Energy Research and Education at Carnegie Mellon University

Over the course of recent decades, a strong and diverse set of educational and research programs in energy science, technology, and policy has been developed at Carnegie Mellon University. Because CMU has a long and well-established tradition of interdisciplinary research, most of these activities have not grown in isolation but have drawn upon faculty and students across a number of departments and colleges. Other universities talk about interdisciplinary research and education—at CMU, it is a way of life.

There are several common themes to these efforts. While they spread across the campus, most have their core in the College of Engineering, the Tepper School of Business, the School of Architecture and the School of Design. While most involve deep technical content, many also involve economic, policy, environmental, and other social and political dimensions. Virtually all entail heavy involvement by students who go on to become leaders across the United States and around the world. The strength of CMU's role in energy research is further illustrated by the frequent calls to its faculty to assume leading roles in the broader world of energy technology and policy.

A few examples illustrate the strength of our current research programs:

• The campus-wide Green Design Institute has led the world in developing new economy-wide methods for life-cycle analysis, and it is now applying these tools to a range of existing and new energy technologies, as well as to issues such as proposed border adjustment tariffs on energy-intensive imports.

Steve Koonin, Department of Energy's Under Secretary for Science, talks to a CMU audience. Use the controls above to find other energy-related videos or visit the playlist on YouTube.

• The Electricity Industry Center has been lauded as "probably the largest effort of its kind in the world focused on interdisciplinary problems of the electricity industry" (report of the Engineering and Public Policy External Advisory Board, April 25, 2005).
• Carnegie Mellon has played a leading role in strengthening the depth and breadth of research programs of the Department of Energy's National Energy Technology Laboratory (NETL) through the collaborative Regional University Alliance for Energy Technology Innovation.
• Research groups have developed and disseminated energy modeling tools such as the Integrated Environmental Control Model that is widely used by government, academic, and industrial organizations worldwide.
• The Center for Building Performance and Diagnostics established the first NSF Industry-University Collaborative Research Consortium (IUCRC) in the building sector, with over 20 years of collaborative research on sustainably built environments.

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