A spray-on coating to keep power lines standing through an ice storm may not be the obvious fix for winter outages — but it’s exactly the kind of innovation that happens when MIT students tackle a sustainability challenge.“The big threat to the power line network is winter icing that causes huge amounts of downed lines every year,” says Trevor Bormann, a graduate student in MIT’s Department of Materials Science and Engineering (DMSE) and member of MITten, the winning team in the 2025 MADMEC innovation contest. Fixing those outages is hugely…
