This grant funds a research project by a team of scholars led by Noah Dormady, Associate Professor of Public Affairs at The Ohio State University, to better understand the economic, equity, and justice impacts of consumer electricity rate selection in Ohio and Pennsylvania. The academic research team includes Abdollah Shafieezadeh, Associate Professor Civil Engineering at The Ohio State University, and Alberto Lamadrid, Associate Professor of Economics from Lehigh University. They will examine the practice of consumers being offered and selecting above-market or predatory electricity rates using a number of qualitative and quantitative research approaches. His team has assembled a robust electricity market rate database for Ohio, which contains millions of entries on both default standard service offer (SSO) electricity rates and competitive retail electric service (CRES) retail rates offered to consumers. After constructing a similar CRES rate database for Pennsylvania, the team will survey consumers in both states to better understand household electricity rate selection and the distributional impacts of such retail rates among different populations, paying particular attention to engaging low-income and historically underrepresented racial and ethnic populations.The survey will be administered in the Columbus and Cleveland-Youngstown metro areas of Ohio and in the Lehigh Valley, Lancaster, Poconos, and Harrisburg areas of Pennsylvania. The team will then partner with local community organizations in both states to engage underrepresented households in the study. In Ohio, the team will work with the Mid-Ohio Food Collective (MOFC), a large food bank, and the Mahoning-Youngstown Community Action Partnership (MYCAP), a nonprofit that helps administer the Home Energy Assistance Program, and plan to partner with similar local organizations in Pennsylvania.Outputs from this project are expected to include economics and public policy articles reporting on the project’s findings in both Ohio and Pennsylvania. The team will also produce a detailed database containing daily electricity market data for both Ohio and Pennsylvania, as well as a separate database containing residential survey data. All data and code used for the statistical modeling and machine learning activities will also be made public. The team plans to leverage their extensive network of partnerships in government and the private sector to ensure broad dissemination of results to germane consumer protection, industrial, and regulatory communities. Numerous graduate students and undergraduate students will be trained in this project.

This grant looks to add to the body of research on residential electrification by examining the collective effect of installing an integrated set of electrification technologies in concert with one another, as opposed to individually. This research will study the effects of coordinating the functionality of these integrated technologies across homes in an attempt to identify possible additional community-level benefits, focusing on an under-studied subset of the housing stock: pre-manufactured homes. Pre-manufactured homes are a particularly important aspect of the housing stock given that low-income populations disproportionately rely on these buildings and there is the potentially unique opportunity for electrification upgrades to be installed since these homes are produced in regularized, standardized ways. A highly collaborative and interdisciplinary team led by Paulo Cesar Tabares-Velasco, Associate Professor of Mechanical Engineering at Colorado School of Mines, will assess the benefits and challenges associated with installing holistic, community-scale electrification and energy retrofits in at least two low-income, pre-manufactured mobile home communities in Colorado. Additional co-PIs include experts in electrical engineering and microgrid management systems (Mohamad El Hariri), computer science and digitization in the built environment (Gabriel Fierro), behavioral economics of residential energy decisions (Ben Gilbert and Ian Lange), and political science and energy policy (Kathleen Hancock). The collaborative and interdisciplinary team has developed an integrated electrification home-retrofit package called "eHDER." The suite of eHDER technologies consists of (1) ensuring an energy efficiency building envelope with thermal storage; (2) an upgraded heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC) system; (3) use of digital home energy management systems and smart controls that also provide community-level feedback; and (4) installation of renewable distributed energy resources in the form of solar photovoltaics. Up to 90 homes will be outfitted with the full eHDER package.Given the community-scale focus of this work, this project prioritizes collaborations between local organizations, and the academic team will work with three different organizations to help engage study communities, implement the physical eHDER retrofits, and manage continued study operation and management. These partners include the Colorado Energy Office, the local utility in Black Hills Energy, and the nonprofit organization GRID Alternatives to assist with community solar installation. Most notably, the project will work with Resident Owned Communities (ROCs)—mobile home communities that have collectively purchased their homes and the land underneath them—to engage residents in the two study sites. A local, ROC-certified nonprofit, Thistle, will assist with community engagement and ongoing project management.In addition to academic publications and the energy system retrofits, project outputs are also expected to include an open-source dashboard, validated and publicly available community energy models, new course materials on sustainable communities, and video reports intended to engage broader non-technical audiences. The team will also engage the participation of a Technical Advisory Committee comprised of community leaders, city and state engineers, utility representatives, and policy experts to help design the research and expand the team’s outreach.

