Energy Research Centers and Programs
The following centers, programs, and projects are significant strands in the fabric of interdisciplinary energy research at Stanford.
The Precourt Energy Efficiency Center (PEEC)
The mission of PEEC is to promote energy efficient technologies, systems, and practices, emphasizing economically attractive deployment. PEEC works to understand and overcome market, policy, technology, and human behavioral barriers to economically efficient reductions of energy use and to inform public and private policymaking. Energy Efficiency is vital for the U.S. and world economy, for environmental protection, and for energy security.
The Global Climate and Energy Project (GCEP)
GCEP seeks new solutions to one of the grand challenges of this century: supplying energy to meet the changing needs of a growing world population in a way that protects the environment. GCEP's mission is to conduct fundamental research on technologies that will permit the development of global energy systems with significantly lower greenhouse gas emissions. With the support and participation of four international companies—ExxonMobil, General Electric, Schlumberger, and Toyota—GCEP is a unique collaboration of the world's energy experts from research institutions and private industry. The Project's sponsors will invest a total of $225 million over a decade or more as GCEP explores energy technologies that are efficient, environmentally benign, and cost-effective when deployed on a large scale.
The TomKat Center for Sustainable Energy (TomKat)
The TomKat Center looks at generation and conversion, transmission and distribution, storage, and land and water as they pertain to energy for electricity and transportation. The TomKat Center works to transform the world's energy systems by identifying key challenges and defining research agendas, carrying out evaluation and analysis, challenging our faculty to form interdisciplinary groups to provide new approaches to problem solving, developing methods for analysis that will be adopted by other practitioners, performing systems level and cross-disciplinary research, facilitating translation to actual applied technology, and proposing innovative solutions.
The Steyer-Taylor Center for Energy Policy and Finance
The Steyer-Taylor Center is helping to blaze an economically sensible path toward an advanced global energy system. The center, housed jointly at Stanford's law and business schools, develops economically sensible policy and finance solutions for advancing cleaner and more secure energy.
The Stanford Institute for Materials and Energy Science (SIMES)
SIMES is a DOE-funded institute that focuses on the basic science of materials associated with energy conversions and storage. Through SIMES, faculty and students take advantage of the unparalleled capabilities available at the Stanford Linear Accelerator (SLAC), including the newly commissioned Linac Coherent Light Source, to characterize materials, surfaces, and processes at the atomic level. The work at SIMES provides foundational understanding of the interactions of light and solid matter. The understanding is applied in photovoltaics, in catalysis that is widely applicable to energy conversion devices like batteries and fuel cells, and in the nanostructured materials that offer many opportunities for future advances in energy technologies.
The Program on Energy and Sustainable Development (PESD)
The Program on Energy and Sustainable Development (PESD) is an international, interdisciplinary program that draws on the fields of economics, political science, law, and management to investigate how the production and consumption of energy affect human welfare and environmental quality. In addition to undertaking world-class research, the Program leads advanced graduate and introductory undergraduate courses and seminars in energy and environmental policy at Stanford. The Program's core sponsors are BP, plc, and the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI).
The Stanford Environmental and Energy Policy Analysis Center (SEEPAC)
SIEPR and the Precourt Institute for Energy have launched a new center that will foster research on public policies that address pressing environmental and energy issues. SEEPAC, directed by Lawrence Goulder, enlists faculty and students to seek innovative and effective policies to deal with a range of issues, including climate change, local air pollution, vulnerability to oil supply disruptions, and transitions to renewable energy resources. SEEPAC's policy analysts work closely with engineers and natural scientists as it examines policy efforts at all levels: international, national, and regional.
Shultz-Stephenson Task Force on Energy Policy
The Hoover Institution's Shultz-Stephenson Task Force on Energy Policy addresses energy policy in the United States and its effects on our domestic and international political priorities, particularly our national security. As a result of volatile and rising energy prices and increasing global concern about climate change, two related and compelling issues—threats to national security and adverse affects of energy usage on global climate—have emerged as key adjuncts to America's energy policy, and the Task Force explores these subjects in detail. The goals of the Task Force are to gather comprehensive information on current scientific and technological developments, survey the contingent policy actions, and offer a range of prescriptive policies to address our varied energy challenges. The Task Force focuses on public policy at all levels, from individual to global. It then recommends policy initiatives, large and small, that can be undertaken to the advantage of both private enterprises and governments acting individually and in concert.
Energy Modeling Forum (EMF)
The EMF seeks to improve understanding of an important energy/environment problem by harnessing the collective capabilities of participating experts, explain the strengths, limitations and caveats of alternative analytical approaches, and identify high priority directions for future research.
Center for Advanced Molecular Photovoltaics (CAMP)
CAMP is a research center with the goal of revolutionizing the global energy landscape by developing the science and technology for stable, efficient molecular photovoltaic cells that can compete with fossil fuels in cost per kilowatt-hour produced. While today's best molecular solar cells have efficiencies up to 8.5% and last approximately 2 years in sunlight, our vision is to increase the efficiency to at least 15%, and make the cells stable for 10 years or more. Furthermore, developing manufacturing technologies and production of cells at very low-cost is also a high priority. CAMP's activities span polymer, small molecular and dye-sensitized molecular solar cells with research activities in molecular design through advanced quantum mechanical calculations, molecular synthesis, nanostructure engineering and characterization, understanding and engineering carrier recombination, light management, transparent contacts, and the engineering of durable molecular solar cells.
Center on Nanostructuring for Efficient Energy Conversions (CNEEC)
The Center on Nanostructuring for Efficient Energy Conversion is working to provide a scientific foundation for break-out high-efficiency, cost-effective energy technologies. The research effort investigates how to employ nanostructuring to generate high gradients, high surface-to-volume ratios, and low dimensionality leading to improved energy conversion efficiency, how to manipulate materials at the nanometer scale to increase efficiency of energy conversion devices, and how to exploit fundamental advances in charge transport, optical absorption, and equilibrium control to improve performance and efficiency in energy conversion devices. To achieve these goals, CNEEC pursues an integrative research program to study the scientific principles that govern physical and chemical processes and phenomena at the nanoscale. This involves understanding how nanostructuring modifies and governs the properties of materials, learning how to control dimensionality and confinement, and implementing learned insights on model energy conversion materials, structures and devices.
SUNCAT Center for Interface Science and Catalysis (SUNCAT)
The SUNCAT Center for Interface Science and Catalysis explores fundamental challenges relating to advances in energy technology. The center, which is a partnership between SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory and the Stanford University's Department of Chemical Engineering, focuses on atomic-scale design of catalysts in energy conversion and storage. SUNCAT researchers aim to reveal chemical processes at solid-gas and solid-liquid interfaces, and to identify the mechanisms which control a material's catalytic properties. Understanding these processes at an atomic level will aid in crafting new, efficient and sustainable catalysts. Widely used in many industrial processes, catalysts are critical to future energy technologies such as artificial photosynthesis, creating cleaner fuels and building better, more efficient batteries for energy storage.