The Institute for Energy Efficiency at UC Santa Barbara invites you to attend our 2024 Emerging Technologies Review. This year, the workshop will be organized with OpenFarm to dive into Climate Risks and Smart Food Systems on Wednesday, November 20th. Please save the date and register below.
The United States' decarbonization trajectories encompass new electric loads connected to the distribution grid, such as electric vehicles (EVs) and heat pumps, a massive penetration of distributed energy resources (DERs), and a more active role for consumers in generating electricity, adopting and managing energy technologies, and participating in wholesale energy and reserve markets.
Hydrogen is projected to play a significant role in the future energy mix, with the IEA forecasting an increase of almost an order of magnitude compared to hydrogen consumption today. This increase is driven by the possible dual use of hydrogen: to provide a clean or green high energy density vector as well as a clean “chemical building block” towards more circular sustainable chemical manufacturing industries.
Former UCSB undergraduates Alex Woolf and Jesse Tootell (class of 2009) will discuss the current state of the global food supply chain and pathways to decarbonization. Topics include microgrids, refrigeration controls, energy trading, electric & hydrogen vehicles, thermal energy storage, and novel cooling technology.
The energy transition requires new technology and public-private partnership to accelerate research, development, demonstration and deployment of clean energy systems. This talk will begin with an overview of research in Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory’s Energy Technologies Area. This in- cludes R&D related to demand side systems such as buildings, industry and EVs, plus energy markets and policy analysis, as well work on energy storage, supply chains, direct air capture systems, and clean hydrogen.
AI's capabilities to create visual art, music, stories, and videos are improving exponentially. AI can teach innovative new strategies, unknown to humans, in games such as chess or Go and promises to revolutionize human problem-solving. These advances motivate important questions relating to AI and Human Creativity.
Climate change is the defining challenge of our time, with global consequences affecting the natural environment, basic livelihoods and nearly every sector of human activity. The presentation will briefly review the current scientific understandings that define climate change as a critical threat, and summarize where we stand in the enormous task of limiting global greenhouse gas emissions. This will be followed by an examination of the principal economic and policy tools that can be brought to bear to address the problem, with an emphasis on putting a price on carbon as a key option.
As Germany completes the closure of its last nuclear power plants, Sweden is looking to build new nuclear in light of climate change and energy security concerns. In this talk, Jessica will discuss the unique role that nuclear energy can play in balancing a low-carbon electric grid and decarbonizing the global energy system. This talk will focus on both the opportunities and challenges of new nuclear technologies, and explore how policy can bring down the costs and expand access to the benefits.
Writer, historian, and activist Rebecca Solnit joins Dr. Leah Stokes and Nikayla Jefferson for a conversation about Not Too Late, a new anthology edited by Solnit that changes the climate story from despair to possibility. Solnit is the author of twenty books on a variety of topics, including feminism, the environment, western and Indigenous history, politics, and art. After the conversation, there will be a book signing with Rebecca Solnit.