Unconventional paths to energy efficiency

Kara Miller: I'm Kara Miller. 

Robert Stoner: And I'm Rob Stoner. 

KM: And this is What if it works? Coming to you from the MIT Energy Initiative and looking at the energy solutions to climate change. 

Today, large parts of the world just don't have enough energy. So how do they transition to cleaner sources when for many people that's not the real priority? 

Amos Winter: In the work I do, I have to very actively recognize that I am very ignorant about many facets of a problem and actively try to educate myself from the perspectives of different stakeholders around the problem. 

KM: That's Amos Winter, a professor of mechanical engineering at MIT and he's got a knack for looking at technical problems a little bit differently than most people. And he's tackled a lot of technical problems, from designing a wheelchair that's usable and affordable in Tanzania…

AW: When you're working in a resource-constrained setting, that often means lowering cost or using maybe a more constrained set of parts like bicycle parts for a wheelchair. 

KM: …to creating a prosthetic foot that fits the market in India. 

AW: Can we have something that's mass manufacturable and cheap and rugged? 

KM: But as developing countries seek to solve more problems, need more power, and consider the pros and cons of renewable energy, one of Winter's big beliefs is that you have to tackle a whole system. And when you've got a system that's created for a set of circumstances and resources in Tanzania or in India, sometimes you uncover solutions that provide significant insights into how to make systems in developed countries more energy efficient. Approaching these large-scale challenges often brings into play the idea of design thinking, which has gotten a lot of attention in both business and academia over the last couple of decades. Making energy work for a community means you've got to understand people's lives. If you live in a place where you're not on the grid, for example, can solar panels meet your needs? Well, it's an interesting question, and actually, it kind of depends. 

AW: Let's say you want to just power lights in your home and charge your cell phone. That doesn't require very much energy. You can have a relatively small array of solar panels. It's low cost. You can implement it. When you start wanting to run appliances in your house, the energy load is much, much higher and the power load is much higher and that becomes a much trickier problem. And then the other thing that we face all the time is there's a certain level of power and energy needs that ends up justifying having a stand-alone power generation system. 

So, for example, it doesn't make any sense probably to have a solar panel just to run a single sprinkler on your lawn. But if you have the solar panels to run the sprinkler and your TV, well, then there's a stronger value proposition. And there's companies that have done this. They figured out additional power needs that justify the capital costs of installing that power system. 

For us, when we're talking about a community scale or even municipal scale, and we're working on that as well, desalination system, those are plants basically. And they are often in areas that have enough spare area either on the roof of the building or the surrounding area to put in a solar array. But if we're talking about, let's say, a home-scale desalination system, which are very widely used across India, for example, it doesn't make sense to have a little tiny solar panel on your roof for just that one device. 

KM: So, where's the energy coming from? Where's the energy then coming from for that home-based desalinization system? 

AW: Those are bought by typically middle class or above households that have grid access. And those systems don't need to run 24 hours a day. So even if you have intermittent grid, you can turn it on when you have energy access. 

KM: Rob, do you have thoughts on that notion of, you know, whether in emerging economies people are skipping a generation in terms of technology or they're scaling up by relying on many of the things we've relied on, coal and oil. And, you know…

RS: Well, I think, I don't know so much skipping a generation yet, but it's getting there before the conventional electricity generation and distribution technologies are economically viable for you. So, what's happened is we've seen villages and remote communities or even parts of provinces and states and countries that aren't that rural but are still far from where the infrastructure is. We've seen them get electricity sooner than they would economically because of these new options becoming possible for them. Amos talked about the idea of electrifying individual homes with a very small amount of solar power. Didn't work out well. Solar prices and battery prices were higher than they are now. But as they've fallen, it's become more and more possible for poorer families to be able to buy these systems. Not the poorest, yet. I think what he's really done that's so exciting with desalination—and we'll talk about irrigation in a minute—is figure out how to make the systems work as systems so much more efficiently that you can get to even yet another layer of poor people. And also by making them, in some cases, communities serving. You can access people that who individually couldn't afford them, but as a community can afford them. And I think that's exciting, a sort of providing public infrastructure using these engineered systems. 

