Sustainability
A CONVERSATION WITH SUMANJEET KAUR
Sumanjeet Kaur in Energy Technologies is researching technologies that can substantially reduce the carbon footprint of the building sector, improve industrial thermal processing systems’ performance and her thermal energy group is looking into ways to advance carbon-negative efforts, and help meet the global demand for clean water.
Suman has been at the Lab for four and a half years. She became interested in energy storage technologies as deeper penetration of renewable electricity will only be possible with scalable, affordable, and sustainable energy storage. Within this framework, her motivation to work in the building sector comes from the sheer magnitude of the energy and carbon footprint in this sector.
The building sector represents the largest sector of the US economy and needs to be transformed to plan for a sustainable energy future as it consumes roughly 75% of our nation’s electricity and 39% of our total energy use and contributes 35% to our carbon emissions.
What is your area of work?
I am working in thermal energy storage, especially in the context of buildings. Buildings utilize energy in a wide variety of ways. Of these, thermal processes, such as heating and cooling, make up a significant portion of a building’s overall energy consumption. Electrochemical batteries have received much attention for distributed energy storage; however, thermal energy storage can be uniquely suited to many building needs.
Thermal storage strategies can effectively store and release large amounts of heat. One of the challenges facing the electrical grid is satisfying peak demands. Much of the peak demand in residential buildings is driven by heating and cooling loads. If we can find ways to use thermal storage to shift some of these thermal demands to other times during the day, many utilities could more readily meet peak demands without infrastructure expansions. Thermal energy storage also holds the potential to have notably lower capital costs and longer lifetimes.
What big challenges are you hoping to solve with your or scientific research in the next 20 years?
I am working on reducing the energy and carbon footprint of the industrial and building sectors.
Many people do not realize that most of the energy that we use as a country is consumed in the form of heat, not electricity. About 63% of the energy we use is heat to power industrial manufacturing processes, transportation, or to regulate the temperature of residential and commercial buildings.
To achieve the Intergovernmental Panel of Climate Change (IPCC) climate goals, it is essential to decarbonize the industrial and building sectors. Most of the energy consumption and associated CO2 emissions are related to heating, indicating that these sectors' decarbonization is only possible with the decarbonization of heat.
What steps are you taking today to accomplish this vision?
In collaboration with other Energy Technology Area principal investigators, and those at UC Berkeley and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, I am developing next-generation thermal energy storage materials, which can make buildings more energy-efficient and can allow for their integration with the evolving grid. For the industrial sector, I am looking into the least disruptive ways to decarbonize industrial-scale synthesis.
Who would you like to partner with at the Lab to bring this vision to life?
It is critical to understand fundamental issues at the materials level. I want to expedite the discovery of new materials for thermal energy solutions using computational materials design, combinatorial synthesis, and high throughput characterization. I want to partner with scientists at the Advanced Light Source, Molecular Foundry, Materials Sciences Division, and Computational Research.
Who from the past, present, or future would you like to collaborate with? And on what?
I would like to engage the industrial sector in additional research and development. If we want to see the faster adaptation of new technologies in the market, it is imperative to work hand in hand with industry early to understand their needs and requirements.