On many days, California now generates more than half of our electricity from renewable energy sources, especially solar and wind farms. Renewables are intrinsically weather-driven, introducing major new uncertainties into the daily balancing of grid load and power generation. Large deviations between forecasted and realized renewable production are frequent and impose significant additional cost on running the grid.

According to the Paris Climate Change Agreement, keeping the global temperature rise below 2 oC is critical to avoid the perils of climate change. World has ~ 20 years to decarbonize the energy sector before we exceed 2oC. Thermal energy accounts for ~40% of end use due to heating and cooling of buildings and heating needs of the industrial sector. Thermal energy also plays a significant role in safe and reliable operation of other energy technologies such as lithium ion batteries and water desalination.

When people hear about climate change, they often ask the same question: What can I do? Faced with an existential threat, people want purpose. They want to know how they can hold back the rising tide. Often, people look to their own lives for change, to try to lower their own pollution. While this is a valuable training ground, changing your behavior is not as powerful as changing the infrastructure and institutions around you. We should think about climate action as a series of circles: starting with yourself, but moving outwards into community, and finally policy change.

The fact that the universe is made entirely out of matter, and contains no free anti-matter, has no physical explanation. The unknown process that created matter in the universe must violate a number of fundamental symmetries, including those that forbid the existence of certain electromagnetic moments of fundamental particles whose signatures are amplified by the large internal fields in polar molecules.

Photonic integrated circuits have experienced a tremendous progress over the last decade, seeding a commercial photonic chip ecosystem, which provides active and passive photonic chips with well-defined circuit components. Indeed, one of the first photonic chip materials was lithium niobate, which has been used for decades for high-speed modulators, underpinning the internet, and as a nonlinear optical material for frequency mixing processes.

Interferometers can very accurately detect very small variations of physical parameters like displacement, temperature, strain, etc. Integrating them on a silicon chip can dramatically increase their presence in the market due to cost and size reduction.

Beta-Gallium Oxide is an emerging ultra-wide band gap semiconductor with a predicted critical breakdown field much higher than the commercial wide band gap semiconductors such as Gallium Nitride and Silicon Carbide. The key attractive feature is the availability of single crystal large area bulk substrates. This talk will begin with the motivation for pursuing research on ultra-wide band gap semiconductors for applications in power electronics. Key results in epitaxial growth and device performance will be highlighted.

The explosion in energy consumption from microelectronics – due to the increasing reliance on Internet of Things devices, Artificial Intelligence, and Data Centers – is projected to exceed 20% of worldwide electricity production by 2030 and its current exponential growth would exceed global energy production by 2050 if left unchecked. These era-defining energy challenges not only require physical breakthroughs which drastically reduce the energy cost of information processing, i.e.

Please join us for an exciting talk from leading Industrial Ecologist, Professor Roland Geyer, who will be speaking about the content of his new book.

An expert on U.S. energy policy, Jay Hakes has a long history of working on
energy issues, including as Administrator of the U.S. Energy Information
Administration during the Clinton administration and as Director for Research and
Policy for President Obama’s BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill Commission. He also
served for thirteen years as the Director of the Jimmy Carter Presidential Library.