Posted: March 19, 2025

The core members of a proposed university research center, the Center for Advancing Community Electrification Solutions (ACES), organized a workshop on the campus of Lehigh University in October 2024.

The faculty included ACES leaders Shalinee Kishore, Director of I-CPIE, Iacocca Chair of Electrical and Computer Engineering and Arindam Banerjee, Paul B. Reinhold Professor of Mechanical Engineering and Mechanics and Department Chair, as well as core faculty members Javad Khazaei, Assistant Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering; Alberto Lamadrid, Associate Professor of Economics; Farrah Moazeni, Assistant Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering; Shamim Pakzad, Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering; and Carlos Romero, Professor of Mechanical Engineering and Mechanics and Director of the Energy Research Center at Lehigh.

The invited speakers represented the range of issues and opportunities in the contemporary energy and electrification sector and offered a variety of strategies for leveraging electricity solutions to meet increased demand. The ACES workshop focused on interdisciplinary approaches that can address these needs through innovations in energy generation and storage, data-driven control and electricity grid integration, and coordinated policy solutions.

Kishore opened the workshop with the observation that, according to the International Energy Agency, meeting the 2050 net-zero goal will require doubling 2020 levels of energy demand by the year 2050. She noted that future studies outline areas to focus on: advances in electrification, policies to enable growth, tools for understanding how to manage that growth, understanding cybersecurity concerns, policies to address the adoption barriers, and meeting the diverse needs of the range of electricity customers.

A variety of speakers from national labs, government agencies, and academia contributed perspectives on electrification in the building, transportation, and water sectors. They included:

  • Vanessa Chan, then head of the Department of Energy’s Office of Technology Transitions and now Jonathan and Linda Brassington Practice Professor, Materials Science and Engineering, at the University of Pennsylvania. Chan discussed replacing technology readiness levels, the traditional marker of commercialization readiness for researchers, with an Adoption Readiness Level (ARL) framework with an early-stage focus on incorporating market considerations.
  • Junhong Chen, Argonne National Laboratory and the University of Chicago’s Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering. Chen contextualized his research in water and energy by outlining global water challenges, particularly with freshwater scarcity and contaminants including lead, PFAs, and microplastics.
  • Karl Fetzer, Staff Research Scientist in the Autonomous Systems and Control Group at Siemens Technology and a Lehigh alum. Fetzer provided an overview of Siemens’ buildings and decarbonization technology, noting that shareholders are driving Siemens to meet efficiency and sustainability targets.
  • Perry Stephens, EPRI Principal Technical Leader. Stephens spoke from the perspective of EPRI’s low-carbon resource initiative (LCRI) and looked at multiple tradeoffs across the spectrum of decarbonization pathways/low-carbon fuels.
  • Sanya Carley, Presidential Distinguished Professor of Energy Policy and City Planning and Co-Director of the Energy Justice Lab at the University of Pennsylvania’s Kleinman Center for Energy Policy. Carley provided a broad global focus on the human side and costs of the move to electrification.
  • Anthony Calabro, CTO and Chief Product Officer of InductEV, a King of Prussia, Pennsylvania-based company that makes wireless charging pads to power electric vehicle fleets. Calabro spoke of the need for standardization across the EV industry and its future.

Lehigh graduate students in a variety of disciplines presented research posters, a session many attendees valued for the chance to learn more about the direction interdisciplinary energy-focused research is headed at Lehigh.

The ACES team had been refining its scope and approach since receiving a planning grant for this purpose from Lehigh in January 2024. Kishore and Banerjee have been working closely with Anand Jagoda, Vice Provost for Research; Kate Bullard, Director of Research Development; Dominic Packer, Associate Vice Provost for Research, and a team from KB Science, headed by CEO Kristin Bennett, to determine the center’s appropriate scope and strategize the proposed center’s support capacity. The group’s proposal was approved in January 2025, and ACES will begin operations in July 2025.

Drawing on the expertise of its faculty, ACES will support research that develops electrification systems and processes for local communities. This efficient, community-led electrification will focus on three critical infrastructure systems: buildings, transportation, and water. It will also focus on distribution adaptations needed to support this electrification. As a university center, ACES will lead in research goals associated with efficient energy generation and storage solutions, data-driven control and grid integration solutions, and coordinated cross-sectoral policies, especially those related to human factors (behavioral, socio-economic, and environmental and health).