Skip to main content

Affordable and Clean Energy

About the Goal

Affordable Energy

The United Nations aims to ensure access to affordable, reliable, sustainable and modern energy for all by 2030.

Northwestern is engaged in a broad range of research projects and other initiatives aimed at realizing this goal, including efforts to advance global sustainability and energy solutions through transformational research, interdisciplinary education, and public engagement.  Other initiatives include a collaboration between Northwestern faculty and the Argonne National Laboratory to expand and support energy-related research and education opportunities, as well as research that examines emerging technologies and their energy and environmental impacts and the pollution associated with electricity generation.

 

Northwestern Experts and Initiatives

Sossina Haile

Sossina Haile is the Walter P. Murphy Professor of Materials Sceince and Engineering and the co-director of the Northwestern Institute for Sustainability and Energy (ISEN).  Haile's research broadly encompasses solid state ionic materials and devices, with a particular focus on energy technologies. She has established a new class of fuel cells based on solid acid electrolytes and demonstrated record power densities for solid oxide fuel cells. Her more recent work on water and carbon dioxide dissociation for solar-fuel generation by thermochemical processes has created new avenues for harnessing sunlight to meet energy demands. As an ISEN co-director, Haile plays a key role in advancing the work of the Institute by providing direction and insight into sustainability and energy research and education.

Sossina Haile
Josiah Hester

Josiah Hester

Josiah Hester's research broadly focuses on mobile and pervasive computing, wireless sensor networks, and embedded systems. This includes battery-free smart devices and intermittent computing, where Hester designs computer systems resilient to frequent and unpredictable power failures. He also explores and develops new hardware designs, software techniques, tools, and programming abstractions so that developers can easily design, debug, and deploy intricate sensing applications that work despite frequent power failures, constrained resources, and unpredictable conditions. His work is often applied to mobile healthcare, infrastructure monitoring, and conservation.

Mar Reguant

Mar Reguant is an associate professor of Economics who studies the evolution and impacts of the energy transition through the lens of economics. She uses quantitative modeling techniques and data analysis to understand the impacts of increasing renewable production and the best policies to undergo the dramatic changes that we are witnessing as we decarbonize our electricity sector. She also studies who the winners and losers from the transition are, and what is the best way to minimize the frictions that arise during the transition. 

Mar Reguant

Featured Course

Contemporary Energy and Climate Change (342-0-01)

The increasing worldwide demand for energy presents a number of complex interdisciplinary challenges, from resource depletion to climate change. This class will challenge students to answer the question, How shall we power the world in the 21st century? We will examine the history and geography of energy use; links between energy and climate change; inequities in climate impacts; challenge of sustainability; and the fundamental science of climate change.

Explore the course