While cardinal and white have adorned Stanford’s halls for more than a century, some University researchers are favoring another color — green — these days as Stanford establishes itself as a leader in the clean-tech, or green-tech, movement that has swept Silicon Valley.
“Clean-tech” describes products and services designed to improve operational performance or efficiency while reducing energy consumption or pollution. A product of the early 2000s, the clean-tech movement was spearheaded in the Golden State: the Cleantech Group and Deloitte reported that California companies accounted for $2.1 billion of the $5.6 billion invested in clean-technology ventures in 2009.
Stanford’s interest in environmentally conscious technology long predates the clean-tech revolution, said Jim Sweeney, director of the Precourt Energy Efficiency Center (PEEC). The center is one division of the larger Precourt Institute for Energy, which opened in 2006 with a $30 million grant from Jay Precourt, B.A. ’59, M.S.’60.
Sweeney, who has been a Stanford faculty member since 1971, documented more than 100 energy research projects on campus in 1978, decades before the current clean-tech wave. In these early years, projects were spread across different departments, with little opportunity for collaboration.
“We didn’t have a strong institutional structure that would promote work on the environment,” Sweeney said.
To provide more cohesive supervision, Stanford established the Woods Institute for the Environment in 2004, an interdisciplinary center for environmental research. Jeffrey Koseff, the Perry L. McCarty director of the Woods Institute, said his center’s goal is to generate viable solutions to sustainability challenges of the new millennium.
“Stanford’s [academic] model encourages invention, and we have research sponsored by a variety of federal, state and nonprofit agencies,” Koseff said.
He cited the Woods Institute’s Environmental Ventures Project as one opportunity for the intersection of academic and corporate interests in green technology. Each year, the Institute provides seed funding for five research projects related to sustainability proposed by Stanford faculty. Last year’s winning proposals included an analysis of anthropogenic fires in Australia and development of a technique to convert poisonous nitrous oxide waste into thermal energy.
“The focus is on finding solutions, not necessarily an end product you can put your hands on,” Koseff said. “If a project has potential, we’ll work with researchers to develop ongoing funding, which could come from corporate sources.”
Franklin Orr, director of the Precourt Institute for Energy, similarly emphasized that academic research is a necessary precursor to commercial development.
“Our goal is to do the fundamental science that enables whole new groups of processes and products,” Orr said. “We want to provide the knowledge that fuels a set of transitions and changes the way people think about problems.”
While the Woods Institute focuses primarily on research in environmental science, the Precourt Institute takes an interdisciplinary approach that considers environmental policy, economics and consumer behavior.
“In the U.S. alone, you have 350 million people making decisions every day, most of whom are not experts in energy,” said Sweeney, who submitted the original proposal for the center. “You have to pay attention to human behavior, which is why you need the social sciences — pyschology, sociology, education.”
Sweeney emphasized that energy consumption is just as important as energy production. To this end, the Precourt Institute funds projects that encourage collaboration between academic, government and corporate parties. Current projects include economics professor Larry Goulder’s analysis of a cap-and-trade system for carbon dioxide emissions and electrical engineering professor Balaji Prabhakar’s project to establish economic incentives for off-hour commute in India.
Last year, the Precourt Institute won a $4 million grant from the Department of Energy for an upcoming project with the Sacramento Municipal Utility District (SMUD), researching electric meters as a means of regulating consumer energy use. The proposal was a joint effort between the institute and corporate interests, Google and PG&E.
Such government collaboration is a growing aspect of Stanford’s environmental research and the larger clean-tech field. Environmental engineering and science professor Craig Criddle currently researches techniques of wastewater recovery through a grant from the Woods Institute. His project uses the Palo Alto water treatment center as a test site.
“We usually think of wastewater in a negative sense as something that has to be treated and discharged,” Criddle said. “But it has a variety of potential applications — for example, irrigation and plumbing. For these things the water doesn’t have to be treated to the same level as drinking water.”
Though Criddle and other clean-tech advocates push the economic and environmental benefits of going green, they acknowledge that the ultimate challenge is to convince the public.
“We have to find a way to get really large scale,” Orr said. “Renewables are out there but are growing from a relatively small base. Our energy bases are really big, and I worry that the attention span of the world public is not as good as it should be.”