Stanford University's $100-million new Precourt Institute for Energy, announced in January, has a bold mission: to tackle the spectrum of science and policy challenges needed to meet future energy demands.

It faces a complex mix of political, environmental and national security concerns. While developing renewable sources, the institute also plans long-term interdisciplinary research programmes aimed at making a new system sustainable. These will include social issues such as economics and behavioural aspects of energy use.

“By forging programmes across disciplinary boundaries, our efforts can become more than the sum of their parts,” says director Lynn Orr.

The institute will start recruiting faculty soon, while using Stanford's existing talent: 137 specialists in sustainable energy, climate, energy efficiency and materials.

Materials science will be a key component. “You can argue that more than half the potential solutions to energy problems — particularly those involving energy harvesting, storage and transport — are related to materials,” says Zhi-Xun Shen, director of Stanford's Geballe Laboratory for Advanced Materials. Shen says Precourt will allow the university to work on both immediate improvements — such as developing nanostructured materials to improve solar conversion and manipulating electrochemistry to improve battery performance — and longer-term policy and infrastructure solutions.

With so many diverse researchers focused on the issue, Orr says, there will be training opportunities in almost every area. The first of 20 new graduate fellowships and five postdocs will be available through an internal competition among energy-related departments later this year.

Shen says it's becoming clear that energy decisions affect the economy as well as climate change and national security. The funders are a group of Stanford alumni (including Jay Precourt, who has given the new institute its name) with ties to the energy, oil and investment industries.

John Doerr, a partner at investment firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield and Byers, says that providing renewable-energy resources while protecting the planet presents an opportunity to remake the global economy. Orr says that the institute plans to attract those interested in both scientific innovation and economic feasibility. “We need to change an entire set of energy systems,” he says. “To do that, we need as many players as we can get on the field.”