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The demand for energy is growing. Projections for total energy demand depend primarily on how the global economy grows. The world's gross domestic product (GDP) is increasing at around 3% each year, mostly in developing countries. As a country's GDP grows, the amount of energy it requires increases.

Meeting this rising demand requires a multi-faceted approach: expanding clean energy generation, increasing electrification, and reducing energy consumption through efficiency. This Impact Area encompasses advances in the latter two. Electrification, the transitioning of processes and devices from fossil fuels to clean electricity, offers significant advantages in efficiency and flexibility. Meanwhile, by making devices and applications more efficient, we reduce the total energy that needs to be generated in the first place.

Historically, fossil fuels made sense for many applications because much of our energy use involved generating heat, including warming homes, cooking food, and powering steam engines. Combustion is effective for producing heat. However, modern energy demands have shifted dramatically. Today, most of our energy goes toward performing work: running motors, powering electronics, processing information, and driving precise industrial operations. Electric systems excel at these tasks because they convert energy into work far more efficiently than combustion-based alternatives. An electric motor, for instance, can convert over 90% of its input energy into mechanical work, while a gasoline engine typically converts only 20-30%. This fundamental efficiency advantage means that electrifying our vehicles, industrial processes, and heating systems can substantially reduce costs and total energy requirements.

If we can reduce the amount of energy needed to light and heat our buildings, power our electric devices, drive our vehicles, and perform industrial processes, and transition more of these applications to run on electricity, then we can better satisfy growing global demands while minimizing resource consumption and costs.

Here are just some of the ways in which several of the Technology Domains are making advances in this Impact Area:

Buildings

• Developing building climate control systems that dynamically adjust energy demands throughout the day to drive down energy use and costs.
• Design of district level heating and cooling networks.
• Developing windows that are more insulating and can dynamically tint to better control internal building temperatures.
• Developing building materials that require less energy and less carbon to produce.

Bio-Catalysis

• Developing new bio-catalytic methods to replace existing chemical methods for producing fine and commodity chemicals on industrial scales.

Carbon Capture

• Developing chemical and bio-chemical approaches to sequester carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, or at point sources.

Catalysis and electrocatalysis

• Developing new, more efficient, chemical approaches for large-scale synthesis of commodity chemicals that require less energy and replace heat with electricity.

Nanoscience and Advanced Materials

• Development of new materials and semiconductors that require less energy to power lights, displays, and electronics devices.
• Characterization of materials at the atomistic level to better understand energy flow, to inform the design of future materials.

Polymers

• Development of new techniques to recycle plastics with lower energy demands.
• Design of polymers that have lower energy demands to produce and can be readily recycled in a sustainable manner.

Theory, Computational Modeling, and Simulation

Using fundamental theory and calculations to better understand how energy is transported through materials at the atomistic level to guide the design of more efficient materials.