During the premier gathering for the global hydrogen community in the Americas region at the #H2Americas2023 Summit & Exhibition, we spoke to global and regional #hydrogen and #energy leaders about the future outlook for the hydrogen industry, including an interview with Aditya “Adi” Mehrotra, Department of Mechanical Engineering at MIT.
“So our talk during the H2 Tech Series was about open source hydrogen and how we think open source could play a large role in the hydrogen industry, so one of our projects is developing open-source tools for hydrogen vehicles specifically, so we brought a bike with us today, a hydrogen powered motorcycle that’s a fully open source platform for design and associated simulation play work that we’re working on. And one of the things we are kind of starting to think about is this idea of small hydrogen as opposed to large hydrogen, I think hydrogen is often thought about as like for like large scale industrial applications, buses, trucks and things like that. We kind of see the space for hydrogen in applications where you need high energy density, low weight and things like that so these niche applications we can find but there’s a lot of them so it will help bring demand up, like this chicken and egg style problem of you need infrastructure but you also need demand to greed the infrastructure, so this idea of how can we bring up the demand side applications. And the final thing we talks about is making hydrogen general more accessible and equitable across the entire global infrastructure so a lot of our work is in emerging markets and developing economies and trying to figure out how can we integrate hydrogen into those infrastructures and how can that enable more sustainable living then also higher quality of life and work opportunities according to the UN sustainable development goals and things like that.
It’s great to be here, it’s actually so different than what I expected but in a great way, I think everyone’s so wonderful and nice and we’ve made so many connections with people I know we’re going to follow up on. It’s just really exciting to be in a building with all these people passionate about green energy and building really a better world for all of us and it’s been really exciting to meet with those people and we have some super exciting new projects on the horizon from just talking to people and yeah it’s been great.
So I feel like I’ve always wanted my work ever since I was little to make the world a better place and I also really love just detailed hard engineering problems, and energy is really one of those fields where those two things really come together in terms of the problems are super hard but the impact is super high too, and I think energy also more like I think it touches many aspects of the sustainable development goals so clean energy systems aren’t just about building clean energy right? Climate change significantly disproportionately affects people who live in low-income communities, however climate change is mostly caused by people who don’t live in low-income communities.
Systems to mitigate climate change can increase economic prospects for low-income communities and also significantly improve the quality of life so it’s like this balance of making the climate better and making the world a better place but also the social side of making the world a more equitable place regardless of race, gender and socioeconomic status, and I think that’s why I love the energy sector.”
Join us at #H2Americas2024
Co-hosted by the U.S. Department of Energy, join global and regional #hydrogen and #energy leaders at #H2Americas2024 Summit & Exhibition taking place 11-12 June 2024 in Washington D.C. The event welcomes 4000 industry professionals, 200+ Speakers, 100+ Exhibitors and 40+ sponsors to share the latest news, establish key connections and sign business deals to accelerate the deployment of the hydrogen economy. Register your place among hydrogen pioneers.
