About The Resnick Sustainability Institute
While much progress has been made in developing renewable energy technologies, one major goal remains elusive: scaling these efforts to the terawatt scale necessary for sustainable energy to become a viable replacement for carbon-based energy sources such as oil, coal and gas that are limited in supply, pollute the air and water and contribute to global warming.
At the Resnick Sustainability Institute, we are striving to reach this daunting but urgent goal—powering the planet with renewable energy—by concentrating significant scientific resources on a handful of core areas that promise to help meet the growing global demand for energy by both improving the efficiency of emerging renewable energy technologies and dramatically lowering their cost.
These scientifically challenging projects—centered on finding better ways to capture and store energy from abundant, clean sources such as the sun, hydrogen and plant waste—are high risk, but also high return. Scientists at the California Institute of Technology, with a track record of success in solving difficult, multi-disciplinary scientific problems, are uniquely poised to take on this challenge.