IIT Madras expertise includes carbon capture and storage, gas hydrates, coal and biomass conversion to useful chemicals, renewable energy systems including applications in desalination and cold storage, electrolyser technologies for CO2 conversion and green hydrogen, energy storage technologies both lithium & beyond, and resilient distributed energy management including for AC and DC microgrids.
The recently launched IIT Madras Energy Consortium, brings them all together as one large effort. The consortium has active participation from more than 50 IIT Madras faculty, with significant technical expertise and demonstrated contributions on the world stage. In addition, there are over 250 post-graduate students (Ph.D. and MS) and about 20-30 post-doctoral fellows working in various domains related to energy research.
The consortium would be a strategic partner to help incubate and groom technology that is in the discovery and feasibility stages and to assist those in the pilot demonstration levels through use case scenario validations and techno-economic studies geared to understand scale-up and commercialization aspects.
The three broad outcomes envisaged by the consortium will be:
· Stakeholder engagement that is agnostic of whether their view is favorable or averse, and encouraging responsible choices for energy solutions.
· Methodologies for transparent and clear metrics such as on achieving a reduction in GHG emissions and addressing sustainable development goals overall.
· Preparing future leaders with diverse perspectives, those who would be capable of navigating the cultural rewiring that comes about from a sustainable energy dominated future.