How Stevens Is Rethinking Renewable Energy

Renewable energy is finally having its moment in the American sun.

Decades after U.S. President Jimmy Carter approved solar panel installations on a White House roof, renewable power sources such as solar, wind, electric and hydro are positively booming.

According to a recent mid-year report by the U.S. Energy Information Agency, about 95% of the power that will be added to the nation’s grids in 2024 will come in one of those emission-free forms — far outracing fossil fuel-powered additions.

And Stevens — whose campus’ electricity has been sourced 100% renewably since 2021 — is at the forefront of many of the technological advancements helping make renewable energy sources ever greener, more attractive, compatible and lighter-footprint.

Catching the Wave (Power)

Ocean waves are powerful, clean, self-generating, free, and emissions-free. As such, they represent a huge potential clean-power bank.

“Just one meter of wave height, harvested continuously for energy, could power a single home for a full year,” explains Muhammad Hajj, director of Stevens’ historic Davidson Lab, who believes wave-power technologies will be ready for use in off-grid applications within in as little as five years.

Hajj himself has long innovated wave-power harvester designs in partnership with the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) — and he’s currently testing scale models both on campus and at an Oregon coastal U.S. government laboratory facility.

Now the university has been recently granted National Science Foundation (NSF) support to co-found a new GO Blue Center, in partnership with the University of Michigan and Texas A&M-Corpus Christi, to ideate, explore and test a host of wave, tidal and offshore-wind power technologies.

The effort will extend through at least 2029 and receive initial funding support of up to $2.2 million to the three universities.

An Uber for Energy?

What if you could tap energy when you needed it — and get the best price too? What if communities worked together locally to allocate shared energy resources during natural disasters and other emergencies? Soon you might be able to.

Stevens systems engineering professor Amro Farid is working with a New Hampshire city and the state’s largest energy cooperative, under a $1.7 million National Science Foundation grant, as lead investigator on a pilot project to develop what he calls an ‘Uber for energy.’ Communities could potentially collaborate with one another to share and allocate energy more efficiently.

MIT, Florida State University and SUNY-Buffalo will also lend expertise to the collaboration.

Better Batteries, Charging Ahead

Electric tech is white-hot. EVs and hybrid-powered vehicles have arrived in the mainstream, and even airlines are testing electric concepts.

But batteries need to recharged (or replaced) often. Also, lithium (the current preferred material) is rare and expensive and it occasionally leaks and bursts into flame.

That's why Stevens professor Jae Chul Kim explores a number of alternative battery technologies in search of longer-life, safer batteries.

“Better batteries are very important to the planet's sustainable energy mix," notes Kim. "As academic researchers, we will play a significant role in developing a better understanding of the fundamentals of new materials and processes for energy storage and generation."

In one recent project, for instance, he's looking at anode-free batteries that would cut down significantly on the amount of lithium used and also render it in a safer form. As they charge, these batteries would develop lithium metal on their anode sides via electrodeposition; then, as the battery is discharged, the lithium would in theory strip away, leaving little to none behind.

Working with recent graduate Yazhou Zhou Ph.D. ‘24, Ph.D. candidate Danna Yan and longtime CEMS professor Dilhan Kalyon, Kim’s team has developed a method of using electrowriting techniques to create three-dimensional surfaces for batteries that don’t form dangerous dendrites — tree-like, fractal structures — or fissures as quickly on the lithium's surface as it is charging and being deposited. (Those dendrites and fissures cause short-circuits and fires.)

The team's innovation involves a specific combination of polyvinylidene fluoride (PVDF) fibers, printed on copper-foil substrates with extreme, micron-scale precision. The PVDF fibers are built up in specially squared grids that dissipate the strain energy usually associated with dendrite formation. This unique cell construction suppresses dendrites' growth, enabling enhanced electrochemical properties — and longer life — in the resulting battery.

The Backyard Grid

Everyone knows three things about the powers grid: it’s big, mysterious… and it can fail suddenly.

Odonkor is out to help change all that.

His ongoing university research projects and private startup, Grid Discovery, work to help communities do something new: set up local power grids (they’re known as “microgrids”) that can bridge the gap from big energy-transmission systems to your local neighborhood, and plan for outages intelligently.

Grid Discovery recently received $75,000 from the New Jersey Board of Public Utilities (NJBPU) and the New Jersey Economic Development Authority (NJEDA) to accelerate the development of their microgrid platform into a commercially viable technology.

Coming Soon: Algae-Mobiles

What if we could turn plants into fuel, and grow those plants cheaply and efficiently enough to make it worth our while?

We already can.

Stevens’ Center for Environmental Systems (CES), under the direction of professor Christos Christodoulatos, has long partnered with the U.S. Department of Defense in several investigations aimed at created cleaner, greener new biofuels.

The CES group has zeroed in on certain microalgae, which are grown in test tanks on campus and then pressed and processed to extract oils. Those oils, says Christodoulatos, are potent enough to power modified combustion engines in light vehicles — and a future iteration of the project will ramp up pilot algae production to real-life size, such as a small pond producing harvestable algae and biofuel that could power a small facility’s buildings or fleets.

This Grid Is Automatic, Systematic, Hydromatic

Hydropower technology — the accumulation of water behind dams, then releasing it strategically to turn big turbines that spin up energy that’s either delivered or stored — has been around for centuries.

The management and allocation of the powered generated, though, remains a work in progress. For one thing, rivers and lakes have other competing uses: travel, recreation, as water supplies. For another, the

Stevens professor Lei Wu is at the forefront of a new movement to use AI to manage stored hydropower, moving water and energy around at precisely the best times to satisfy surges in demand without stressing the system.

He also develops algorithms to manage other supply, generation and delivery components of grids.

“We can’t rebuild the grid,” explains Wu. “But we can redesign and optimize the tools that control and operate it; it’s that optimization that underlies a greener, more efficient system that’s central to the day-to-day functioning of the grid and one that can bounce back in the event of extreme weather.”

Wu and his team simulate sprawling energy ecosystems, using mathematical models to understand how energy gets from point to point via power plants, transmission infrastructure, storage devices and energy demand — then identify areas where those systems can become smarter, more reliable and more resilient.