Humans have been trying to draw power from the ocean’s waves since 1799, and for good reason: the energy potential of waves off the U.S. coastline is estimated at 2.64 trillion kilowatt hours, or roughly 63% of U.S. electricity generation. And perhaps since the time of the Romans, humans have stored water at high tides to drive tidal mills, the earliest form of tidal energy harvesting. Technology improvements and the climate crisis have sparked renewed interest in these ideas, and two Cornell faculty members have received Fast Grants to study ocean wave and tidal energy projects in Oregon and New York, respectively. 

Six projects focused on energy systems of the future have been awarded a total of $147,130 from The 2030 Project: A Cornell Climate Initiative. This is the third year that the project, housed within the Cornell Atkinson Center for Sustainability, has awarded Fast Grants to researchers across the university who are pioneering new concepts or partnering with industry, government and nonprofits to develop or scale projects. 

“The 2030 project is built around four key themes: materials of the future, energy systems of the future, food and farms of the future, and societies and policies of the future,” said Ben Furnas ’06, executive director of The 2030 Project. “This year we chose to focus our grant solicitation on impact-oriented climate research around energy systems. We were pleased to receive proposals from a wide variety of disciplines because social scientists and physical scientists may think about these problems in different ways and contribute interesting and important insights into how we develop the energy systems of the future.”

Edwin “Todd” Cowen, professor of civil and environmental engineering, and Seth Schweitzer, research associate in civil and environmental engineering, are partnering with a team of Cornell researchers and At-Sea Development, a private company working to build a 100-megawatt tidal energy project in Long Island Sound, NY. When built, the project would deliver clean energy to New York City and downstate New York, where energy is currently 95% fossil fuel-based, Cowen said. 

“Generating renewable electricity for New York City and downstate is highly desirable to meet environmental and human health goals and mandates, but is very challenging due to dense development and constraints on energy transmission, distribution and storage,” Cowen said. 

“Tidal power has the potential to play a unique role in the transition to a zero-carbon electric grid as, unlike wind and solar, it is a highly predictable renewable energy resource,” Schweitzer said.

Maha Haji, assistant professor in the Sibley School of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, is partnering with colleagues at Oregon State University to improve conversion of wave energy into power production. Oregon State began construction this summer of a new wave energy testing facility off the coast of Newport, OR. One of the key project aims is to develop and test innovative designs that can pull energy from multiple types of wave movement. The project will also study wave energy converter farms to understand the influence of constructive and destructive interference between devices on power production. Initial research for this project supported two students through a Cornell Atkinson Summer Undergraduate Mentored Research Grant.

“Our goal is to improve wave farm design and modeling techniques, to accelerate the field toward larger-scale experiments and deployment in oceans,” Haji said. 

Other projects that received Fast Grants this year will explore: 

• Green hydrogen. Green hydrogen is created by using wind or solar power to generate electricity, which is then used to split water molecules into hydrogen and oxygen. The resulting “green hydrogen” can be used in fuel cells to generate energy or to store energy, which can help compensate for the intermittent nature of wind and solar. Geoffrey Coates, Tisch University Professor of chemistry and chemical biology, seeks to develop new polymer membranes that will improve stability and conductivity in green hydrogen technologies. 
• Cooling textiles. Heat waves have caused more fatalities in the United States than any other weather-related event, and in the past 30 years as the climate has warmed, heat-related deaths in the U.S. have more than doubled. Larissa Shepherd, assistant professor of human centered design, will build on a fabric surface modification plasma technique she and her group have developed to create radiative passive cooling textiles from natural fibers that can be used in indoor and outdoor spaces and in clothing. She will test the scale-up of these cooling textiles with industry partners. 
• Energy efficiency in large-scale computing. The rapid expansion of artificial intelligence is consuming huge amounts of energy. One major area of inefficiency is communication bottlenecks between graphics processing units (GPUs), leaving GPUs idle for large percentages of the time and wasting energy in data centers. Rachee Singh, assistant professor of computer science, and Emaad Manzoor, assistant professor of marketing, will design light-based, optical network fabrics that enable faster communication between GPUs and bypass bottlenecks caused by slower electrical connections. 
• Developing catalysts for carbon emission reduction. Energy conversion strategies, like splitting water into clean hydrogen or carbon dioxide conversion into liquid fuels, require efficient catalysts to speed electrochemical reactions. Electrochemical reduction of CO2 is especially important for global researchers interested in capturing and reusing CO2. Yao Yang, assistant professor of chemistry and chemical biology, seeks to design a family of nano-scale catalysts that could drive CO2 reduction reactions, and record reactions in real-time using advanced electron microscopes. He will collaborate with Erik Thiede, assistant professor of chemistry and chemical biology, to develop machine learning algorithms to uncover hidden features of those catalysts. 

Krisy Gashler is a freelance writer for Cornell Atkinson.