About ACES

To deliver scalable approaches to a range of different types of communities, the Center for Advancing Community Electrification Solutions (ACES) focuses on electrification across three energy-intensive sectors common to all communities: transportation, water, and buildings. These sectors crosscut industrial, commercial, residential, and mixed-use settings. ACES provides research, development and test-bed solutions at the community scale to support electrification of transportation, water, and building systems through adaptations in the supporting local power grid. As electrification is intrinsically connected to stakeholders within a community, these approaches accommodate economic, environmental, and health constraints and objectives. Because of this, the ACES team delivers cross-sectoral technology and policy electrification solutions that integrate diverse economic, environmental, and health goals that collectively drive outcomes for community stakeholders.

An authority on regional electrification and stakeholder-engaged energy research, ACES strengthens Lehigh’s connections regionally and nationally through successful research, development, and demonstration projects with a portfolio of stakeholders. The goal, now and in the future, is to enable efficiency and resilience via the design and operations of electricity-sheds, which are power grids or microgrids that locally generate power needs to supply electricity for a community. ACES is known for the novel electrification tools and toolkits it provides to a range of communities and industries, as well as for its cutting-edge facilities and demonstration work and its innovative, interdisciplinary training of future energy leaders.