities for exploring functions of novel proteins from the deep biosphere in our laboratories. It’s possible these proteins could have use in biotechnology, medicine, industry, environmental remediation, and many other fields.”

Huard, a research scientist in the School of Chemistry and Biochemistry, marvels at how nature is capable of evolving simple yet elegant solutions to complex problems like figuring out clathrate structure. A simple amino acid sequence, when blended into proteins that bind to clathrates, “allows for organisms to thrive in extremely harsh, cold environments,” he says. 

Huard adds that clathrates are known to exist elsewhere in the solar system. “Our clathrate-binding proteins, produced by bacteria, could provide a clue as to how life might survive on other planetary bodies that have gas clathrates, such as Mars.”

Don’t forget about discoveries in the past few years about the role methane clathrates may play in maintaining subsurface liquid oceans on icy moons and planetary bodies in the outer solar system, adds Glass. “Gas clathrates are thought to be possible habitable zones for microbial life. I’m very excited to connect our research to results from future [NASA] missions.”

The full extent of the capabilities of clathrate-binding proteins is not yet known, Huard says. For example, the food industry could benefit if the proteins also inhibit ice growth, since antifreeze proteins are already found in many food products. 

The perfect mix of Georgia Tech researchers and disciplines 

Huard researches in Lieberman’s lab, which has produced studies of the protein structure found in certain forms of glaucoma. Lieberman and Huard ended up being part of a team that Glass says illustrates Georgia Tech’s interdisciplinary strengths.

“This project is a perfect example of the exciting results that emerge when fields that often don’t talk come together to try something new,” Glass says. “Our team at Georgia Tech is truly one of the only in the world, to my knowledge, that has the scientific and engineering expertise to do this work.” 

The clathrate project brought together marine microbiologists and geochemists from the Glass Lab, bioinformaticians from the Georgia Tech Bioinformatics Graduate Program, and geosystems engineers. It was catalyzed by the Ocean Science and Engineering program (OSE), in which doctoral candidate Johnson is an inaugural class member. “OSE uniquely encourages graduate projects on ocean-related research that bridge the disciplinary divides between marine science and engineering,” Glass says. 

The impact of clathrates on climate science 

For Johnson, the study afforded her an opportunity to offer a better understanding of clathrates, which have trapped methane under the ocean floor and deep in the Arctic permafrost.

Clathrates “basically occur anywhere there is low temperature, high pressure, water, and sufficient gas concentrations,” Johnson says. “Gigatons of methane, a known potent greenhouse gas, are stored in gas clathrates. A warming global climate could cause clathrate dissociation, potentially leading to a disastrous snowball effect. This is why it’s so critical that we have a firm understanding on the forces controlling clathrate stability.”

Johnson says the role microbiology plays in that stability is important to consider but has not been well researched. “Our study elucidates a potential role that bacteria have in stabilizing gas clathrates by producing CBPs (clathrate binding proteins). We found that CBPs bind and significantly change the morphology of the clathrate structure, which hints at a potential role in stability. Our future research will help us determine if these CBPs work to inhibit or nucleate (crystallize) gas clathrate. We hypothesize that CBPs are secreted by bacteria into their fluid habitat within the clathrate, and then bind to the clathrate, thereby inhibiting further clathrate growth; this mechanism would allow the bacteria to maintain their fluid habitat."

Watch: Researchers Transform Clathrate 'Crystal Cages' with Chilly Protein Cocktails

Mohammadreza Nazemi, who researches in Regents' Professor and Julius Brown Chair Mostafa El-Sayed’s Laser Dynamics Lab, developed this particular technology during his Ph.D. studies. He has already received a patent for the process, which utilizes the nitrogen and hydrogen in ammonia for new uses, including as a fuel source that burns cleaner than fossil fuels. Nitrogen can also serve as a fertilizer — another potential revenue source — and as a transport mechanism for liquid fuels. Hydrogen by itself is very difficult to transport, but ammonia, which requires much lower pressurization than liquid natural gas to remain in liquid form, could be used as a carrier for hydrogen.

Electrosynthesis is the combination of chemical compounds in an electrochemical cell. The process has the potential to be less wasteful of materials than conventional or traditionalredox reaction, a different type of chemical reaction. Electrosynthesis also allows for customization, or fine-tuning, of certain chemical functions.

Nazemi says existing fuel pipelines that transport natural gas may get a new life as transport pipes for those liquid components, thereby saving money. “We already have the infrastructure. We’re trying to eliminate the factors that are not green or sustainable. We’re taking steps to make sure we’re mitigating carbon emissions, and also providing energy at lower costs to customers around the world,” he says.

In its letter to Nazemi informing him of the award, the GRA says its goals for the grant include moving university technologies out of the university labs and into the marketplace, and growing university-based startup companies in Georgia “to create a vibrant industrial base and high-quality jobs. GRA accomplishes these goals by identifying individual commercialization projects to support.”

“In putting together Undersecretary Dabbar’s visit, we attempted to demonstrate the full range of Georgia Tech’s energy research portfolio, from basic science to industry scale testing, and our deep understanding of national security, national lab partnerships, corporate partnerships, and company startups,” Lieuwen said. “We think the tour achieved this very effectively.” All aspects of Undersecretary Dabbar’s tour were arranged with special considerations for maintaining full compliance with safety and health guidelines.

