Powering Up

For 20 years, Georgia Tech’s Strategic Energy Institute (SEI) has brought together campus researchers who collectively develop better ways to meet the energy needs of today and tomorrow. 

These days, that amounts to more than 1,000 people. Georgia Tech faculty are creating advanced communications and information systems, sensing and control approaches, and transmission and energy storage technologies that will make the nation’s power distribution systems more efficient and cost-effective. Their research also focuses on integrating renewable energy sources and electric vehicles.

“As the nation’s largest technologically focused university, Georgia Tech is playing an integral role in developing solutions that enable more equitable, lower cost, and cleaner generation, storage, distribution, and utilization of energy,” said Tim Lieuwen, Georgia Tech’s interim executive vice president for research. Lieuwen knows SEI better than anyone: he had been its executive director since 2012 until stepping in this summer as interim leader of Tech’s entire research enterprise. 

“Georgia Tech researchers are not just helping to create cleaner, more efficient fuel options or mitigate the environmental impact of conventional energy supplies. They also are creating better performing, more economically viable energy options,” he said.

The work at SEI and across Georgia Tech has helped make the state of Georgia one of the nation’s leaders in clean energy, battery technology, and energy sustainability. It’s attracting numerous companies to invest in research and development in the state, including Hyundai, SK Battery America, and solar panel maker Qcells.