Expanding geothermal to all: Geo@MIT holds its first annual spring showcase
Geo@MIT invited industry experts and undergraduates to share their contributions to decarbonization
Staring out across the Tang Center auditorium, Geo@MIT President Anoushka Tamhane ’28 reflected on how much her student organization had grown.
“[Geo@MIT] has evolved so much, and I don’t think I ever could have predicted how big it would become this year alone,” Tamhane admitted. “When I started last year it was ‘Let’s do this competition together,’ and it’s really become a whole thing of its own now.”
Geo@MIT is an MIT student club founded in 2024 under the guidance of MIT D-Lab lecturer Susan Murcott, originally formed to compete in the 2024 EnergyTech University Prize for Geothermal Technologies competition. By the time they’d won the EnergyTech UP National Geothermal Technologies Bonus Prize, the club’s founding members Megan Lim ’24, Jason Chen ’25, and Olivia Chen ’26 had discovered a deeper passion in geothermal energy and decarbonization. In the two years that followed, the three grew the club into what it is now: an organization focused on using their innovative thermal network plan to achieve MIT’s decarbonization goal 15 years earlier than the Institute promised.
But decarbonization isn’t just focused on the scientific innovation that humanity needs to move towards a net-zero campus emissions, stated communications lead Li Xuan Tan ’25. Education around such issues and a more general awareness of the research focused on these efforts are equally important. The first annual Geo@MIT Spring Showcase was organized to celebrate the work done so far.
The event included keynote speakers, panels from industry experts, and facilitated discussions on student involvement in decarbonization efforts and how the academic community can hold higher education institutions responsible for their commitment to a net-zero emission campus. In one such panel, University of Massachusetts Amherst Physics Professor Lori Goldner remarked how some of the most effective faculty measures are unions and faculty senates. She added that every single campus that had successfully decarbonized had a decarbonization plan with significant outside support.
“If you don't do that up front, you’re going to fail,” Goldner stated. “The decarbonization plan will never get [done].”
But there needs to be greater cooperation between the city of Cambridge and higher education institutions such as MIT and Harvard, explained Cambridge City Councilwoman Patti Nolan.
“The town might not be the town without the university, but the university wouldn’t be what it is without the city or town,” Nolan said.
As an example of what such partnership could look like, Nolan pointed to the success of Cambridge’s Building Energy Use Disclosure Ordinance (BEUDO), a result of sustained cooperation between universities and the city of Cambridge. Introduced in 2014, BEUDO is a piece of legislation that helps aggressively tackle climate change by reducing emissions, requiring the largest buildings to report their annual energy and water usage to the city.
While BEUDO initially had a near 90% compliance rate from buildings that met the criteria, this compliance did not mirror similar trends in emission reductions. This resulted in a surge of interest in the law, culminating in an amendment to BEUDO in 2023 to mandate emission reductions. According to Nolan, this renewed effort was only possible due to widespread support from university students. With efforts like these, Nolan strongly believes that student involvement similar to that behind the BEUDO legislation would be vital for MIT’s efforts to decarbonize.
However, there are also issues surrounding the accuracy of information used to make decarbonization plans, explained Salem State University Professor of Geography and Sustainability Noel Healy. For instance, one paper with a review of 2,000 offset decarbonization projects “found that fewer than 16% represent real emissions reductions.” The University of California spent three years studying those offsets only to conclude that they would not be able to meet their 2025 neutrality goal, further causing delays to their decarbonization goals. As such, faulty information and unclear sources of information lead to delays in meaningful progress towards decarbonization.
The showcase also featured a poster session featuring various projects. They ranged from using MIT’s nuclear reactor as a potential heat source to the negative effects on health based on current fossil fuel energy generation methods. Keith Acosta, a final-year master’s student at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, presented his poster alongside Tan. While Acosta did not have any previous background in decarbonization, he cited his lack of affiliation as a necessity in society’s transition to a decarbonized future.
“I think everyone has a role in the sustainability movement, no matter their background or no matter their professional environment,” Acosta explained. “It’s important to come to events that are a little bit out of your comfort zone in the environmental space to get a sense of how you can contribute [or] what resonates with you the most.”
Tamhane expressed a similar point, stating that the climate space has “a lot of opportunity, but you have to know where to find it.”
As attendees filtered out of the Tang Center, the takeaway remained clear: achieving meaningful decarbonization will require more than technical breakthroughs. It will require collaboration across institutions, disciplines, and communities: exactly the kind of conversation this showcase hoped to kindle.