The shift toward electrified steel production, leading to a greater reliance on utilizing renewable energy, has the potential to increase variability of steelworker schedules and job quality. This would allow steel producers to use clean energy when it is readily available and cheaper, produce and store intermediate goods, and finish the manufacturing process at a later date. Doing so, however, introduces temporal and seasonal variabilities into the steel production process that would impact the jobs of steel workers.This grant funds efforts by a team of engineers and social scientists to study the impacts on both steel workers and manufacturing processes associated with this increased adoption of renewable energy in the steel industry. The team is led by Rebecca Ciez, Assistant Professor of Mechanical Engineering and Environmental and Ecological Engineering, and Partha Mukherjee, Professor of Mechanical Engineering, at Purdue University. They team will start by conducting structured interviews with 15-20 steelworkers from across Indiana to develop a framework for understanding worker decision-making processes and how they make tradeoffs about employment opportunities. These interviews will inform the development of a survey of steel workers that will be implemented throughout five states in the Great Lakes region (Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, Ohio, Wisconsin) to help quantify how workers value different attributes of their work schedules, such as hourly wages, shift schedules, number of months worked per year, and overtime provided. Survey respondents will be recruited using a number of modalities, including engaging companies, local steelworker union chapters, and direct mailing to engage rural steel workers in areas where non-unionized steel mills are major employers. Survey results will inform the modeling of electrified hydrogen and steel production processes, focusing on better representing how renewable-based hydrogen processes might impact steelmaking production on a daily, weekly, seasonal, or yearly basis.In addition to survey results and the hydrogen electrolysis modeling framework, outputs are expected to include academic articles, policy briefs, public repositories of shared data and code, and the training of two graduate students and one undergraduate student in survey methodologies and industrial energy systems analysis. While the framework developed will initially focus on electrified and decarbonized steel manufacturing, it may eventually be expanded and applied to other industries and manufacturing processes.

Electrifying industrial manufacturing processes is one of the key pathways to decarbonizing the U.S. energy system, yet decarbonizing industry remains challenging. This grant funds research from a team of scholars led by Erin Mayfield, Assistant Professor of Engineering at Dartmouth College and includes Maron Greenleaf, Assistant Professor of Anthropology, along with researchers at Carbon Solutions. This project will take an industry-wide look at the potential impacts of electrification on steel manufacturing. Two technologies are being developed that can help electrify steel production processes: direct reduction of iron ore using electricity and deploying low-carbon electricity to make hydrogen, which can then be used to make steel. Existing energy system capacity expansion models do not yet represent these electrified production pathways well.The team will model electrified technology options for replacing, retrofitting, or redeveloping the over 130 steel manufacturing sites in the United States and then expand the analysis to assess associated upgrading costs, production capacity, material demand, and labor impacts. Improving understanding as to how these electrified steelmaking processes will be implemented will require close engagement with steel industry stakeholders who are making such transition decisions. To integrate this perspective in the study, the team will conduct technical consultations with 3-5 steel manufacturing and technology development firms, and they will also conduct a set of community engagement activities by engaging local stakeholders across three steel production communities in the Upper Midwest. Additionally, the team will assemble a project advisory committee to provide feedback on the methodology and facilitate community engagement.Along with academic research articles, the primary output from this project will be a multi-objective online planning and mapping platform that can be used to model various industry-wide electrification and decarbonization scenarios, which the team plans to disseminate widely through numerous briefings. The project will involve training of two graduate students and multiple undergraduate students in industrial systems modeling, techno-economic assessment, and environmental justice. To further the community engagement portion of the work, the Sustainable Transitions Lab and Clinic at Dartmouth College will provide support to engage the community-level interview participants.

Rural areas are important, yet challenging, regions in which to advance electrification. In particular, the rural North is in a cold climate, has remote communities, has frequent need for back-up power (like generators) during periods of extreme weather, and has historically been dependent on fossil fuels. At the same time, these rural areas are also becoming likely spots for future renewable energy development, as they tend to have abundant natural resources and sparse population densities.This grant funds an interdisciplinary research team led by Ana Dyreson, Assistant Professor of Mechanical Engineering at Michigan Technological University, who will examine the technical and social barriers and opportunities for electrification in the rural northern region of the United States through three community-engaged case studies in Michigan (Baraga County), Wisconsin (Ashland and Iron counties), and Minnesota (Beltrami and Clearwater counties). Transitions associated with energy system electrification may also raises specific concerns for Tribal Nations in these rural regions, who have longstanding histories of facing energy and environmental extractivism. The project will focus on studying issues associated with electrifying space heating and cooling, a particularly essential and difficult energy load to electrify in this region. Each case study will involve a pair of surveys in each of these communities, one at the beginning of the study to better understand current heating and cooling options and the other at the end to assess perceived barriers and opportunities for electrification. Surveys will be co-designed with the members of the communities themselves, prioritizing the involvement of Tribal Nation representatives. There will also be engineering analyses to assess the potential readiness of homes in these regions to install electrified residential heating and cooling systems under current conditions and future electrification scenarios. Using the survey results and the technical readiness assessment, the team will develop a model of household energy use and combine it with regional datasets to extend their model to the broader regional level. All of this research will be undertaken with a lens toward understanding and identifying the local and regional energy justice implications of these electrification options.Additional research team members based at Michigan Technological University include Chelsea Schelly, Associate Professor of Sociology; Timothy Scarlett, Associate Professor of Archaeology and Anthropology; and Roman Sidortsov, Associate Professor of Energy Policy. To closely engage with the communities under study, Dyreson and her team will partner with the Center for Energy and Environment (CEE), a Minnesota-based non-governmental organization with decades of experience working with rural and Indigenous communities in the region on issues related to energy development. In addition to academic outputs, the team plans to develop an online, geospatial decision-support tool that will compare future home electrification scenarios and highlight accompanying technical, equity, and policy considerations.