Anthro-Engineering: Decarbonization at the Million-Person Scale
Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia serves as the field site for this MIT course on decarbonizing heat at city scale. The coldest capital on Earth is also one of the most polluted, largely from coal-fired household heating, and the course combines anthropology and engineering to design an alternative: a molten salt heat bank meant to replace coal stoves. Students move between technical prototyping of the heat storage device and on-the-ground research into the economic, cultural, and political conditions that determine whether such a technology could actually be adopted by Ulaanbaatar households. The approach treats energy transition as a social problem as much as a materials problem, weighing cost, local acceptability, and existing infrastructure alongside thermal engineering. Course materials, published through MIT OpenCourseWare, include the syllabus and project materials used in the class, offered free under a Creative Commons license with no certificate attached.