Firm Low-Carbon Resources and the Path to 100% Carbon-Free Electricity

Event Date/Time

Friday, September 13, 2024 - 15:00

Location

Bowen Hall
222

Series/Event Type

MAE Departmental Seminars

The electricity sector is the linchpin in any path to net-zero greenhouse gas emissions. Over a decade of research, Prof. Jenkins has explored what it will take to build an affordable, reliable, carbon-free grid. Wind power, solar photovoltaics and lithium-ion batteries are now affordable, mature, rapidly scaling industries, providing the key foundations for a decarbonized grid. But one critical piece remains missing: firm low-carbon resources, technologies that can ensure a decarbonized electricity supply remains reliable whenever needed, for as long as needed. In a highly-cited 2018 paper, Jenkins and colleagues first defined the role of firm-low carbon (or ‘clean firm’) resources in deep decarbonization of the power sector, explaining why these technologies are critical complements to weather-dependent variable renewables and batteries. In subsequent work, Jenkins has led studies to understand a wide range of potential firm resources, including long-duration energy storage, flexible carbon capture systems for gas-fired power plants, advanced fission reactors, fusion power plants, and enhanced geothermal systems. Once ‘science fiction’ concepts appearing only in academic studies and the minds of scientists and entrepreneurs, each of these technologies has now attracted billions of dollars of investment, with first-of-a-kind commercial projects under construction or planned this decade. Jenkins’ work has quantified key cost and performance targets for these technologies, helped define and popularize the entire asset class, and guided policy and funding from both public sector agencies and private investors.

Speaker Bio

Jesse D. Jenkins is an assistant professor and macro-scale energy systems engineer at Princeton University with a joint appointment in the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering and the Andlinger Center for Energy and Environment. He leads the Princeton ZERO Lab (Zero-carbon Energy systems Research and Optimization Laboratory), which focuses on improving and applying optimization-based energy systems models to evaluate and optimize low-carbon energy technologies, guide investment and research in innovative energy technologies, and generate insights to improve energy and climate policy and planning decisions. Dr. Jenkins earned a PhD in engineering systems and masters in technology and policy from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, worked previously as a postdoctoral environmental fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School, and spent six years as an energy and climate policy analyst prior to embarking on his academic career. Dr. Jenkins served on the National Academies of Science Engineering and Medicine expert committee on Accelerating Decarbonization of the U.S. Energy System, was a principal investigator and lead author of Princeton's landmark Net-Zero America study, and leads the REPEAT Project (repeatproject.org), which provides regular, timely, and independent environmental and economic evaluation of federal energy and climate policies as they’re proposed and enacted. He has published 38 peer-reviewed papers to date in high-impact journals including Science, Nature Energy, Joule and Applied Energy. Dr. Jenkins has delivered invited testimony to multiple Congressional committees, his research is frequently featured in major media outlets, and he is the co-host of the podcast Shift Key on the transition away from fossil fuels.