Can you explain the work the ACES team is doing?
Our center is focused on enabling energy independence through electrification. We’re doing research on cutting edge technology, working on practical workforce solutions and common-sense policy approaches that's going to help American communities take charge of their energy future and achieve energy independence through electrification.
Electrification, just to be clear, is to essentially promote a higher use for electricity in our energy consumption. Right now, about only 20% of our electricity consumption is through electricity, and that's projected to grow to about 50% in the next couple of decades. The reason for that is electrification—switching over things that currently use other forms of energy to electricity, like electric cars or heat pumps to heat their homes and so on. One reason we want to use electricity is because electricity relies on energy resources that are diverse. We can use traditional fossil fuel-based generation like coal and natural gas, but also greener solutions like renewables and nuclear and so on. A number of locally available resources can be used to generate electricity and then that electricity is used to drive energy consumption on the residential, industrial and commercial end.
Electrification also describes new use cases for electricity, things like AI data centers or controlled environment agriculture or smart manufacturing facilities. All of this collectively is driving up electricity demand in the near future. If we do electrification correctly, we can reduce energy costs, total energy usage, air emissions, water use while improving our reliance and use of the electricity grid, making energy more secure and enabling more energy reliability.
To have efficient electrification solutions, we need to incorporate local needs and needs of the particular use case. That's why ACES focuses on community-scale electrification, trying to ensure that we have enough capacity, enough grid resources, so that you can support electrification in a community, but while using local resources as much as possible.
How will the community see an impact from the work you're doing?
By community, we really mean end use. There's a range of communities that could be electrified. It could be a neighborhood or campus, but we're also thinking about places like coastal communities, where you have high energy costs and you also have a high cost for water. Water desalination, for example, uses a lot of energy to make water usable for communities.
Another use case is right here in the Lehigh Valley. With all the warehousing that's going on, there's a lot more fleets that move through the area. What would it mean to electrify these fleets? How would we do it and what outcomes could we expect? Another use case could be industrial parks, where you have a new range of challenges in trying to electrify electric loads. Of course, AI data centers are another important and emerging use case.
If we do the work well, all these use cases may be able to use local resources like local generation, local storage to power that electrification and may even get you through, short-term power outages. That's an important component of energy independence. All of us depend on the grid very often, but if the grid for some reason fails, for example due to weather events, electrification solutions could still be sustained through the local generation, storage and energy management to be able to give you the water, the heating, the cooling and the basic services you would expect. We want to be able to deliver local solutions to electrification as much as possible, ensuring that the use cases, the users or the community members, have more affordable power, more resilient power, and more reliable power. That's what would be success for us, being able to provide those types of solutions across a range of communities.
ACES held the “Innovating Energy and Water Solutions for Tomorrow's AI Data Centers” symposium in October. Why was it important for Lehigh to host that event?
This is—regionally, at the state level and also at the national level—one of the most pressing energy discussions going on right now. As a center that's talking about these topics, we feel we're the right entity to convene a discussion around this. … It's relevant, because Pennsylvania is putting its stake in the ground where data centers are concerned. We had big announcements related to this earlier this summer. One from Amazon, that they were investing $20 billion in two data centers here, and then a couple of weeks later, there was an energy and AI summit held in Pittsburgh in which another $92 billion of private investments were committed toward this space. This type of data center growth has happened in other parts of the country, and we want to be sure that as it happens here in Pennsylvania, it does so in a sustainable way. The dialog needs to start now and then the activities and the solutions need to follow.
Does being an R1 research university enable ACES to achieve things it otherwise wouldn't, whether that’s resources, collaboration or innovation?
The folks who are involved in ACES have been very active for decades here at Lehigh. To be R1, that level of engagement does bring opportunities for us. In the case of data centers, for example, the $20 billion Amazon investment announcement includes engagement of R1 universities. It's an exciting time for Lehigh.
