Stanford Faculty in Energy Research

Causes, responses, and consequences of the Fukushima nuclear power plant accident.

Applying behavior change techniques to reduce energy use. Using pervasive sensor data to measure relevant behaviors and to evaluate efficacy of interventions. Climate behavior assessment tool.

Impacts on local ecology of biofuel expansion. Impacts on climate of using more land for biomass energy. Regional impacts of climate change and energy policy in the Western Hemisphere.

Models for predicting performance of conventional and non-conventional hydrocarbon reservoirs (including shale oil and gas), and CO2 sequestration operations. Flow of complex mixtures (oil, gas and water) in porous rocks and in pipes. Optimization of oil field development and operations.

Probabilistic and statistical tools for modeling the reliability of nuclear power plants and nuclear waste repositories.

Nanostructured polymers for low-cost, stretchable batteries. Synthesis of functional organic and polymer materials. Thin-film organic photovoltaic cells. Printable, electrically conductive gel for potential use in energy storage and biofuel cells.

Wireless power transfer to moving electric vehicles.

Sequestering CO₂ in deep underground formations. Energy systems analysis to guide decisions about best options for providing energy while reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

Alternative transportation fuels, particularly biofuels. U.S. energy policy and its effects on the nation's domestic and international political priorities, particularly national security.

New algorithms to improve imaging of reflection seismic data for structural and stratigraphic interpretation. Continuous passive seismic monitoring for detection of CO2 plumes in geologic sequestration projects.

Tax and public expenditure theory and applications. Federal energy subsidies. Carbon-based taxation.

Decentralized message passing to constantly optimize an electricity network with many different devices, each with its own complex constraints and objective.

Development of silicon-based microphotonic functionality and plasmonic devices to manipulate the flow of light at the nanoscale. Use of nanowires in thin-film solar cells to boost efficiency.

Entrepreneurship education regarding high-growth and technology enterprises, in particular energy-related technologies.

Transition from coal to low-carbon electricity. Oceanic CO2 sequestration. Accounting for CO2 emissions. Future CO2 from existing energy infrastructure. High-altitude wind power. Assessing wind power resources. Geoengineering to combat climate change.

Plasma propulsion. Plasma and combustion synthesis of materials. Effects of injecting ionized gas on the operation of a fuel cell. Photon-enhanced thermionic emission devices, which use solar heat and light.

Electron transfer between electrodes and among redox species. Electrocatalysts to convert CO2 and feedstocks to higher value materials. Water oxidation with metal-oxide semiconductor anodes.

Research pathways to low-carbon energy systems, including alternative and renewable sources, energy storage, smart grid and CO2 capture. Methods to project trends in energy technology innovations and associated new business models. The effect of energy efficiency standards in appliances and buildings, and how these standards affect purchase prices and operating costs.

Developing bidirectional deconvolution to improve filtering and interpretation of seismic data to model the Earth's inner structure in areas like deep water Gulf of Mexico.

Creating valuable products from organic waste streams. Energy positive wastewater treatment. Biosynthesis and molecular-scale recycling of bioplastics and biocomposites. In-situ remediation of radioactive waste.

Understanding diamondoid electron transport properties, synthesis of higher diamondoids, and developing diamondoid applications for oil and gas exploration.

Energy-Efficient computing. Developing an efficient low-power microprocessor. "Imagine," an image and signal processor 20 times more power efficient than conventional signal processors.

The determinants of legal and political conflict in global infrastructure projects. Recovery of energy, nutrients, and water from household and community-level sanitation systems.

Interactions between climate change, biofuel mandates, and energy and agriculture markets. Interactions between climate and large-scale solar energy projects.

Self-assembly of nanostructures from the natural protein clathrin to act as templates for metallization, which could potentially be of interest as experimental battery electrodes.

Nuclear energy safety. Nuclear energy and nonproliferation of nuclear weapons.

Computational modeling of subsurface flow, with applications in oil and gas production and geological carbon sequestration. Optimization of subsurface flow operations and energy systems.

Flow and heat transfer in complex turbulent flows. Turbulence interactions with dispersed particles and droplets, such as with pulverized coal combustors and fast-fluidized beds.

Study of plant cell wall biogenesis, cellulose synthase dynamics and trafficking, for potential application to cellulosic biomass for energy.

A simulation tool that models all parts of the electrical network, including generation, transmission, intermittent renewable supply, energy storage, distributed generation and electrical vehicles.

