In the last year, we’ve seen a flurry of activity in the emerging hydrogen industry, from the establishment of the world’s largest clean hydrogen incentive to the first final investment decisions being made on multi-billion-dollar green hydrogen, green ammonia, and green steel projects. Amidst the excitement of the past year, it’s important to remember that hydrogen isn’t just a fad. RMI has been analyzing the alternate energy carrier as a low-carbon energy solution since 2003, building upon the work of RMI Founder, Amory Lovins, to demonstrate why hydrogen will play a critical and substantial role in the decarbonized global energy system.

At RMI, we understand the importance of not leaving any sector behind in the energy transition. To address these needs, we have established a hydrogen initiative on the Climate Aligned Industries program to promote systems thinking around finding solutions for industrial and heavy-transport sectors. We collaborate closely with our colleagues across RMI to deliver holistic, integrated insights in our analyses and to our partners. Experts from our electricity, transportation, buildings, and finance teams, as well as our Global South, China, India, and US Programs regularly contribute to and review RMI’s hydrogen work, and their perspectives have been vital in developing our broader analyses on the developing global hydrogen industry.

The following breaks down the Why, What, Who, Where, and When of our work on clean hydrogen to date. Through our informed opinion that hydrogen can play a calibrated role in a successful energy transition, we’re turning cutting-edge analytical research into action.

A municipal utility near Sacramento, California has deployed more than 120,000 smart meters as part of a multi-year improvement project.

Roseville Utilities said the effort was completed three months ahead of schedule. The meters will support residential and customer engagement by the city’s electric and water utilities.

“Modernizing our metering system is a game-changer for both the environment and our customers,” said Sean Bigley, Roseville’s assistant environmental utilities director. “It allows us to monitor usage patterns better, reduce waste, and offer more personalized support to our residents.” 

The meter upgrade uses advanced metering infrastructure and introduces a two-way communication system for electric and water meters. City employees will no longer need to visit homes or businesses to read meters physically; they can send commands through the network to connect services and perform maintenance virtually. Ultimately, the project is expected to yield faster customer service resolution and smarter billing information.

• Electricity demand from data centers could more than double over the next decade, threatening U.S. grid reliability and increasing operational risks for other businesses, the Conference Board said in a May 30 report.
• Due to limited grid and transformer capacity and long permitting and interconnection timelines for new generation and transmission projects, expected data center load growth could slow the pace of the United States’ transition to a net-zero electricity system, the report said.  
• “More positively, the broad adoption of AI tools might unlock greater efficiencies in the way electricity is used, as well as generated, stored and transported,” wrote authors Alexander Heil, senior economist at the Conference Board’s Economy, Strategy and Finance Center, and Ivan Pollard, leader for the Conference Board’s Marketing and Communications Center.

In May 2024, the US Departments of Agriculture (USDA) and Housing and Urban Development (HUD) updated their minimum home energy standards for new construction. This is great news because residents in new homes that these agencies support will soon benefit from lower bills, greater resilience to extremely hot and cold weather, and all-around more comfortable and healthier living spaces.

Multifamily homes like HUD-funded apartments and condos purchased with Federal Housing Administration (FHA) mortgages will be among those affected: new covered buildings under four stories will need to comply with the 2021 International Energy Conservation Code (2021 IECC), while taller buildings must meet ASHRAE/ANSI Standard 90.1-2019 (90.1-2019). HUD and USDA estimate that over 40,000 new apartments will be affected every year.

This month, the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA) is considering a similar move as regulator and conservator of the Government Sponsored Enterprises (GSEs), including Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. While best known for their support of single-family home mortgages, the GSEs collectively back about 40% of outstanding debt on US multifamily properties. A change of policy from FHFA would likely affect hundreds of thousands of new apartments annually.

Between the HUD-USDA standard and a potential FHFA decision soon, updated energy standards are poised to make a big impact on higher density housing. The combination of updated efficiency standards and incentives for new apartment buildings will create win-wins for residents, developers, and the climate that affects all of us.

Modern chief information security officers (CISOs) are navigating tough circumstances due to complex challenges. Evolving threat actor tactics, technique and procedures (TTPs) leveraging new next-generation technologies have enhanced the sophistication of traditional cyberattacks – increasing the urgency for CISOs to implement resilient cyberdefense strategies. However, an experience shortage driven by understaffing and evolving skill requirements is making that difficult to accomplish. There are more than four million unfilled security jobs in the world today, and research indicates that many security professionals believe the skills shortage’s impact has worsened over the past two years.

CISOs are also dealing with heightened regulatory pressures coupled with corporate politics. In 2023, the charges against Joseph Sullivan (Uber) and Timothy G. Brown (SolarWinds) set a new precedent for corporate responsibility on matters of cybersecurity. Both landmark cases exemplified the consequences of inaction on new cyber mandates like the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) regulations, Biden Administration Executive Order and NIS2 Directive, among other global measures. The stakes have never been higher for CISOs to foster seamless cross-functional alignment on cyber risk mitigation and compliance across their C-suite and board. If not, they potentially can be held liable for it. Except as we’ve encountered time after time, generating collective buy-in amongst stakeholders with varying priorities and business objectives is far easier said than done.