AW: Rob is touching on such an important point, and I boil that down to the question of how can you do a task but with less energy than we do it with in the U.S., in Europe? And I think I talked to like consumer product companies, and they realize there's just massive fortunes to be made to figure out who can make the air conditioners and the refrigerators and the, you know, ovens and these higher power appliances and amenities that you can't run on small micro-grids right now just because of the power draw. You know, we're going to talk more about irrigation, but also desalination that like we are always trying to do the task with less energy to drive costs down. But in this regard, to just make the energy that can be viable and available, more usable to do more tasks that add valuable to people's lives. 

KM: So are you saying that there's a race right now kind of behind the scenes, even in wealthier countries, to pull bits of energy out of air conditioning or freezers or whatever, and then money is to be made at scale? Or you talking more about in poorer countries? 

AW: So that race is there, of course, like, you know, the Energy Star appliances and all that stuff. That's been around forever. And that's you know, Rob can speak more knowledgeably about this than I can, but that, you know, that's appealing to consumers because it costs energy. It's appealing for like a green mentality. I think there's subsidies for some of those things. 

I'm talking about step changes, though. Like thinking about how can you do a task with like half to a 10th the amount of energy as we use in the U.S. And that excites me. And that is what we have done in a lot of our work, like in the desalination work I talked about previously. You know, we've lowered the power system size. Well, we've cut all the batteries out of it. That's a massive, massive capital cost. Sometimes we actually want to use bigger solar panels that are less efficient because of the overall benefits of the rest of the system. Like it's often cheaper to buy more solar panels than you need, than trying to buy batteries and buffer all the energy you need in batteries so you can use it at night. It's just better to get more energy during the day and blow it then. So yeah, all these energy drivers that dictate design decisions I think are fascinating. 

RS: Human behavior comes into making that system work well sometimes, too, right? I mean, you can overpower the system during the day with bigger solar panels and get the batteries at a zero. But people have to decide to use the system during the day. And, you know, it's interesting to watch how communities adapt their behavior to the availability of energy. I wish we did that more in developed countries. 

AW: Yeah, like in our irrigation systems. When we did our first pilots, we found that many of the farmers would miss irrigation events they were supposed to do because they had to pray. These were in Muslim countries. And we hadn't we hadn't built in those blackout hours yet. And so you're exactly right, Rob. You have to design all of this around the people's behavior. It's not just the tech problem. 

RS: We have the idea of demand response in the West where people are paid to modify their behavior because it's cheaper to pay them than to add extra infrastructure investment to make it possible for them to do any old thing at anytime they want. It hasn't really had the impact that we've wanted it to have because now they want to do stuff when they want to do it. 

AW: I think this is such a good point to bring this back to talking about design thinking. I think as we look to a green future and climate change and energy reduction, all these things, I feel like too often we depend on “well, people will change” and people don't change very easily and people tend to do what they want most of the time. So I think the real sweet spot is if you can find solutions where people can still do what they want and have what they want, but just by default, they do something better for the environment. 

RS: I find that people are much more willing to do these things when they're off grid than when they're on grid. And I think the reason is that when you're connected to the grid, you're buying electricity from a system that's being managed by financial wizards and people who are building the system with the idea that it's going to be paid off for many, many decades. So, a unit of electricity that you buy is inconsequential. But you wouldn't, of course, be willing to personally make the billion-dollar investment that it took to get the electricity there. When you're building an off-grid power system, you're faced with that capital investment. Even if you're able to borrow the money and pay it off slowly, you're not going to pay it off for 50 years the way we pay off the grid, you're going to pay it off in three years. And it's painful to do that. And so they're much more willing to buy into the idea that they're going to modify their behavior if they can get away with this much smaller upfront capital investment. And I've seen that in micro-grids, in rural communities, in solar home systems, in solar pumps. It's an interesting phenomenon. It's too bad we don't have to pay with cash up front for the wires that come into our homes or I bet we buy smaller ones. 

