Batteries, buildings and beyond: Scott Moura combats climate change at scale

Collage of three photos: Close-up of a person's hand putting a charger in an EV; an excavator at a construction site; a wooden home burning.

The CITRIS principal investigator and associate professor of civil and environmental engineering uses modeling and machine learning to optimize systems and develop energy-efficient infrastructure.

Scott Moura.

Growing up in Southern California, Scott Moura, the Clare and Hsieh-Wen Shen Endowed Distinguished Professor in Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of California, Berkeley, and a principal investigator (PI) at the Center for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society and the Banatao Institute (CITRIS), found inspiration for his life’s calling in an unlikely place: Los Angeles traffic.

“As a kid, sitting on congested highways, I was always thinking, there’s a lot of pollution being created and people aren’t really moving,” said Moura. 

That pollution, hovering in hazy clouds above the city and occasionally canceling his school recesses due to air quality concerns, is one of the most visible consequences of greenhouse gas emissions from human activity — which is itself the primary driver of climate change. The state of California currently contributes just over 371 million of the 51 billion tons of carbon emitted around the world each year, and Moura seeks to lower that number by targeting some of our largest emission sources: transportation and energy production. 

Moura’s research explores control, optimization and data science in energy and mobility systems, from the smallest scales to the largest. From batteries to vehicles to full power and transportation grids, he aims to develop an energy-efficient infrastructure equipped to meet society’s needs. 

With a bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering from UC Berkeley and master’s and doctoral degrees from the University of Michigan, Moura describes his current position at his alma mater as coming full circle. He heads the Energy, Controls, & Applications Lab (eCAL), and serves as faculty director of the California Partners for Advanced Transportation Technology (PATH) in the UC Berkeley Institute of Transportation Studies and as chair of the College of Engineering’s Engineering Science Program

A smiling Scott Moura speaks into a microphone on stage in front of a room full of students seated around tables.
Scott Moura welcomes T-PREP students to the UC Berkeley campus. Photo by Adam Lau/Berkeley Engineering

Seeking to give back to an experience that helped him find academic success, he also teaches a cornerstone design class for the Pre-Engineering Program (PREP) and Transfer Pre-Engineering Program (T-PREP), which prepare incoming first-year and transfer students from underrepresented backgrounds for their starting semesters at UC Berkeley.

Driving down off-road emissions

The first image that comes to mind when one thinks about vehicle pollution is likely a crowded urban highway like those that vexed Moura in his youth. Another important part of the picture, however, remains off the road. 

Heavy-duty construction vehicles, such as loaders and excavators, account for about half of the carbon emissions of construction operations, which as a whole make up nearly 7 percent of industry-related carbon production. 

One promising avenue for reducing construction vehicle emissions is building heavy-duty vehicles that run on electric batteries, but electrifying these complex machines presents unique challenges. Although they seldom travel long distances, construction vehicles must function for long periods of time, up to eight hours in a work day. They also weigh much more than typical consumer vehicles, thus requiring much more power — and larger batteries — to move. 

“On the surface, batteries seem like super boring devices, but they’re fundamental.”

Scott Moura

For Moura and Shima Nazari, a professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at UC Davis, these key differences sparked an investigation into how construction vehicle batteries degrade, so researchers could better understand the operational costs and potential benefits of electrification.  

When the 2022 call for proposals for the CITRIS Seed Funding Program came out, Nazari, who is interested in control systems design for electrified and automated vehicles, reached out to Moura for his expertise in electric vehicle (EV) batteries. 

“On the surface, batteries seem like super boring devices, but they’re fundamental to things like consumer electronics, vehicles and energy storage in the grid,” said Moura, who received a 2019 Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Award from the National Science Foundation (NSF) for research on battery modeling and management. “We’ve done a lot of work with modeling and algorithms to extract more power, to make them last longer and charge faster, and that enables solutions to our energy problems.” 

Supported by a CITRIS Seed Award, Moura and Nazari narrowed their focus to heat transfer during the discharging and recharging cycles of lithium iron phosphate (LFP) batteries, which are often used in EVs because of their low cost, lower weight, longer life and relative safety. While LFP batteries are highly resilient and can last thousands of cycles, they are sensitive to temperature, and extremely hot or cold operating conditions can speed up their aging processes. 

To measure temperature changes throughout the cycle, students from Nazari’s lab brought battery cells to Berkeley, where Moura’s group used infrared cameras to measure heat loss during a discharging and charging process that mimicked real-life operating conditions. 

The team found that the battery pack’s design can significantly affect heat transfer. By configuring the cells in a way that maintains a “Goldilocks” temperature range — not too hot, not too cold — designers can increase the battery’s lifespan within the vehicle and reduce the frequency, and thus the cost, of battery replacements. 

“It’s exciting to rethink our infrastructure. Delivering energy in a way that minimizes carbon emissions is very interesting to me.”

Scott MOura

According to Nazari, Moura was crucial to troubleshooting the complex battery behavior.

“He told me, ‘Predicting how batteries age is pretty much like predicting how humans age. It’s complicated and no two battery cells age the same,’” she said. “My team and I learned a lot from him.”

Nazari is leading the next steps of the project with follow-on support from the California Department of Transportation (Caltrans), where she is evaluating the performance of work vehicles intended for future mass deployment. 

“CITRIS is great,” said Moura. “By investing in small seed projects, it enables PIs to bring their technologies to the next level and mature their ideas to compete for bigger pots of funds.”

