Articles & Publications
Electrofuels: A New Paradigm for Renewable Fuels
January 1, 2013
Abstract: Biofuels are by now a well-established component of the liquid fuels market and will continue to grow in importance for both economic and environmental reasons. To date, all commercial approaches to biofuels involve photosynthetic capture of solar radiation and conversion to reduced carbon; however, the low efficiency inherent to photosynthetic systems presents significant challenges to scaling. In 2009, the US Department of Energy (DOE) Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) created the Electrofuels program to explore the potential of nonphotosynthetic autotrophic...
Forward Pass
May 1, 2012
ABSTRACT: Public policies at both the state and federal levels in the United States and a variety of technological and economic changes are poised to significantly alter both the demand for and supply of electricity in the country over the next several decades. These changes will yield a wide range of new challenges and opportunities, including variable energy sources like wind and solar radiation; adjusting distribution systems to accommodate small-scale, distributed generators; accommodating the charging of electric vehicles and other changes in electricity demand;...
Channeling Natural Resources for a Carbon-Free Tomorrow
April 19, 2012
My parents nurtured my awareness of the big problems facing our world and throughout my life have supported me in my desire to find solutions, even though this meant I was not following any kind of conventional career path. I have also been fortunate to have friends, colleagues, and my own wife and family, who have encouraged me in hard times, and never doubted that devoting my life to working on solutions to climate change was what I should be doing.
For many years, I wrestled with the problem of how to store the energy from wind farms and enable...
Fueling the Future: Problem Solving for a Renewable Energy World
April 19, 2012
After a century of unprecedented growth in science, technology, and the economy, we now face tremendous challenges to our ability to fuel the future: a fluctuating oil price, a changing climate, and continued dependence on unreliable energy sources. These problems are increasingly personal, and the demand for solutions becomes increasingly urgent. There are many changes that we must make to address these challenges, but the ultimate solution(s) will only come from fundamental innovations in science and technology.
Our laboratory at UCLA has been...
Searching for a Better Thermal Battery
March 23, 2012
ABSTRACT: Energy storage has mainly focused on electrochemical systems. However, more than 90% of the world's primary energy generation is consumed or wasted thermally. Thermal energy storage has a broad and critical role to play in making energy use more sustainable for heating and cooling, solar energy harvesting, and other applications. Thermal storage technologies are still based on solutions developed decades ago, such as molten salt, ice, and paraffin phase-change systems, whose performance and cost do not merit widerscale adoption. Progress in materials science, chemistry, and...
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