AW: I've noticed it a lot in electric cars in the last year where I think there was a slump in sales over the last six months or so.

RS: Aside, Amos is a huge car guy. All ears are up.

AW: Yeah, but car guy aside, I think what's happened is that you initially had early adopters who liked the new tech and want to be green, and so they were buying electric cars. And then as you get near the mass market, electric cars right now cannot deliver in all the use cases that a gasoline- or diesel-powered car can do still, in terms of range and fill up time and towing capacity and all these things. And I think that has slumped the market. 

And so probably most people recognize that internal combustion is a real negative contributor to climate change. They also have other needs in their life. And they can't you can't be a farmer in Iowa that has to pull a trailer 500 miles a few times a week with an electric truck. It just the energy doesn't work out. 

And so in my work, we have to very much recognize this in, like our irrigation, in that we can't really ask the farmers to do anything that would be looked at in their eyes as a detriment to their business or put them at risk or like not grow as many crops or be arduous to use. And it's a very similar dynamic in that I think most farmers recognize climate change is a huge issue for the agriculture industry. They know water is stressed, but they also want to maximize their crop growth. So if they have access to water, they're going to use it right. And so we have done, and we'll talk about this more, but a huge amount of work on water-saving irrigation methods that you can use less water but preserve crop productivity and also ideally instill that confidence in farmers that when they adopt this thing, it's not going to reduce their yield. It's actually going to make their life better and actually maybe enable them to grow a lot more crops because given the water they have allocated to them; they can use it on a bigger area and grow more yield. 

RS: So talk about that. I mean, how can you use less water to water the same plant? I mean, doesn't plants need water? 

AW: So water-saving irrigation methods have been around for many, many years. The technology called drip irrigation, where you just drip out the exact amount of water a plant needs so you minimize water loss to evaporation and drainage. That was really popularized in Israel in the 1970s, and that's a very effective way to reduce the water required to grow plants. So, if you compare drip irrigation with conventional furrow or flood irrigation or even sprinklers oftentimes, you can reduce water consumption by upwards of 60% by using drip versus those traditional methods. 

So, a big portfolio of our work has been on how can we promote greater adoption of drip irrigation. The big barrier to drip irrigation adoption is cost. It is more expensive than just getting a diesel pump and flooding your fields. And particularly in the markets where we work, where we don't necessarily have grid access, power cost is really the biggest cost driver. And that power can be a diesel pump, both the capital costs and recurring cost of that energy, or it can be a solar-power system. Both are about equivalently expensive when you look at it over ten years. 

So, a big area of our work has been addressing how much power and energy does it require to move water through a drip irrigation system? We can't really change flow rate because the plants need so much water, but we can change pressure. And so, because we cut pressure, our drip irrigation emitters that we've designed cut pumping power in half compared to existing products. So, if you're an on-grid farmer, it cuts your energy costs in half if you're, say, pumping from a pond to your fields. If you're an off-grid farmer, it cuts a solar-powered irrigation system—it depends on a lot of factors—but anywhere from like 10 to 40%—still big, big reductions. 

And then also, again going back to design thinking, we have to think about what would incentivize companies to make and distribute this. And our big commercial partner on this project is Toro. They make lawn tractors and ag and landscaping equipment, and they really instilled in us that for their bread-and-butter markets like the U.S., farmers are not so sensitive to energy, even though they can save energy costs. But what Toro was sensitive to was the size of the emitters that they make. And if we can make them smaller, they're cheaper. And if we can make them smaller as well, we can ship more of them in a container to a production facility where they're put into the pipe. So, they're much cheaper to distribute. And so, we have come up with drip emitters that are half the size of Toro's previous products, and that completely changes their business model. So now they can centrally manufacture these emitters and do it under very high precision quality control and then put them inside a box, ship them anywhere in the world, and then insert them into the pipe locally. And you do that because when you ship just emitters, they're really densely packed in a box. But when you make piping, there's a lot of air in the pipe. So, you never want to ship that over a long distance. 

