MIT’s Energy ‘Manhattan Project’

Posted on August 12, 2006  Comments (5)

MIT’s Energy ‘Manhattan Project’ by Mark Anderson:

David Jhirad, a former deputy assistant secretary of energy and current VP for science and research at the World Resources Institute, said no other institution or government anywhere has taken on such an intensive, creative, broad-based, and wide-ranging energy research initiative.

Many of these projects are ongoing and will continue under the Energy Research Council banner. Others, such as a new effort to make cheap ethanol using a biochemical technique called metabolic engineering, apply the expertise of faculty and staff who had never worked on energy problems before.

The council will also hire faculty in fields, such as optimizing energy distribution and transmission, if it finds MIT hasn’t devoted enough resources to them.

Susan Hockfield, Inaugural Address, 16th President of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology:

To this end, we have begun working with the faculty to develop a major new Institute-wide initiative on energy. This initiative will foster new research in science and technology aimed at increasing the energy supply and bringing scientists, engineers, and social scientists together to envision the best energy policies for the future. We will seed this initiative with resources for new interdisciplinary faculty positions. Together, I believe we will make an enormous difference.

EnergyNews@MIT from the MIT Energy Research Council.

WBUR interview with Susan Hockfield (webcast)

5 Responses to “MIT’s Energy ‘Manhattan Project’”

  1. Curious Cat Science and Engineering Blog » Engineers Save Energy
    October 7th, 2006 @ 10:08 pm

    […] Related: MIT’s Energy ‘Manhattan Project’ – Wind Power – Large-Scale, Cheap Solar Electricity Physicist Takes Energy Efficiency From Theory to Practice also includes Voice of America audiocast: “You can put windows on a new house, which cuts the heating bill by 30%,” Rosenfeld says, adding, “[you] are indeed saving more oil every year than comes out of Prudhoe Bay.” The fields at Prudhoe Bay Alaska are America’s major domestic source of oil. So the energy savings are really adding up now. […]

  2. South Korea To Invest $22 Billion in Overseas Energy Projects at Curious Cat Investing and Economics Blog
    October 30th, 2007 @ 11:23 pm

    This sounds like the type of news that 3 years later everyone says was the sign of a bubble. Today it is hard to tell whether the boom in oil and commodity prices are a bubble or a sign of a huge demand increase that the cannot be supplied at current costs…

  3. CuriousCat: Electricity Savings
    April 6th, 2008 @ 12:19 pm

    I am far from doing everything I could, but at least I have installed compact fluorescent light bulbs as old ones burned out…

  4. Curious Cat Science and Engineering Blog » Easier Way to Make Coal Cleaner
    November 18th, 2008 @ 8:49 am

    “Our approach – ‘partial capture’ – can get CO2 emissions from coal-burning plants down to emissions levels of natural gas power plants, said Ashleigh Hildebrand, a graduate student in chemical engineering…”

  5. Curious Cat Science and Engineering Blog » $100 Million to Tackle Energy Issues
    January 13th, 2009 @ 8:48 am

    […] MIT’s Energy ‘Manhattan Project’ – Engineers Save Energy – Google Investing Huge Sums in Renewable Energy and is Hiring – more posts […]

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