Posted by: JaredFurtado on Nov 29, 2011

MIT NSE News: IPC Forum on Energy Innovation

Energy is the lifeblood of the industrialized world, providing light, heat, transport, and thousands of vital benefits. But energy dependence also creates a complex collection of challenges,
including carbon emissions that are tightly linked to climate change, oil spills, nuclear accidents, economic pressures, and regional and global political tensions.

The result: an unsustainable situation, with deeply intertwined environmental, economic and political consequences for the US and the world.

On Nov. 10, MIT’s Industrial Performance Center hosted a Forum on Energy Innovation, discussing the results of an interdisciplinary three-year project aimed at creating strategies for clean, affordable, reliable energy supplies in the 21st Century.

The IPC’s Energy Innovation Project engaged scientists, engineers and social scientists from across and outside the Institute, and has produced a new book, Unlocking Energy Innovation, that reviews the entire US energy production and consumption chain, and offers new proposals for spurring ongoing, systemic innovation to boost efficiency and make low-carbon energy technologies effective and economical.

‘The Energy Innovation Project, and our book, paint a clear picture,” stated co-author Richard Lester, IPC co-chair and head of MIT’s Nuclear Science and Engineering Department. “We face a very big innovation challenge over the next few decades – bigger, perhaps, than most people realize. While parts of the U.S. energy innovation system are working well, the system as a whole is not up to the task of delivering hundreds of billions of dollars of mostly private investment into cost-competitive, scalable, and environmentally benign new technologies; making thousands of new sites available for often-controversial energy facilities and infrastructure; and training tens of thousands of young people annually, from craft workers to Ph.D. scientists."

Lester added, however, that these challenges can be met, if full measures of creativity and rigor are applied to the redesign of the “institutions of innovation” - the complex web of indirect incentives, direct government support, regulations, research and educational institutions, codes, and standards that affect energy production and consumption. All of these interact to affect the markets where new technologies are developed and taken up by energy suppliers and users.

Read the full story HERE and watch the video of the IPC Forum on Energy Innovation HERE.



Print
Return