Buildings and infrastructure

The challenge

The built environment must expand as populations grow, living standards improve, and new businesses and infrastructure are created. With this expansion comes increased demand for energy to power lighting, appliances, machines, and climate control systems. For certain specialized modern buildings like data centers, energy demand is particularly high in order to power and cool thousands of servers and computer storage systems.

By 2050, the built environment is expected to roughly double in size. Decarbonization of this sector must proceed simultaneously with its expansion to avoid harming communities and jeopardizing economic development goals. At the same time, reducing the energy used by existing buildings will require retrofits. These must often be customized to each structure, taking into account the climate, energy costs, retrofit logistics, regulatory framework, and other factors for a local area.

Our impact

MITEI brings together researchers from across MIT to develop technologies and strategies for increasing the energy efficiency and reducing the carbon emissions of the built environment. 

Key focus areas are:

• Building decarbonization, including electrification and alternate on-site energy sources (for example, geothermal) for commercial buildings; redesign of heating and cooling systems; techno-economic analysis of various retrofit technologies for residential buildings; and decarbonization of steelmaking and cement production
• Policy, market, and regulatory framework needed to scale decarbonization of the built environment. MITEI sponsors work on affordability analysis, tariff design, decision-making tools, and uncertainty modeling
• Integration of new buildings (including data centers) and newly electrified buildings into the electric grid, including studies on demand response, AI-driven grid flexibility for distributed energy resources, and advanced net metering tariffs