Energy Research and Outreach — On-Campus and Off

       
        

Steve discusses AltWheels       on Boston Community TV

The 5th Annual AltWheels Alternative Transportation and Energy Festival, on Boston City Hall Plaza on Sept. 28-29, 2007 was a great success. We had an estimated 35,000 people visit over 170 exhibitors ranging from major auto companies, to community groups along the Energy Freedom Trail.
 

For Earth Day in April, I was invited to give two talks at Boston's Museum of Science. The first was on clean energy technologies. The second was on sustainable transportation. Turnout and questions were good. You can download what I presented below.
 

    

• Clean Energy Technologies
          and Pathways   (download.. 932k )
• Sustainable Transportation:
          Designing for the Dynamics   (download.. 584k )

On Weds. May 9th, I also co-hosted a Smart Growth Forum. It featured four speakers on regional and local smart growth strategies. Timing for the event was good as the week before the Metropolitan Area Planning Commission release its MetroFuture vision for Eastern Massachusetts.

• Smart Growth: A Citizen's Tool Kit
          7p, Wed. May 9th—- 3 Joy St. (AMC HQ)

The full EPA Avoided Emissions from Solar PV project report is now available
    off the AGREA website. (May07)

       

Where in the World is Steve?

I've been at MIT since August of 1986, first working for a year and a half for Professor John Elliott in the Dept. of Materials Science and Engineering on a DOE funded project run through The Energy Laboratory. It was from his lab in the basement of Building 8 that I first encountered the other bits of MIT, most significantly the E-Lab electricity scenario work of Richard Tabors, David White and Fred Schweppe. I left 8-020 for E40-481 in January 1988, and as a Technology and Policy Program student, along with fellow graduate students Clint Andrews and Carl Bespolka, helped create AGREA (pronounced 'agree') to convey that our scenarios were to inform, and build consensus, among decision-makers.

These few pages give you some background on what I've been up to. Much more AGREA project related materials are available on the research group's web pages. Below, and on accompanying web pages are some talks and papers, old and new, that provide some intellectual milestones and convey how my thinking has evolved over the years. There are still many, many open issues which are hinted at here and there.

I am indebted to many people over the years at MIT, including the E-Lab/LFEE directors Dave White, Jeff Tester, and David Marks, who have allowed me to work on so many interesting, challenging, and worthwhile projects over the years. Even with all the work we have done to date, the challenges remain great. So, it is very welcome that "the team," campus-wide will be growing as MIT build up its integrative research and education in energy.

      
 

Recent projects in China, Mexico and elsewhere have been collaborations among the AGS (The Alliance for Global Sustainability) universities. MIT, along with the University of Tokyo, The Swiss Federal Institutes of Technology (especially PSI and EPFL), and Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden. These organizations, along with colleagues at UMass-Amherst, NTNU in Trondheim Norway, and Cambridge University (UK), have allowed our research at MIT-LFEE-AGREA to flourish.

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