Resources for the Future (RFF) maintains a suite of 14 influential, high quality energy system models designed to analyze how different aspects of the energy system might change under different economic, policy, and technology conditions. Funds from this grant will support a project to expand, augment, and improve the sophistication of RFF’s models in three areas of model development that are of critical importance to the study of the U.S. energy system: transportation, land use, and energy equity. With respect to transportation, RFF will build on its previous efforts to model the consumer, light-duty transportation sector and will develop a new model component that addresses the medium- and heavy-duty vehicle and truck sector. With respect to land use, RFF will update its Carbon and Land Use Model (CALM) to better represent alternative types of land use that could advance or hinder carbon storage and emissions reductions. This includes studying factors such as deforestation, ethanol production, or land use for building and construction. With respect to energy equity, RFF will better represent the equity and distributional impacts of alternative energy policies in one of its flagship power sector models, known as E4ST. In doing so, RFF will examine the equity implications of various energy policies, including policies deliberately designed with energy and environmental justice considerations in mind, such as those that prohibit the siting new fossil fuel power plants in vulnerable communities, and those where equity considerations are secondary considerations. The results of this analysis are expected to be widely valuable for both research and policy purposes.

Different communities have unique histories with local energy systems, stand in different relationships to local policymakers, and face different threats related to climate change. Implementing sensible, effective policies for ensuring just energy transitions will thus require the development of local solutions that take these factors into account. This grant funds work by a team led by legal scholar Nadia Ahmad of Barry University and Elise Harrington of the University of Minnesota to develop conceptual frameworks that tie together both place-based and overarching considerations that can inform how just energy transitions might occur across multiple localities. Ahmad, Harrington, and their team will conduct a series of interviews and community-level focus groups in four states (Florida, Kansas, Louisiana, and Pennsylvania) to better understand the place-based dynamics of energy transitions and to illuminate the multiple theoretical dimensions of energy justice. The resulting case studies will highlight different challenges for place-based energy transition policymaking, including the relationship between urban and rural areas, tradeoffs associated with agricultural and industrial land use, re-use of existing energy infrastructure, and local climate resilience efforts. In each case, the team will partner with local community organizations who will help co-develop interview questions, refine the developing conceptual framework, create opportunities for collaborative outputs, and determine how this research can directly benefit local communities. The project is expected to contribute to a growing body of scholarship on energy transitions, facilitate interstate learning in policy design, and advance greater inclusion of place-based considerations in state and federal energy transition initiatives.

Energy disruptions caused by severe weather events like hurricanes, floods, or tornados can be catalysts for clean energy transitions, as damaged fossil fuel generation plants can be replaced with cleaner alternatives, or rebuilt homes or energy infrastructure can be rebuilt with more modern, efficient technologies. Effective community engagement is crucial in such situations, as policy decisions made in the wake of disaster can have lock-in effects for years to come. This grant will fund a team led by Laura Kuhl of Northwestern University that aims to advance our understanding of the role energy system crises play in shaping just energy transitions through examining case studies in three distinct regions: comparing community experiences with extreme energy system disruption and recovery in Puerto Rico with historically marginalized urban communities in Massachusetts and rural communities in West Virginia. In each case study, Kuhl and the team will work with local community organizations to conduct focus groups that employ photovoice approaches in which participating individuals use photographs and images they capture as a way to share their experiences with energy system disruptions and crises. The team will also conduct semi-structured interviews with relevant stakeholders in each area to discuss barriers to just energy transitions, how decisions on energy investment are made, and how such crises and disruptions might open new policy opportunities. The case studies will aim to paint a picture of the overlap between federal and community energy transition priorities and help to identify the conditions under which disruptions can promote more equitable transformation.

Microgrids are small-scale generation and distribution systems developed to serve the energy needs of remote communities where distance, geography, or weather makes connection to larger electricity grids either technologically or economically impractical. In the United States, microgrids are particularly attractive in Alaska, where harsh weather, expansive distances, and the presence of numerous remote and Indigenous communities can make them a crucial strategy for meeting the energy needs of residents. Historically, microgrids have been powered by expensive, polluting, and carbon-intensive diesel fuels, but technological advancements in recent years have seen an uptick in microgrids powered by wind or solar, both of which are becoming more viable across much of Alaska. This grant will fund efforts by a team of researchers led by Bindu Panikkar of the University of Vermont and Erin Whitney at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks to examine the views, perspectives, and responses of historically underrepresented rural and Indigenous communities in Alaska to renewable microgrid development. Researchers will compare these community responses to renewable energy projects taking place along the more central Railbelt electric grid that spans from Anchorage to Fairbanks. Partnering with Renewable Energy Alaska Project, a local organization with strong ties to Alaska Native communities, the team will survey and engage three rural Indigenous towns (Galena, an Athabaskan community, and Buckland and Shungnak, both Inupiat communities) to understand their relationship to clean microgrid development projects. The team will also develop locally-oriented, quantitative models that simulate how renewable-based microgrids might be best structured to ensure energy resilience, reliability, stability, and cost effectiveness for the communities they serve.