And it's been really fun working with Toro's marketing department in the Middle East and North Africa, where we do our work because they've instilled in us that this ability to accommodate a much wider pressure variation and run much, much longer lines has huge economic advantages to farmers because they need less piping, like big piping, what are called “sub mains”, between the fields. They can just run longer hoses basically and get rid of some of that infrastructure. So even though drip irrigation emitters are more expensive, they can actually save costs on other capital equipment by running longer lines. 

RS: So ironically, these countries are getting wealthier, people are getting wealthier and moving into the middle classes as they get the benefits of having these technologies, how can we ensure that in the future as they become advanced economies, they don't adopt our bad habits and give up all these lovely frugal habits and, you know, system scale thinking that is required with these sorts of systems. Is it possible, in other words, that we're going to skip the revolution and go back to the same old sloppy habits that we've adopted? 

AW: The way I think about this is a few ways. One, when you're talking about water-stressed countries, you have an incentive to not be wasteful, like the Middle East and North Africa just doesn't have the spare water we do in the United States. So, you know, that's a totally different scenario. The second, in terms of being a designer, is thinking about how can you save water and incentivize farmers to adopt your technology because the benefits of it are so much that it would be foolish to go back to a more wasteful practice. And that has been critical in our irrigation work in how we design system controllers. 

So, I haven't talked about this yet, but the other big portfolio we have is how we very judiciously use water and use energy so at every point in the growth cycle of a plant, we're figuring out how much water does the plant need to maximize this growth potential? How do we not waste water to evaporation and drainage? And how do we account for weather variation every day and how that affects evaporation and transpiration and water loss out of the soil? 

So, what we've created is a control system that every day is predicting weather using machine learning, is knowing where the plants are in the growth cycle, is figuring out the exact amount of water the plants need in order to get water to maximize productivity, but not waste any. And it does that every single day as the weather changes. And it's also tracking what the farmers do. 

Let's say they forget to turn on the pump or turn on a valve or something. It will accommodate for that if there's a water deficit. And so, what we've shown now is that with that very judicious tracking of water and energy, we are cutting water usage by more than 40% compared to normal drip irrigation practice. So that already cuts water enormously. We can cut it by another 40%. And we're also cutting energy use by about 40% compared to traditional solar irrigation solutions. 

So, you know, that has huge benefits, energy and water. But what's cool about it as well is hearing farmers feedback about it, because we were really wary of whether farmers would want to adopt something that kind of steps in for them and makes decisions for them. And we, in that work, we had to go through a huge amount of farmer interaction in storyboarding, how the controller would work with like pictorial diagrams of how they would interact with it and get that confidence. The farmers were saying, “Yeah, you know, we could use this, this makes sense. We could interact with it this way on our phone.” And then the feedback we keep hearing from farmers who have interacted with it is that they like that decision-making capability. They want ways to reduce water and reduce costs and reduce energy. And they also know that they can override it. They still have manual control, but they've actually wanted that intervention that can help them grow more crops and save water or use the water they have on a water field to grow even more crops. 

There's a long history around like service-learning programs in academia where you have students going to a village to, you know, work on some project, and the villagers are like, “Well, what do we get out of this in the end?” And companies look at it and they're like, “Well, there's no scalable model here.” But I think if you go at it from the standpoint of saying, “Hey company, there's this massively underserved market that has tremendous purchasing power that you could engage and dramatically grow your business,” and then also discuss with farmers, like, what would make a meaningful impact on their lives and why would they be incentivized to adopt a solution? That informs you in such a powerful way to make something that's actually viable. And I like I literally have these meetings with Toro where we're doing market projections in the Middle Eastern market versus the U.S. market. And the market size is smaller in the Middle East, but the growth potential is much larger than in the U.S. So, in terms of absolute like revenue increase, they're actually pretty similar with our technology portfolio. 

