September 2021

Inside this Issue

Features

• Welcome to our 18th Edition
• From the Chair of the Board,
  Dr. Shelley D. Dionne
• News & Events
• Link Fellows/Interns/Scholars, where are they now?

Meet this Year's Fellowship Recipients

• Energy
• Modeling, Simulation and Training
• Ocean Engineering
• SmithsonianFellows

Link Fellowship Awardees for 2021-2022

Energy

FIRST YEAR FELLOWS:

Taryn is a Ph.D. student with the Energy and Resources Group at UC Berkeley and a Senior Fellow at the World Resources Institute. Her research interests center on the technical design and political economy of decarbonization policies. Taryn came to Berkeley from a career in climate policy, during which she served most recently as an advisor to the California Governor’s Office on the 2018 Global Climate Action Summit. Previously, she led WRI’s Open Climate Network – a coalition for ambition and transparency in climate action under the Paris Agreement – as well as a GHG Protocol initiative to build capacity on GHG accounting in emerging economies. Taryn is a lead author of the UNEP Emissions Gap Report and has served on the board of the GHG Management Institute. She holds an B.S. and M.S. in Earth Systems from Stanford University.

 

Xiaomeng is Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. His research is focused on developing novel ‘green’ energy devices to harvest electricity from ambient humidity. Specifically, he is working on using electrically conductive protein nanowires, an exciting green material harvested from microbe Geobacter sulfurreducens, to fabricate a thin-film device that can harvest electricity from the ambient humidity. Much of his work has been published in peer-reviewed journals and he filed two patents. His goal is to investigate and develop strategies to translate the lab discovery into scalable technology for broad impacts. He is an active member at the UMass-Amherst Electrical and Computer Engineering department and has been particularly passionate about interfacing with younger researchers. He served as an effective mentor to undergraduate students in his lab to help engage them in their research projects.

 

Nora is a Ph.D. candidate at the Center for Polymers and Organic Solids at the University of California Santa Barbara under the supervision of Prof. Quyen Nguyen. Her research on organic photovoltaics (OPVs) is driven by the need for sustainable, remote, and integrated energy solutions. With the goal to facilitate the development and implementation of OPVs, Nora answers fundamental material science questions and has developed a new, simple method to unravel the complex optoelectronic processes in OPV devices. Her research in the field of energy efficiency and sustainability has been recognized by several awards and has led to over a dozen research articles in peer-reviewed high-impact journals. Her recent focus lays on semitransparent OPVs, which can open new possibilities for integrated energy harvesting, such as in zero-net-energy buildings.

Before joining UCSB, Nora graduated with a B.S. and M.S. in Chemistry with distinction from RWTH Aachen University, Germany. As a member of Women in Science at UCSB, Nora has organized outreach and campus events to promote equity in STEM. Moreover, she is active at the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry as a research mentor for undergraduate students, host of the annual departmental poster session, and member of the new graduate student recruitment committee.

SECOND YEAR FELLOWS:

The splitting of water into oxygen and hydrogen gas (electrolysis) holds the potential to store renewable electricity (like solar) as chemical fuels, subsequently recombined in a fuel cell to yield electricity. With 71% of the earth's surface covered with (less than ultra-pure) water, seawater electrolysis can offer an urgently needed method of CO2-free renewable energy storage without competing for potable water. The chloride salts in seawater, though, compete with the oxygen evolution reaction (OER) to form toxic chlorine gas due to similar standard oxidation potentials, which must be avoided for safe and sustainable operation. My project seeks to control selectivity between oxygen and chlorine using earth abundant electrodes. To do so, I will develop real-time online electroanalytical techniques for selectivity determination, address issues related to charge buildup on the electrode surfaces causing lower electricity-to-H2 efficiency and improve the stability of electrodes for longer life span. This work will help develop earth abundant electrodes that selectively and efficiently generate oxygen, complementary to the hydrogen production in seawater electrolysis, and pave the way for efficient and economical energy storage mechanisms using under-utilized natural resources like seawater and solar energy.

 

Concerns about grid reliability for life-saving electric services have grown amidst natural disasters such as Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico and wildfires in California. In response, investments in customer-sited distributed energy resources installations have increased. However, how much should society pay for resiliency? Furthermore, should these investments be made by electricity end users or by centralized utilities trying to enhance reliability for all? To answer these questions, my project investigates the historical and ongoing adoption of back-up power in California in light of the recent power safety public shutoffs to estimate the drivers of back-up power installations. I aim to generate the first revealed-preference estimates of the value of lost load. Then, I will build a techno-economic model to explore the opportunity for microgrids to provide cost effective resiliency. These results will not only provide key insights to electric system planners in California who are currently deciding how to make cost-effective investments to avoid wildfires but can also inform future investments in grid resiliency across the world as extreme weather events increase the reliability strain on electric grids. This research helps inform the current debate between a distributed vs. centralized energy future.

 

Biofuels from algae offer many advantages over petroleum derived fuels, including a net reduction in greenhouse gas emissions and the potential for renewable, domestic production. However, all biofuels suffer from the biological limitations of photosynthesis. Due to the low efficiency of photosynthesis, large areas of land are needed for biomass cultivation to produce substantial quantities of biofuel, potentially destroying wild lands and natural CO2 sinks.

By coupling CO2 electrolysis to heterotrophic production of liquid fuels, I will improve the energy, carbon, and water efficiency of photons to fuel. Photovoltaic solar cells have much higher photon conversion rates than photosynthesis. The electricity they create can be used to power an electrocatalysis reaction that converts CO2 into reduced carbon sources. These carbon sources can be used for the heterotrophic production of algal biomass, bypassing photosynthesis entirely. Triacylglycerides from algae can then be extracted and converted into biodiesel through a simple transesterification reaction.

This unique combination of technologies will improve the overall efficiency of photons to liquid fuel by several fold while increasing CO2 utilization efficiency for biomass production. Unlike a system based on photosynthesis, this system has the potential for large improvements in efficiency as technologies behind photovoltaic solar cells and CO2 electrolysis continue to improve. This approach will be transformative for the production of sustainable liquid fuels.

 

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If you would like to find out more about our Link Foundation Energy Fellows and projects that have been funded in the field of Energy by the Link Foundation, please visit the Link Energy Fellowship webpage at http://www.linkenergy.org/fellows.

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