Topics of discussion included cybersecurity and energy infrastructure, carbon capture and synthetic fuels, and microgrids and electric infrastructure. At each stop along the tour, Dabbar engaged with researchers and experts to discuss their work and to see Georgia Tech’s facilities. He met with about a dozen researchers including Alexa Harter from GTRI’s Cybersecurity, Information Protection, and Hardware Evaluation Research Laboratory; Devesh Ranjan from the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering; Krista Walton from the School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering; and Salvador Palafox from NEETRAC.

In his role as undersecretary, Dabbar is the lead for technology commercialization activities for the department and its 17 national labs, as well as the Department of Energy’s principal advisor on fundamental energy research, energy technologies, and science. He also serves on the department’s Environmental Management Advisory Board. Before his appointment as undersecretary in 2017, he was the managing director for mergers and acquisitions at J.P. Morgan, where he focused on operations, finance, and strategy in the energy sector. Dabbar holds a B.S. from the U.S. Naval Academy and an MBA from Columbia Business School.

“The Energy Chat with Russell Gold was one of our most successful events in recent memory,” Hirschey said. “Attendance was up over 150% from our regular meetings – largely due to the advertising from SEI and help arranging the event. Many club members told me afterwards that he was one of the best speakers they’ve listened to on the energy space. I attribute this to Russell’s immense knowledge, journalistic curiosity, and ability to convey complex energy issues to a multidisciplinary audience.”

Russell’s journalism is noted for his ability to weave together the factors that influence energy trends, including the technical, political, and economic forces that can either drive or inhibit energy innovation. He emphasized this perspective during Tuesday night’s virtual gathering. Participant Bryan Hare commented that he was “very shocked and intrigued by how Mr. Gold identified politics as today’s main obstacle in the adoption of renewable energy, rather than technology.” Student Kavya Ashok said, “As an engineering school, we do some amazing things in technology. Russell rightly pointed out, however, that we should not forget the policy and regulation aspect of this industry.”

Despite covering stories of devastation, such as his Pulitzer Prize nominated works on the Deep Water Horizon oil spill, and the California wildfires caused by neglected PG&E transmission lines, Russell remains optimistic about our energy future and believes that the U.S. is ready to create a low carbon world with existing technology. He left students with some parting advice, telling them that it will not be enough to create a new and better energy technology. As engineers, they will need to be cognizant of the political influences that can make or break the implementation of their technology no matter how groundbreaking it may be.

For more information on the GT Energy Club, contact Jason Hirschey jhirschey6@gatech.edu

http://www.energyclub.gatech.edu/

• Solve Big Problems by leveraging the significant infrastructure and intellectual capabilities of both parties in a multi-disciplinary and multi-institutional manner.
• Sustain and Engage Human Capital by exposing a pipeline of talented future members of the workforce to problems of practical importance and complex nature early in their academic programs.
• Accelerate Technology Adoption by introducing new ideas, science, and technology into the industrial and federal marketplace for the public good.

This five-year agreement was acknowledged during a virtual Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) signing event on October 23, 2020, organized by Georgia Tech’s Strategic Energy Institute (SEI). “This MOU provides a basis for both parties to engage in research collaborations, and the joint creation and administration of intellectual property,” said Tim Lieuwen, SEI’s executive director. Leaders of both institutions emphasized that the MOU leverages existing relationships and takes advantage of synergies. PNNL and Georgia Tech already have a long history of collaboration, with more than 100 journal articles, conference papers, and the like, co-authored by PNNL and Georgia Tech researchers over the past decade. PNNL also boasts 32 current staff who earned either a bachelors, masters, or doctorate degree from Georgia Tech.

The MOU lays out several potential topics of mutual interest to both institutions. “Georgia Tech and Pacific Northwest National Laboratory share interests in many areas of science and technology, including data science and visual analytics, electrical grid technologies, cybersecurity, and processing for fuels, chemicals and materials,” said Chaouki T. Abdallah, Georgia Tech’s executive vice president for research. “Through this MOU, we look forward to expanding our collaborations in these important research areas.”

The MOU also calls for expanded intellectual engagement, with PNNL and Georgia Tech students and researchers having substantive presences on each other’s campuses, likely in the form of joint appointments and internships. Personnel exchanges of this nature typically accelerate research efforts by making available to both parties the unique capabilities, facilities, and research communities that both have to offer.

“The complexity of the research problems we are tackling today requires cooperation among institutions. No one institution can solve the big problems alone,” remarked Tony Peurrung, PNNL’s deputy director for science and technology. “We are pleased to elevate our partnership with Georgia Tech because with our combined strengths, we will be better prepared to solve some of world’s most difficult science and technology challenges.”

Several online seminars are planned in the coming months to boost awareness of this agreement among the research communities of both institutions and to foster connections between researchers with similar research interests.

Pacific Northwest National Laboratory draws on signature capabilities in chemistry, earth sciences, and data analytics to advance scientific discovery and create solutions to the nation's toughest challenges in energy resiliency and national security. Founded in 1965, PNNL is operated by Battelle for the U.S. Department of Energy's Office of Science. DOE's Office of Science is the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States and is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time. For more information, visit PNNL's News Center. Follow us on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn and Twitter.

The Georgia Institute of Technology, also known as Georgia Tech, is one of the nation’s leading research universities, providing a focused, technologically based education to more than 36,000 undergraduate and graduate students. The Institute has many nationally recognized programs, all top-ranked by peers and publications alike, and is ranked among the nation’s top public universities by U.S. News & World Report. It offers degrees through the Colleges of Computing, Design, Engineering, Sciences, the Scheller College of Business, and the Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts. As a leading technological university, Georgia Tech has hundreds of centers focused on interdisciplinary research that consistently contribute vital research and innovation to American government, industry, and business.