KM: I wonder if there's enough groups of people with the right incentives, as you see it, to be innovating in the way that you think innovation works best? Or do you know what I mean? 

AW: Absolutely.

KM: Like, are academics doing one thing because they have a career trajectory and then companies are doing another thing because they have a profit motive. And then like, there's the sweet spot and none of the people are hitting it. 

AW: I think there's two big barriers to better aligning academic innovation with real world impact. The first is the incentive structure. You can be an excellent, accomplished academic by having ideas that you can raise some money around, writing papers on that, getting your colleagues to cite them, and repeating. But there's nothing inherent in that process that necessarily translates out to real-world impact. 

And the second I think is a lack of skills necessarily to do what is really product design, where like most great technical minds who are particularly fundamental scientists, they've never done ethnographic work, they're not working on field sites, interacting with end users. It's a totally different skill set, and it also takes a lot of time and money to do that upfront problem definition work, but also the development of a technology in collaboration with stakeholders in a real-life environment. We spend crazy amounts of money setting up desalination systems across the world, but the information we get is so variable because we're not only seeing how they run technologically, we're seeing how people interact with them and what they like about them. 

So, this is actually a really good segway to how I've been trying to address this on a more holistic scale at MIT. And so, a year ago, I became the director of the K. Lisa Yang Global Engineering Research Center or GEAR Center. And the point of this whole center is to help grow the impact potential of academic research by addressing these barriers that I just talked about. So the main tasks of the center are first, to have a team of people, well-seasoned researchers that can go out, do the field work to find really compelling, high impact problems, but also distill the research questions out of them so that they can be brought back to MIT, where we can then engage collaborators and say, do the great research you're amazing at, but please focus on these targets. We'll fund you and we'll also have our team integrate with you so we can have your students working in the field. We can help you build field prototypes so we keep evolving the technology towards impact. And then the final part of the center is having a lot of applied engineering ability to not only make prototypes, but also do technology transfer. Because an Achilles heel often of academic innovation is, let's say you have this brilliant idea, but you don't have a student who wants to start a company around it. We have staff that we can bring in as future founders of companies or who can work with existing companies to facilitate technology transfer through licensing agreements. 

RS: I think what you're talking about broadly is how we can provide people with products or services that are delivering the capabilities and characteristics that they value. It's the best blender or it's the best lawn mower or it's the best irrigation system or the best prosthetic knee. 

AW: It doesn't have to be best, though. It has to be one you want to use. 

RS: It's good where I want it to be good. I'm not making a trade-off that I'm conscious of. That seems to me to be the sort of golden fleece of engineering design, if we could really get there with everything, then we could be not knowingly making sacrifices in our choices and yet doing the right thing, doing the right thing in spite of ourselves. Or is that a stupid objective? 

AW: No. The reason I chimed in about the word best is that best drives so much product development in wealthy countries. You know, you hear about the new whiz bang features of the new iPhone, whatever, 15 and you try to get that little bit better or like, you know, horsepower in cars, which is just so arbitrary. And I think a big part of my job and other innovators jobs that want to work in resource constraints settings is you want to distill what is the core value that consumers want, that make them want to use a product and derive value from that product, and try to trim out all the extraneous stuff, all the unnecessary features. But then the other side of that coin is you can think about what specific features may resonate with users from different markets. So, an example of this is going back to the wheelchair we talked about at the beginning. In developing countries, people would not ride in cars very often, particularly in rural areas. In the U.S., they ride in cars all the time. So we had to make our wheelchair frame collapsible and the wheels removed really quickly. The chairs look very similar between U.S. and developing countries, but that feature was critical to engage the U.S. market so it was transportable in a car. 

RS: And yet it still has all of the other advantages that might cost a little bit more. Not a lot. 

AW: Yeah. Well, and it retains the core value, which is the ability to propel yourself on a diversity of terrains very fast and efficiently and with an architecture that's easy to repair using bike parts. 