The MIT Energy Initiative’s (MITEI) Future Energy Systems Center kicked off 12 projects committed to advancing a clean energy transition at their Spring Workshop in May. The projects explore optimizing energy storage, hydrogen transport, CO₂ capture, and EV charging optimization, among other topics. These projects will continue the Center’s focus on systems-oriented research, allowing for holistic, multisectoral analyses of current energy challenges across a variety of disciplines.

MITEI Director William H. Green stressed the importance of this strategy: “A systems approach—where academia, industry, and government work together to provide many perspectives on a problem—allows us to see the whole problem as a system, hopefully leading to more optimal solutions for society.”

The Future Energy Systems Center—MITEI’s industry research consortium—seeks to provide insight on navigating the energy transition through analyses of evolving technologies, policies, and economics that are reshaping the energy landscape. The Center awards a new set of projects twice per year.

Community members in areas with increasingly extreme weather like Florida, Texas, and Puerto Rico are fed up. Every couple of years a powerful storm hits, causing extended power outages, putting safety at risk, and damaging buildings and key infrastructure. Though it is a matter of when, not if, these storms will come again, as soon as the clean-up is finished, leaders move energy resilience and preparedness to the back burner and the cycle continues with the next storm.

But there is a way to lessen the blows. Energy technologies like solar and battery storage have proven time and again to provide reliable power, and now they are more affordable than ever. So why aren’t leaders scaling them up for resiliency ahead of impending extreme weather?

While hurricane season did not officially begin until June 1st, this pattern started to play out this Spring. Take Texas, for example. Last month, thunderstorms, powerful winds, and flood-inducing rain knocked out power to over 800,000 people and caused seven casualties. After the storm, temperatures climbed to over 90 degrees, and those that were without power could not run their air conditioning in the stifling heat. Just a couple of weeks later, more extreme weather hit Texas. Having to deal with multiple storms is not unique to Texas — in Florida, there were three named hurricanes over two months in 2020.

Unfortunately for the over 60 million people that live in hurricane-affected geographies, more weather events like this are likely on the way. Forecasts from leading experts for the 2024 season are “daunting.” High ocean temperatures along with weather affected by the El Niño and La Niña patterns led the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to their highest May prediction of hurricanes ever. Given increasing ocean and air temperatures, stronger weather events have become the new normal.

Climate models are a key technology in predicting the impacts of climate change. By running simulations of the Earth’s climate, scientists and policymakers can estimate conditions like sea level rise, flooding, and rising temperatures, and make decisions about how to appropriately respond. But current climate models struggle to provide this information quickly or affordably enough to be useful on smaller scales, such as the size of a city. 

Now, authors of a new open-access paper published in the Journal of Advances in Modeling Earth Systems have found a method to leverage machine learning to utilize the benefits of current climate models, while reducing the computational costs needed to run them. 

“It turns the traditional wisdom on its head,” says Sai Ravela, a principal research scientist in MIT’s Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences (EAPS) who wrote the paper with EAPS postdoc Anamitra Saha. 

Blockchain is one of the major tech stories of the past decade. But beneath the surface chatter there’s not always a deep, clear understanding of what blockchain is, how it works, or what it’s for. Despite its reputation for impenetrability, the basic idea behind blockchain is pretty simple. And it has major potential to change industries from the bottom up.

Put simply, blockchain is a technology that enables the secure sharing of information. Data, obviously, is stored in a database. Transactions are recorded in an account book called a ledger. A blockchain is a type of distributed database or ledger, which means the power to update a blockchain is distributed between the nodes, or participants, of a public or private computer network. This is known as distributed ledger technology (DLT). Nodes are rewarded with digital tokens or currency to make updates to blockchains.

Blockchain allows for the permanent, immutable, and transparent recording of data and transactions. This, in turn, makes it possible to exchange anything that has value, whether that’s a physical item or something more intangible.

A blockchain has three central attributes:

• First, a blockchain database must be cryptographically secure. That means you need two cryptographic keys to access or add data on the database: a public key, which is basically the address in the database, and the private key, which is an individualized key that must be authenticated by the network.
• Next, a blockchain is a digital log or database of transactions, meaning it happens fully online.
• And finally, a blockchain is a database that is shared across a public or private network. One of the most well-known public blockchain networks is the Bitcoin blockchain. Anyone can open a Bitcoin wallet or become a node on the network. Other blockchains are private networks. These are more applicable to banking and fintech, where people need to know exactly who is participating, who has access to data, and who has a private key to the database. Other types of blockchains include consortium blockchains and hybrid blockchains, both of which combine different aspects of public and private blockchains.