Evaluating how technologies can fit society’s most pressing needs.
Given the urgency to meet sustainability goals, the Georgia Tech assistant professor is researching how we can make better decisions in a wide range of areas including engineering designs, public policies, and financial investments.
“How can we better tie the research that we do with the objectives we seek?” It’s a question that Dr. Micah Ziegler is keen on answering.
Too often, we find promise in a new technology and present it as a solution to existing problems despite mismatches in how rapidly that technology might be deployed or whether it addresses the underlying need. An improved understanding of which technologies can help us reach our climate goals can inform decisions in many areas including (but not limited to) public policy and the wise use of limited research dollars.
Instead, Ziegler, assistant professor in the School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering and the Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter School of Public Policy, wants to flip the perspective and put societal needs first. Using data-informed modeling, he explores how technologies could be molded to fit what societies need. In researching these issues, Ziegler also studies the mechanisms through which technologies improve, including declines in cost and increases in scale.
Helping to address climate change was always central to Ziegler’s career goals.
Before graduate school, Ziegler worked at an environmental think tank, the World Resources Institute, and considered law school before ultimately pursuing a doctoral degree in synthetic inorganic chemistry. Ziegler knew he wanted to combine science and policy to have an impact. Leveraging his ability to explain science to lay audiences was a good way to get there, as was branching out into energy systems research and policy.
“Toward the end of graduate school (at the University of California, Berkeley) I became very interested in questions about why some technologies succeed and others don’t. So many of the things we work on in the lab don’t make it out in the real world and I wanted to see if we could be more quantitative in our understanding of why and use that to make better decisions,” Ziegler says.
Ramping up to address climate change
Arguably nowhere would such research be more useful than when evaluating solutions to address climate change, especially because its increased impacts mean time is of the essence. “There are many things we could do given unlimited time and resources but we have specific time-based targets [to meet climate goals] we have to address so it doesn’t just matter what we can engineer but how quickly we can do that,” Ziegler says. Case in point: His published research has focused on the factors that have enabled rapid improvement and adoption of lithium-ion batteries.
During his postdoctoral studies at MIT, Ziegler worked on energy system modeling after realizing that the need for energy storage was a major impediment to the large-scale adoption of solar and wind energy resources. “The way I approached this problem was to develop parsimonious energy system models where I get to the crux of the technical challenge and model that to simulate how systems would have to behave,” Ziegler says. His data-informed modeling integrated empirical solar and wind data and physics-based models of storage systems to evaluate options.
The research evaluates what we need from energy storage technologies to enable the integration of a high percentage of renewables into a reliable electricity system. Which features of energy storage technologies matter? Do they need to be really energy efficient? Do they need to have a very high power capacity? Do they need to be very low-cost? If so, which cost features matter?
Ziegler didn’t just evaluate the features but also the drivers that shape them. He found that the cost of storage energy capacity was more relevant to the system-wide cost of providing electricity from solar and wind than the cost of storage power capacity. Such findings help narrow the focus of investments so they can make the most difference (in this case it would be in creating systems with very low costs of storage energy capacity).
Modeling dynamic changes
A critical aspect of Ziegler’s research focuses on understanding why technologies change. “Understanding the drivers and the mechanisms that lead to change can help us make better decisions,” Ziegler says.
The cost of lithium-ion batteries, for example, has fallen dramatically, by more than 97%, since their commercial introduction in 1991. Such rapid changes in technology costs can present a challenge to studies of how energy systems might evolve because you want research that stands the test of time, Ziegler says. Understanding the mechanisms of how these technologies change could provide information that is robust to our uncertainty about future energy systems. If we have a portfolio of technologies to choose from and information about which ones might decrease in cost more rapidly, that can inform how you allocate time and money. “We can’t predict the future perfectly, but we’re trying to slightly increase the chance of success,” he says.
News Contact
Published on: November 4, 2025
Story Written by: Poornima Apte
Priya Devarajan || Research Communications Program Manager