KM: So when you think about the energy transition, just from what you've seen—you've seen a lot of the world both here in the U.S. and in poorer parts of the world—what's your thinking around how well we're doing, how well we will do at creating the systems to make that transition. 

AW: I think it all depends on what the pressures are that will drive that adoption. I think when you can create a cleaner solution that doesn't introduce any drawbacks and is easy to adopt, that's the best win. You know if a Rivian truck could pull a 7,000-pound trailer a thousand miles in a day, oh my God, that would be amazing. But it's not there yet. You can't do it. I think in the absence of those like one-to-one or even better replacements, you have to add pressure from other standpoints in it. And it can be policy pressure, economic pressure. 

What I think is a bit myopic sometimes is when the governments get together and say, okay, we're going to hit these goals, but there's not a real game plan of like how to get there. Or even when like GM says, we're going to make all our vehicles electric by like 2035. You know, I think that's a great goal. I'm not knocking the goal. But without thinking through like not only how you get there, but how are you going to actually satisfy existing needs and requirements and desires and not create drawbacks or impose really harsh penalties, you know, so people accept the drawbacks, I don't know how you get there. 

RS: You got to pay the piper too much. 

KM: Yeah. It reminds me of what you talked about with ethnography, too. Like, you can't necessarily criticize somebody for having range anxiety about their car, even if you can show them on a spreadsheet, so you don't normally drive very far, so you shouldn't worry. 

AW: But also that one time you go to the in-laws house a thousand miles away for Christmas and you can't get there and you're stuck charging in the middle of the night. That makes a big difference, even though it's one time. 

KM: Yeah. 

AW: We look at this actually, like, our desal systems are never 100% reliable because of the cost implications to produce a given amount of water every single day, like even when it's cloudy and rainy out with the solar powered system is nuts. So, we have to figure out, kind of feel out, well, what's good enough? And I actually love working in agriculture because plants through evolution have figured this out. A plant doesn't need an exact amount of water every day, otherwise it dies. No, they've got buffer built into them. So, if we just play within that buffer, we can actually be pretty sloppy and still do pretty well. 

RS: So there must be those natural buffers built into anything. I mean, cooking. 

AW: Yeah. You don't starve to death if you miss a meal. 

RS: Heating your home or cooling your home. You know, you don't need to be at 72.0 degrees at all times. You can tolerate all kinds of excursions. Where do you think the big opportunities are to kind of think this way and take advantage of those buffers, besides the ones you've already mentioned? 

AW: I think it always depends. And it's so culturally, it depends on cultural context every time. I'll give you an example. One of our big lessons we got out of a partner we worked with in India on desalination is how people in India over the last 20 years have developed a palate for very low salinity water that had been treated with reverse osmosis. So brands that you would know, like Aquafina or Dasani in the U.S., they have very, very low salt content in them. And you can maybe pick up the taste a little bit different than, say, like a well water, which may be higher. So why this is important to us is we had designed our early systems around World Health Organization standards of what is healthy to drink. And we realized from our partners in India that healthy to drink water would have too high of a salt content. And you and I probably wouldn't pick up on it, but people in India would. So, we had to lower the salt content of our produced water, which had an enormous energetic cost. It literally doubled the energy we had to put in to desalinate the water. But I'm glad we caught that because it would have very likely created rejection of the product water we make. Now that's not the case everywhere. In a flip side contrast, we also work in the Navajo Nation. And in the Navajo Nation, people will often drink quite salty water, brackish groundwater. And so there it might be very acceptable to have World Health Organization Standard Water that, you know, would taste normal to us, taste normal to people in the Navajo Nation, but not taste right in India. 

KM: Knowing your customer. 

AW: Yeah. Definitely. And customers are different everywhere. 

RS: Have you ever done focus groups in a rural community in India or a Navajo Nation? 

AW: All the time. 

RS: Oh, really? 

