Stanford University’s Precourt Institute for Energy and its research programs awarded more than $6 million for 52 new energy research projects across the university over the past year.
The competitively awarded grants – judges chose from 113 proposals – enable Stanford research teams to pursue concepts with the potential to contribute significantly to a future of sustainable, affordable, secure energy for all people. The funding supports the efforts of more than 60 faculty members and staff researchers working in five of Stanford’s seven schools, plus SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, along with the training of about 100 graduate students and postdoctoral scholars.
“Together the projects seek to enable 24/7 clean and affordable electricity, sustainable mobility across land, air, and sea, as well as fuels for sectors – in addition to transportation – that are very hard to decarbonize,” said William Chueh, director of the Precourt Institute, which is part of the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability.
“A common thread running through many of the projects is artificial intelligence, from powering it more sustainably to using AI to discover new materials, manage battery systems, streamline the permitting of new data centers, and other energy transition goals,” said Chueh, who is also the Kimmelman Professor in the departments of Materials Science & Engineering, of Energy Science & Engineering, and of Photon Science at SLAC.
Electricity for AI and AI for electricity
Of the 52 funded projects, 25 either use AI to accomplish their goals or seek to manage electricity demand growth from AI. For example, equipment central to electricity transmission and distribution relies on soft magnetic alloys that are labor intensive to make, bulky, and inefficient. Thousands of possible chemical combinations might yield improved magnetic alloys. Wendy Gu, associate professor of mechanical engineering in the School of Engineering, is leading a project using AI to rapidly identify the most promising chemical combinations and then move on to experimenting with the best few candidates.
The research team projects that even a 1% efficiency improvement in the magnets would reduce U.S. electricity transmission losses by millions of kilowatt-hours and avoid emissions of millions of tons of greenhouse gases. They also aim for alloys that cost less and have more secure supply chains. The magnetic material has many non-grid uses, too. This project is funded by Precourt Institute gifts.
(For the table of all 52 projects funded, including slide summaries for 40 of them, click here.)
UPS Foundation Professor Sarah Billington (Civil & Environmental Engineering), leads research on streamlining data center development through AI-driven stakeholder engagement. Partnering with the Deliberative Democracy Lab, her team is building a methodology using an AI-assisted deliberation platform to position residents as substantive contributors to decision-making, whether a city is drafting policy, weighing a moratorium, or evaluating a specific proposal. The goal is that resulting projects align with community priorities and municipal needs. The institute’s Bits & Watts Initiative and the Doerr School’s Sustainability Accelerator fund the project.
A project led by Dan Congreve, assistant professor of electrical engineering, aims to significantly accelerate the analysis of new battery designs. A parallel setup will optically examine multiple cells simultaneously, with a robot continuously swapping samples and AI accelerating image analysis. The SLAC-Stanford Battery Center, a joint venture of SLAC and the Precourt Institute, supports this work.
“Energy storage, including batteries, is a great strength at Stanford,” said Jennifer Milne, who manages the Precourt Institute’s research portfolio. “One fourth of these projects are focused on storage research. They aim to improve grid stability, make transportation more sustainable, or recycle battery materials for new uses.”
Sustainable fuels and transportation
William Tarpeh, associate professor of chemical engineering, leads a new project to produce high-purity ammonia fuel from wastewater, while also reducing the cost, energy, and emissions of wastewater treatment overall. Ammonia is emerging as a competitor to hydrogen as a fuel for heavy-duty transport, like ships and trains, and for power generation. Though wide adoption faces several challenges, ammonia is carbon free, has higher energy density than hydrogen, and does not require hydrogen’s ultralow temperatures and high pressure.
Tarpeh’s exploratory project is supported by the Precourt Institute’s Center for Fuels of the Future, which researches technologies, techno-economics, and policies to drive adoption of low-carbon fuels.
Rishee Jain, associate professor of civil engineering, uses a large real-world dataset and AI to study how shading impacts charging stations’ performance during extreme heat waves and whether drivers of electric vehicles are more or less likely to charge their cars during these times – when air conditioners already strain grids in some U.S. regions. EV charging is forecast to account for around 20% of future U.S. electricity use. Given burgeoning electricity demand from data centers, Jain hopes that his team’s findings will help policymakers and charging companies utilize solar shading strategically and maintain grid reliability.
Jain’s project, at the intersection of energy, infrastructure engineering, and AI, is funded by the Sustainable Mobility Center, which the Precourt Institute launched publicly in May. The center is also supporting new research into hydrogen-powered aviation, lightweight airplane batteries, and safer autonomous vehicles.
Simona Onori, associate professor in the Doerr School’s Department of Energy Science & Engineering, leads a project tackling a key barrier to next-generation EV batteries: Silicon-rich electrodes store far more energy but degrade in ways today’s battery management systems cannot detect. Her team combines targeted aging experiments with physics-based models and machine learning to track battery health in real time, on board the vehicle. The payoff could be safer, longer-lasting batteries, as well as a faster path to market for silicon-based designs in EVs and grid storage.
Energy security
Professors Sally Benson and Ines Azevedo, both in the Dept. of Energy Science & Engineering, along with David Fedor, the Stephenson Policy Fellow at the Hoover Institution, lead a major energy security project examining how Taiwan can build the secure and sustainable electricity infrastructure needed for continued economic growth. The team hopes to develop policy options for Taiwan, including ways to reduce this key U.S. partner’s vulnerability to energy supply chain disruptions.
“Taiwan produces the vast majority of the advanced computer processors that AI relies on, and producing these chips requires an immense amount of electricity,” said Beson. “With the growth of that production and Taiwan’s economy generally, electricity use often runs disconcertingly close to generating capacity, and that margin continues to tighten.”
Taiwan also faces growing constraints in its infrastructure for natural gas, all of which it must import as liquefied natural gas by sea, because the island has neither domestic sources nor international gas pipelines. This makes its gas supply chain a potential vulnerability for energy, economic, and national security. At the same time, Taiwan has committed by law to net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050, making the challenge multifaceted and complex.
“We just returned from our first trip to Taiwan on this project,” said Fedor. “Our goal is to listen and work together to understand Taiwan’s priorities and develop rigorous quantitative models and analysis of the costs, benefits, risks, and tradeoffs in various energy scenarios. The choices that policymakers and businesses make there over the coming years will be critical for both Taiwan and the many countries that depend on it, including the United States.”
The Precourt Institute and its programs will request new seed proposals from Stanford faculty in February 2027.
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Billington is also a senior fellow at the Woods Institute for the Environment.
William Tarpeh, Simona Onori, and Ines Azevedo are also senior fellows at the Precourt Institute.
Benson is the Precourt Family Professor, senior fellow at the Woods Institute and at the Precourt Institute, and a former director of the Precourt Institute.
The Dept. of Civil & Environmental Engineering is a joint department of the School of Engineering and the Doerr School.
The Precourt Institute’s Bits & Watts Initiative, Center for Fuels of the Future, and Sustainable Mobility Center are industrial affiliate programs. Stanford industrial affiliates programs are funded by membership fees from companies. View current Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability affiliates members.