Fired up about green building materials 

Greenhouse gases emitted by the construction industry are hardly limited to the machines used to clear the ground and raise the beams, however. The built environment, which includes existing buildings and structures, water and power systems, and roads and ground transportation networks, is responsible for roughly 42 percent of global carbon dioxide emissions per year. 

The production and use of just four key materials in the built environment — cement, iron, steel and aluminum — account for about 15 percent of the world’s carbon emissions each year. 

“Carbon-negative buildings are incredibly important,” said Moura. “If you think of the sources of greenhouse gas emissions in a big pie chart, globally, the biggest chunk of the pie is concrete and steel, much of which goes into buildings.”

With support from a 2021 CITRIS Seed Award, Moura worked with lead PI Lilian Davila, a UC Merced materials scientist, and Jeanette Cobian-Iñiguez, a fire scientist also at UC Merced at the time, to explore the fire resistance of a new organic construction material Davila had designed. 

“CITRIS is great. By investing in small seed projects, it enables PIs to mature their ideas to compete for bigger pots of funds.”

Scott Moura

In search of a sustainable and robust alternative to the carbon-hungry staples of steel and concrete, she created an advanced version of structural timber, also known as mass timber, using composited and cured wood-based recycled materials. 

While Cobian-Iñiguez developed an experiment to ignite the material, Moura built an adaptable sensing apparatus to measure its temperature and other important properties, such as moisture content, as it burned. 

“It’s a pretty hard thing,” Moura said, “to sense the temperature of material as it burns, because it’s combusting and disintegrating.”

The team hopes their project will not only provide a framework that other researchers can use to sense and monitor ignition temperature in future studies, but also serve as a proof of concept for Davila’s new material. If the material continues to perform as well as expected, it could provide a less expensive, carbon-neutral alternative to concrete and steel, even in fire-prone areas such as California. 

Building a case for electric buses

Looking beyond the electrification of massive off-road earth-moving machines, Moura has also turned his sights to the major people-movers of busy city streets: buses. 

Public transportation is significantly more energy-efficient than single-occupancy vehicles, and many municipalities are seeking to replace diesel buses with electric fleets as a part of broader efforts to cut emissions. However, before embarking on this transition, city governments must ensure that the change is both economically feasible and effective at reducing fuel emissions. 

In a special round of funding in 2019, Moura and team received support from multinational power company and longtime CITRIS partner Enel to develop an open-source, online tool to assess the benefits and costs of electrifying different bus routes in major cities across the world. 

“CITRIS has, over the years, been very good about serving as the front door for a lot of companies that want to collaborate with UC researchers on different topics,” said Moura. 

Selecting Boston and Milan as their pilot cities, Moura and team sourced route and schedule data from openly available information. Where data wasn’t available or accurate, they used a machine learning model to predict the energy usage on a rote. Their model also factored in the energy efficiency of varying road grades, bus weights and ambient temperatures in different cities, based on an open-source data set from Manhattan bus lines. 

The application allows a user to input different parameters, such as city, price of diesel and type of bus, and then returns the estimated cost of electrification, as well as the difference in emissions between diesel and electric buses. Municipal governments can use the results as a preliminary screening to make better decisions on how to roll out their electrified fleets. 

Energy efficiency close to home — and across the UC

Closer to home, Moura is working to optimize electric vehicle charging on UC Berkeley’s very own campus. In 2020, Moura launched the Smart Learning Pilot for Electric Vehicles, or SlrpEV. In collaboration with TotalEnergies SE, an international integrated energy company, the project placed an EV charging station in the parking garage of the UC Berkeley Recreational Sports Facility. 

The chargers are adaptive, allowing the more than 200 users in SlrpEV’s pilot group to select between “max” charge, which offers the most power in the least amount of time, or “flex” charge, which optimizes for minimal emissions and strain on the electric grid, at a lower price.  

Scott Moura in garage holding SlrpEV charger with coiled cables on concrete wall behind him.
Scott Moura with a SlrpEV charger in the UC Berkeley Recreational Sports Facility garage. Photo by Adam Lau/Berkeley Engineering

The data the project has collected will offer Moura and his colleagues critical insight for designing a system that will please customers while not overtaxing the electric grid.

Moura’s diverse slate of work is linked by a wide-lens view of energy efficiency, powered by an understanding that optimizing the systems and infrastructure underlying our society’s daily activities is crucial to creating a climate-resilient future. 

“That’s what motivates me,” he said. “It’s exciting to rethink our infrastructure. Energy is interesting, and delivering it in a way that minimizes carbon emissions is very interesting to me.”

As he reassesses some of the fundamental building blocks of life as we know it — batteries, cars, buses, buildings — to lower carbon emission, CITRIS and the Banatao Institute works to facilitate connections between like-minded researchers across the University of California system. 

“CITRIS is that catalyst to help find ways to collaborate with faculty on other campuses. It’s unifying for the UC.”

Scott Moura

Other efforts of Moura’s that the institute has supported include a 2014 partnership with a UC Davis investigator to explore the usage of recycled EV batteries for home energy storage, and a 2019 collaboration with a UC Santa Cruz professor to develop smart controls for more resilient electric microgrids.

“There are few other funding opportunities that say, hey, we would like you to partner with another UC researcher,” Moura said. “We have these campuses that are phenomenal. And CITRIS is that catalyst to help find ways to collaborate with faculty on other campuses.

“It’s great to work with them and it has follow-on effects. It’s unifying for the UC.”