AW: All the time. Yeah. Not only focus groups. We will take storyboards of a particularly new technology that we haven't designed or invented yet and say, here's how we envision you would maybe interact with it. What do you think? And we go through that kind of imagination game and that was tremendously valuable in refining our controller for irrigation systems and how it interfaces through a cell phone. That is what created the app that we run now, and we're refining it now to make it even better. But yeah, we do farmer field days where we get people together and present the technology and demonstrate it and get their feedback. We do lots of focus groups and one-on-one interviews. 

So, we've done that very recently in the Navajo Nation, which is also very water stressed, but is an incredibly unique community because people are so disperse. The advantage India has is you have much higher population concentrations even in rural areas. So, there's an economic justification for having like a community-scale system that can serve a few thousand people who are all within walking distance. In the Navajo Nation, you have like three families in walking distance. And so to do a centralized kind of big capital cost system there doesn't make any economic sense. 

And we recently did a study, we're finishing a publication on this now, where we do the economic modeling and we found that individual home-scale systems make much more economic sense, including the service model of, like, how many repairmen do we need for this community where they're driving all over the Navajo Nation. But with a few service people, we can actually make sure these systems run reliably and we actually learn that service model from an Indian partner that makes home-scale desalination systems. So, we knew the frequency and the type of repairs and the cost of repair that was actually economically viable. 

KM: What is the project you're really excited about? Like, what's next? What are you working on? 

AW: Well, with the advent of GEAR Center that I'm leading now, we are focusing on three primary thrusts, which are the water/energy/food nexus, climate change mitigation and adaptation, and global health technologies. And we're building out portfolios of programs around those themes. So, in the water/energy/food nexus, we are currently trying to bring to fruition our desalination and irrigation technologies. And the new project right now is actually converging them. Doing desalination for agriculture because there's a huge demand for that, not only in very water stressed places like the Middle East, but also if you look at big ag areas even in the U.S., the Central Plains, in the center of the country, in the central valley of California, they have brackish water. So a good, robust, low-cost solution for desalination for ag would be tremendously valuable. So, we're doing that. 

We will start a project this year on hydrogen combustion. And the goal is to do a retrofit of existing internal combustion engines so they can easily burn hydrogen and ideally be able to switch back and forth between their native fuel of gas or diesel to hydrogen. And that is trying to replicate the model that's been very successful with compressed natural gas used on like taxis in big, polluted cities where you can just switch between gasoline and CNG. And so, we've got some ideas of how we could do this, but the ideal would be a bolt-on retrofit where you don't have to change the engine at all and you can run it on either hydrogen or a petroleum fuel. 

And then we're also over the last decade, we've learned a lot about taking a time-variable power source like solar or wind and producing a product from it in a time-variable manner—be it desalinated water or like distributing water for irrigation. We are also looking at that for hydrogen production. 

And then the other area where we're just starting to conceptualize is looking at the services and products and amenities that at-risk communities due to climate change are going to need. We are working with Gabriella Carolini and the Department of Urban Studies and Planning, who studies these populations in Brazil is our focus area. And so this is very early. We're going to go in and do that ethnographic work to understand what are the likely migration patterns these communities might have? What does their future look like? Where will they live? What sort of jobs might they want to do? And see, can we innovate to try to maximize the productivity and health and welfare of these communities? And that gets back to what we talked about earlier in can we do that with renewable sources where you're doing your job but with less energy?

KM: Wow. A ton of work, a ton of projects to check back in on. Amos Winter, professor of mechanical engineering at MIT. Thank you so much. This is great. 

AW: Thank you. 

RS: Thanks, Amos.

KM: What if it works? is a production of the MIT Energy Initiative. If you like the show, please leave us a review or invite a friend to listen. And remember to subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. You can find an archive of every episode, all of our show notes and a lot more at energy.mit.edu/podcasts and you can learn more about the work of the Energy initiative and the energy transition at energy.mit.edu. Our original podcast artwork is by Zeitler Design. Special thanks to all the people at MITEI and MIT who make this show possible. I’m Kara Miller.

RS: And I'm Robert Stoner. 

KM: Thanks for listening.