E-ffiliates Member Highlights

Decarbonizing the PJM Electric Grid

With support from E-ffiliates members, the Princeton ZERO Lab, led by Jesse Jenkins, is completing two public-facing reports on the transition to a clean electricity system in the PJM Interconnection, the nation’s largest electricity market region and home to Princeton. The first, supported by PSEG, focuses on how New Jersey can carve a path to achieve 100% clean electricity by 2050, evaluating key policy choices and trade-offs facing the state with regard to offshore wind, local solar projects, the state’s existing nuclear fleet, and customer cost impacts. A second report, supported by Community Energy, provides a technical and economic blueprint for decarbonizing the PJM region by 80% by 2030, within a broader context of the national energy landscape and national goals. The study illustrates the cost and reliability impacts of various emissions-reduction strategies. A second phase will assess policy options that can support the delivery of such rapid emissions reductions in a way that is equitable and affordable.

Using Machine Learning to Manage Electricity Flows

Minjie Chen and his lab have designed a new power architecture for telecommunications (telecom) towers that uses machine learning capabilities to more efficiently distribute electricity between the grid and the telecom loads. The team’s device aims to facilitate more efficient conversion of power between the grid, energy storage systems such as batteries, and photovoltaic arrays, toward different loads in telecom towers. The work, which is supported by American Tower, helps provide an alternative to traditional ways of managing power in telecom towers, which either distribute power in AC and use bulky AC/DC converters to support each load, or distribute power in low voltage DC, which has low efficiency. The research teams’ work leverages the idea of 400V DC power distribution and multi-input-multi-output AC coupling in the energy router to better manage electricity flows with high efficiency.

Exploring the Use of Plasma to Make Clean Fuels

In collaboration with ExxonMobil Research and Engineering Company

Natural gas that comes up during oil extraction is often flared off and not utilized, usually because it is a byproduct that is not valuable enough in the market to warrant transporting and processing. But could that gas, and its key component, methane, be used to produce other high-value fuels in conjunction with renewable energy? This was a topic that Egemen Kolemen, associate professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering and the Andlinger Center for Energy and the Environment, and the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory and Yiguang Ju, the Robert Porter Patterson Professor of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, explored in collaboration with ExxonMobil researchers Sumathy Raman, David Dankworth, and Robert Nielsen. They hoped to see if methane could be turned into methanol using renewable electricity as an energy source and using plasma to catalyze the reaction. The researchers, using novel laser techniques, were able to explore and measure the plasma in its entirety and detail the underpinning chemistry in time and spatial resolutions never achieved before. Ultimately, the research helped characterize the plasma and identify the temperature, density, ionization levels, and electric field to truly understand what is happening when methane is turned into methanol. Diagnostics techniques and numerical methods developed for this project paved the way for understanding how plasma can be utilized for general chemical reaction catalysis. Graduate student Timothy Chen worked on the research and was co-advised by Ju and Kolemen. After graduating in 2021, he began working at Sandia National Laboratories on laser diagnostics for chemical reactions and plasmas.