How different scenarios of expanded biofuels production in rich and poor countries will affect global and regional food prices, farmer incomes, food consumption by the poor, and climate.

Large hydroelectric dam impact on groundwater. Hydrologic pathways of food contamination from coal-fired power in northwest China.

Productivity of designing, building and operating facilities. Sustainability of the built environment. Computer models for port authorities on infrastructure decisions. Virtual design and construction.

Impact of deliberative polling, which explores how people's opinions would change if they were more informed, on energy choices, attitudes toward renewable energy and energy conservation.

Particle beam physics with emphasis on experimental measurements of physical systems and control of unstable particle beams. Energy interests in transportation systems, energy efficiency and education of scientists and non-scientists in energy policy and technology.

Comparative ecosystem services valuation of large solar power plants and conventional power plants. Hydrologic pathways of food contamination from coal-fired power in northwest China.

Key mechanisms for distributing energy in plants and fine tuning biomass. Cellulose production - polymer synthesis and extrusion. Nitrogen efficiency - reducing fossil fuels in making fertilizers.

Electron transfer dynamics. Mechanisms for directed and efficient channeling of solar energy to chemical energy. Multi-exciton generation efficiency in nano-structured materials.

Using control systems to reduce the environmental impact of automobiles. Unmanned electric vehicles. Homogeneous charge compression ignition engines.

Chemical kinetics, such as determination of bond dissociation energies. Rate constants for reactions of OH with fuels. Optimization of synthetic oxygenated fuels. Hydrogen effects on climate, stratospheric ozone and air pollution.

Wireless technology, including channel modeling, multiuser communications, signal processing and system design, for use in smart grids, automated highways and intelligent home electronics.

Fundamentals of transport of groundwater and contaminants. The future of global oil resources, supply and demand. Deep CO2 sequestration and earthquake triggering.

The environmental and economic impacts of U.S. and international environmental policies, including policies to deal with climate change, and with pollution from power plants and automobiles.

Acclimation in photosynthetic organisms. Generating bioenergy in the form of hydrocarbons and electricity from living cells. Regulatory aspects of photosynthesis and the biogenesis of photosynthetic membranes.

Development of laser-based diagnostics to optimize performance and minimize pollution of combustion and propulsion systems. Synthetic oxygenated fuels. Sensors for advanced combustion. Rate constants for reactions of OH with fuels.

Behavioral mechanisms that determine environmental choices and energy efficiency. Split landlord-tenant incentives in residential energy consumption. New markets for green energy products.

Seismic wave propagation in multi-scale heterogeneous reservoirs. Characterization and monitoring of petroleum and carbon storage systems. CO2 sequestration in coal beds.

Self-assembly of nanostructures from the natural protein clathrin to act as templates for metallization, which could potentially be of interest as experimental battery electrodes.

Characteristics of of airborne particles emitted from urban combustion sources. Effects of anthropogenic pollutants on cloud droplet formation. Assessment of air pollutant dispersion and mixing indoors, including the effects of energy-efficient building design strategies on indoor pollutant levels.

Developing energy efficient electronic solutions. Circuit, architecture and application optimization tools to minimize energy needed for each task. Applications from server farms to imagers in mobile platforms.

Materials and phenomena in lithium-ion batteries. New types of long life, safe and inexpensive alkali metal batteries to connect wind and solar sources to the electrical grid.

Atomic scale synthesis and control of complex oxides heterostructures for energy applications, including catalysis and charge storage.

New tools for making decisions in complex operational settings. Optimizing power dispatching for energy utility networks in the presence of uncertain demand and supply.

Tailoring solid-state surfaces for effective catalysis. Developing devices for storing renewable electricity based on chemical transformations. Converting CO2 and water into sustainable fuels and chemicals using renewable energy.

Developing computational methods for economic modeling and applying them to several public policy issues, including climate change. Robust decision making on climate and energy policy.

Understanding mechanisms for high-temperature superconductors. Novel phases and phase transitions in disordered and strongly correlated electron systems. Micro- and nano-scale mechanical devices

Impact of emission permits on electricity generation. Multiunit auctions, including those for electricity, in which buyers submit discrete bids and hence their demands are step functions.

Getting beyond coal and petroleum with subsidies for renewable energy and research support for solar and wind technologies. Policies for vehicle electrification. Research for CO2 capture and sequestration at utility level. Problems with corn ethanol subsidies and natural gas policy.

