A quickly growing global population presents a variety of challenges, and raises the critical question: How can we sustainably meet energy needs while considering — and preventing — environmental and human impacts? An ever-increasing demand for energy requires the development and maintenance of an underlying infrastructure providing important services and utilities, such as power and communications. As new energy technologies emerge, researchers need to consider factors such as materials and costs — but beyond the actual technologies, researchers also need to determine which policies and incentives will help ensure that the technologies are used efficiently. Research from MIT's Institute for Data, Systems, and Society uses data and models to better design and predict the outcomes of technologies and policies in the critical area of energy and environmental sustainability. Smart grids and pricing The increasing demand for energy — along with growing environmental concerns — have led to the engineering of modern power grids with the capacity to integrate renewable energy resources on a large scale. Although demand response and dynamic pricing are often considered a means of mitigating the uncertainties of renewable energy generation — and improving the system’s economic and environmental efficiency — the real-time coupling of supply and demand creates significant challenges for guaranteeing reliability and robustness in the power system....

The generation of electricity is a huge contributor to the world’s emissions of climate-altering greenhouse gases, producing some 25 percent globally. That’s because more than two-thirds of the world’s electricity is still being produced by burning fossil fuels. But progress in a variety of areas could allow for drastic reductions in those emissions, as several specialists in engineering and economics outlined last week at the third of six climate change symposia being held this academic year at MIT. Titled “Decarbonizing the Electricity Sector,” the symposium centered on four areas: improvements in solar energy and storage systems, advances in nuclear power and fusion, electric vehicles, and expanding access to electricity in the developing world while curbing emissions. “Globally, we are in the midst of a major decarbonization strategy to create clean electricity,” said Paul Joskow, a professor of economics at MIT’s Sloan School of Management and co-moderator of the symposium. But, he said, it will also be essential to cut emissions from the other major sectors, especially in transportation and in building operations....

In Kenya’s second largest city, Mombasa, the demand for water is expected to double by 2035 to an estimated 300,000 cubic meters per day. In Mombasa’s current warm and humid climate, that water comes from a substantial volume of precipitation that may also change significantly as the region warms in the coming decades in line with global climate model projections. What’s not clear from the projections, however, is whether precipitation levels will rise or fall along with that warming. The ultimate direction and magnitude of precipitation change is a major concern for designers of a proposed dam and reservoir system that will capture runoff into the Mwache River, which currently totals about 310,000 cubic meters per day. The substantial uncertainty in future runoff makes it difficult to determine the reservoir capacity necessary to meet Mombasa’s water demand throughout its estimated 100-year lifetime. City planner are therefore faced with deciding whether to invest in an expensive, large-scale dam to provide a consistent water supply under the driest future climate projected by the models, a smaller-scale dam that could accommodate current needs, or start small and build capacity as needed....

India is on a path with dual — and potentially conflicting — goals related to the use of citizen data. To improve the efficiency their municipal services, many Indian cities have started enabling government-service requests, which involves collecting and sharing citizen data with government officials and, potentially, the public. But there’s also a national push to protect citizen privacy, potentially restricting data usage. Cities are now beginning to question how much citizen data, if any, they can use to track government operations. In a new study, MIT researchers find that there is, in fact, a way for Indian cities to preserve citizen privacy while using their data to improve efficiency. The researchers obtained and analyzed data from more than 380,000 government service requests by citizens across 112 cities in one Indian state for an entire year. They used the dataset to measure each city government’s efficiency based on how quickly they completed each service request. Based on field research in three of these cities, they also identified the citizen data that’s necessary, useful (but not critical), or unnecessary for improving efficiency when delivering the requested service....