Experts Urge Call to Action on Energy

Researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Stanford University and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) — including Ravi Prasher — collaborated to write an article on energy, which was recently awarded the best peer-reviewed article for general readers by the American Energy Society.

Prasher, associate laboratory director of the Energy Technologies Area (ETA) at Berkeley Lab, along with MIT Professor Asegun Henry and Stanford Professor Arun Majumdar set out to inspire thermal science and engineering researchers to focus their efforts on problems that we know will have a huge impact.

“This paper represents a big call to action for a variety of scientific and engineering disciplines. Thermal science and engineering, like a number of other disciplines, is one where people work on a variety of problems including energy,” said Prasher. “Focussing on a subset of problems with the biggest potential impact can have dramatic influence on our ability to tackle climate change in a sustainable manner.”

In the Nature Energy article published August 10, 2020, Prasher, Henry and Majumdar show how advances in thermal science and engineering will play a vital role in mitigating climate change.

"Advancing our ability to transport, store, convert and efficiently utilize thermal energy will play an indispensable role in avoiding a greater than 2 °C rise in global average temperature. Even though this critical need exists, there is a significant disconnect between current research in thermal sciences and what is needed for deep decarbonization," leads off the publication, which explores five thermal energy grand challenges for decarbonization.