High-temperature superconductivity. Quantum magnetism. Electronic liquid crystalline phases of matter. Strong correlation effects in electronic materials and devices.

Neural mechanisms that support emotion and decision making. Consumer decision making when purchasing major appliances and effects of nudges like ecolabeling.

Environmental fluid mechanics. Turbulence and internal wave dynamics in stratified flows. The transport of mass and energy in estuarine systems such as San Francisco Bay.

Energy Efficient computing based on architectures, runtime environments and parallel computer systems. Resource management in large multi-core systems. Efficient data centers.

Surveys documenting public beliefs about global warming and preferences for energy policy for more than 15 years. Monitoring and interpreting processes of opinion formation and change.

Consequences of switching land use to biofuels.

The influence of environmental contextual cues on choices in consumer behavior. Long-term cost information related to fuel efficiency and its impact on car purchasing decisions.

Ways for the construction industry to overcome barriers to adopting energy-efficient innovations. Designing organizations and governance regimes for sustainable development of energy and civil infrastructure projects.

Climate impacts of converting land use to biofuel crops. Direct climate effects of converting annual biofuel crops to perennial. Integrating large solar projects with agriculture.

Angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy studies of strongly correlated electron systems, in particular the high temperature superconductors.

Geological carbon storage in sedimentary and magnesium-silicate rocks. Geochemical and hydrological interactions that optimize the formation of carbonates and the physical trapping of CO2, with a view to enhance reaction kinetics, reduce cost and increase storage security.

Atomic and molecular manipulation for energy-efficient nanotechnology. Designer materials and nanoelectronics. Local response of novel superconductors. Carbon-based devices.

Analysis, design and evaluation of energy efficiency and renewable energy technologies. Green buildings. Wind and solar electricity. Distributed energy systems. Electric vehicles.

Impact of rock type, porosity, pore fluids, temperature, and stress on seismic wave propagation. How geochemical reactions of CO2 injection change the seismic attributes of rocks. Enhanced oil recovery.

Community opposition to siting of energy projects in the United States and of pipeline projects in the developing world.

Low-cost hybrid tandem solar cells with polymer or dye-sensitized cells on top of conventional silicon or CIGS cells. Controlling and characterizing the nanostructure of solar cells and their electronic processes. Transparent electrodes based on silver nanowires. Long-term reliability of solar cells.

Photon-enhanced thermionic emission devices, which use solar heat and light to generate electricity. Self-assembly of nanostructures from the natural protein clathrin for experimental battery electrodes.

Environmental rhetoric and environmental ethics, with a particular focus on sustainable energy.

Molecular analysis of organic extracts from sediments and petroleum. Aspects of petroleum genesis, production and environmental remediation of oil spills.

Optimal use of distributed storage and transmission resources in the presence of intermittent energy sources, control design and performance limits.

Plasma enhanced combustion of hydrocarbon fuels and fuel blends using nanosecond pulsed discharges. Drag reducing polymers for energy efficiency. Simulation of hypersonic flight.

Energy disaggregation software, which separates a whole-home meter signal into appliance-level data, to help residents reduce energy use through finer understanding of their consumption.

Economics and politics of utility regulation.

How fractures and electrostatic properties of sedimentary rocks apply to reservoir evaluation and geothermal resources. Geochemical effects from injection of CO2 into reservoir rocks. Methane hydrates.

Geologic storage of CO2. Multiphase flow in porous media; interactions of high-pressure phase equilibria of multicomponent mixtures with multiphase flow, with applications to enhanced oil recovery by gas injection. Control of coal bed fires.

Energy policy. Most promising technologies Biggest risks to transforming energy system. Energy and national security. Energy efficiency.

Numerical modeling of chemically reacting flows to optimize efficiency, stability, and pollutant emissions in combustion engines, and to develop fuel cells. Optimization of synthetic oxygenated fuels.

Extending silicon device structures to nanoscale dimensions. Rapid melt growth method to transform amorphous to single crystal for III-V solar cells on bulk silicon substrates.

Nanomaterials for energy-efficient electronics, including transistors, data storage, integrated circuits, and sensors. Energy harvesting through thermoelectrics. Carbon nanotubes, graphene, and other 2D materials for electronic and thermal applications. Fundamental limits of current and heat flow at the nanoscale.

Quantum confined solar cells, including quantum dots, thin barrier layers and transparent electrodes. Solid oxide fuel cells. Photosynthetic membranes and their catalytic behavior.

