Meeting time-varying peak demand poses a key challenge to the U.S. electricity system. Building-based electricity storage – to enable demand response (DR) without curtailing actual appliance usage – offers potential benefits of lower electricity production cost, higher grid reliability, and...

The known energy resource base is more than sufficient to provide a growing world population with energy on the scale to which the industrial countries have grown accustomed and to which the developing countries aspire. Environmental constraints exist but have promising solutions, provided...

We introduce a safe and permanent method of CO2 disposal based on combining CO2 chemically with abundant raw materials to form stable carbonate minerals. Substantial heat is liberated in the overall chemical reaction so that cost will be determined by the simplicity and speed of the reaction...

Demand response (DR) is one of many approaches to address temporal mismatches in demand and supply of grid electricity. More common in the commercial sector, DR usually refers to reducing consumption at certain hours or seasons, thus reducing peak demand from the grid. In the residential sector,...

To improve the sustainability of transportation, a major goal is the replacement of conventional petroleum-based fuels with more sustainable fuels that can be used in the existing infrastructure (fuel distribution and vehicles). While fossil-derived synthetic fuels (e.g. coal derived liquid...

type="main" <title type="main">Summary</title> <p>Life cycle assessment (LCA)-based analyses of company value chains can inspire profound modifications to products’ design, material procurement, manufacturing, energy/water use, distribution, use, and disposal. However, such modifications often create trade-offs, improving...</p>

Plugin and hybrid vehicles have been shown to offer possible reductions in greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, depending on grid-carbon-intensity, range and thus life-cycle battery emissions and vehicle weight, and on trip patterns. We present a framework that enables GHG comparisons (well-to-wheel...

Access to clean, cheap, and copious energy would allow the entire world to enjoy a standard of living taken for granted in developed countries. This paper identifies technologies for sustainable energy infrastructures, emphasizing that fossil fuels are amply sufficient for the next 100-200...