Solar thermal and PV product design, production, commercialization, investment strategies. Electric vehicle design, production and commercialization. Roadmap to a 100% renewable energy system in the Bay Area.

Making renewable energy economical. Reducing wind power costs by improving forecasts and buying replacement power later. Matching solar supply with businesses that have price-sensitive demand.

Creation of a multiplayer game platform linked to home energy sensors to enable empirical research about how serious games can change consumer decisions about energy consumption.

Cost competitiveness of renewable energy sources, including solar PV, wind and biofuels. Economics of CO2 capture by fossil fuel power plants. Design of alternative regulatory and subsidy mechanisms to achieve CO2 reductions.

Nonequilibrium phonon dynamics. Thermal transport across interfaces between dissimilar materials. Fundamental laser-matter interactions in solids in the high-field limit.

Applying experimental approaches from public health and medical research to design and evaluate theory-driven, family-, school-, and community-based interventions to promote residential and food-related energy-saving behaviors. Designing "stealth interventions" that harness the motivating characteristics of social movements to promote the overlapping goals of environmental sustainability and health.

Development of liquid biofuel, including bioethanol and biodiesel, in China. Biofuels and the poor: global impacts of biofuels on agricultural markets. Hydrologic pathways of food contamination from coal-fired power in China.

Analysis of the conversation about energy efficiency and climate change on social media platforms.

Developing monocrystalline germanium III-V solar cell with efficiencies near the best multi-junction cells and manufacturing cost approaching the conventional crystalline silicon technology.

New methods for delignification of woody cellulosic biomass. Understanding mechanisms plants use to produce complex molecules for future use in synthetic production of energy feedstocks.

High-temperature cuprate and pnictide superconductors. Photon-enhanced thermionic emission devices, which use solar heat and light. Diamondoids-nanostructured diamond. Transition metal oxides as functional energy materials. Multi-scale imaging of energy materials.

Transmission electron microscopy to study effects of radiation damage on the size and distribution of quantum dots in solar cells. Phase change in magnesium as it becomes saturated with hydrogen.

International law and diplomacy, international relations, national security. Nuclear energy and weaponry proliferation, particularly in Iran. Securing Israel's offshore natural gas resources.

Determining the electronic structure of transition metal complexes, which are utilized in oxidation catalysis and fuel cells because of their ability to facilitate and control oxygen activation and reduction.

Metabolic processes of anaerobic microorganisms and their application in bioenergy. Microbes that convert electricity, CO2 and water into fuels (or precursors) without the use of biomass. Microbial conversion of sewage to methane.

Atomic-scale structure and dynamics of the ion conducting oxide ceramic materials at the heart of solid oxide fuel cells, with the aim of optimizing performance and lowering cost.

Energy efficiency technologies, policies and behavior. Energy and climate change policy analysis. Electricity market analysis. Implementation of California's AB32.

A tool for commercial building owners to screen, prioritize and execute optimal energy efficiency retrofit projects.

Strategy and performance of national oil companies. How institutional factors affect the diffusion of technologies, from central electricity generation to cook stoves or generators for the very poor.

A simulation tool that models all parts of the electricity network, from generation to price-sensitive demand. The use of dynamic optimization and finance theory in natural resource management.

Social psychology interventions. Developing human-centered, online programs to motivate residents to reduce energy consumption, using social norms, community and goal setting as motivators.

Magnetic nanotechnology, spintronics and integrated inductors, with applications in energy conversion and storage.

Developing organometallic and organic catalysts. Oxidative conversion of natural gas into liquid fuels without CO2 release. Transition metal catalysts for direct-hydrocarbon fuel cells.

Cleaner energy production from fossil fuels. Membrane and sorbent design and testing for CO2 capture. Hydrogen storage and production. Speciation and capture of heavy metals released from coal combustion.

Multijunction photovoltaic cell using nanowire-based subcells connected in parallel and a plasmonic electrode serving both as a lateral spectral filter and as a light concentrator.

Developing an automated mechanism for charging a fleet of electric vehicles and discharging, i.e. borrowing electricity from car batteries during peak afternoon power use. Reduces charging costs for drivers and costs of managing peak power demand for utilities.

Theory of high-temperature superconductivity. Testing a new class of materials in an attempt to achieve the quantum spin Hall system effect without external magnetic fields and at room temperature.

Reservoir geomechanics, with particular emphasis on shale gas and tight gas reservoirs, geologic sequestration of CO2, hydraulic fracturing and earthquake triggering.