The Clean Energy Program at the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (ITIF) is one of the leading research efforts examining the energy innovation ecosystem in the United States. This grant, led by energy policy scholar David Hart, funds two projects at ITIF—one training, one research. The training project involves organizing a week-long energy innovation policy “boot camp” in 2022 in Washington, D.C. that will involve a cohort of approximately 20 early-career social scientists.  Participating researchers will be introduced to the practicalities of how energy policy is made and will encourage them to highlight the potential connections between research and decision-making in their own work. The second project involves advancing a collaborative research effort that ITIF is undertaking with scholars at the Boston University Institute for Sustainable Energy (BU-ISE) and the BU-based Fraunhofer USA Center for Manufacturing Innovation (CMI) to examine the decarbonization potential of two industrial subsectors.  Researchers will conduct technical, economic, and policy analysis for each chosen subsector, and they will collect data and conduct interviews with industry and regulatory stakeholders that explore relevant energy innovation policy issues, such as financial incentive structures, global competitiveness, and innovation diffusion patterns. The research is expected to result in at least two reports and academic papers, and it will form the basis of a number of policy briefs that the team will provide to industry and governmental stakeholders.

Digital technology developments—including new technologies such as blockchain and the Internet of Things, and behavioral shifts like the rise in digital platform use—can have profound implications for energy and the environment. In 2018, the Foundation supported an emerging effort to study these impacts, and this grant supports the continuation and expansion of this network. Led by Reid Lifset at Yale University, Jordan Diamond at the University of California, Berkeley, and Kasantha Moodley and Dave Rejeski at the Environmental Law Institute, this research network is now known as the Network for Digital Economy and Environment (nDEE). Having already explored the direct effects of digital technologies on energy and the environment, they will now conduct research projects to explore the indirect effects of these digital technologies on energy systems. Three specific research projects will be supported at the outset, with a process designed to further source additional research ideas. The first project will study how the rise of short-term rental services like Airbnb is impacting carbon emissions. The direct effects on emissions through, say, increasing tourism, are well documented, but there are also indirect effects to consider, such as increased travel from Airbnb locations that may be located at the outskirt of cities, thereby increasing overall emissions. The second project will look at the energy implications of product returns. Many product life-cycle analysis calculations stop short of assessing what happens when a product is returned to the seller, and this analysis does not continue to follow a returned product’s continuing environmental impact beyond that point. The third project will seek to design improved personal environmental footprint calculators that integrate robust privacy preserving features. While exploring indirect effects is more challenging than exploring direct effects, completing this work will improve our understanding of how the digital economy contributes to global carbon emissions and what steps we might take toward reducing its impact.

Today’s energy, environmental, and natural resource challenges require rigorous and independent research and analysis to inform the design of effective policies. This grant supports Resources for the Future (RFF) in co-organizing Energy Insights 2022, a conference that will emphasize the connection between energy research and policy decision-making, in partnership with the Sloan Foundation’s Energy and Environment program. Following a successful collaboration in organizing the Energy Research Insights for Decisionmaking conference in 2018, this event will feature a range of Sloan-funded energy-related research exploring key issue areas including new technologies, transportation, energy infrastructure resiliency, and distributional equity and environmental justice. By drawing on Sloan’s grantee network and RFF’s connections to policy audiences, the private sector, and the wider research community, Energy Insights 2022 aims to build and strengthen networking opportunities among energy and environment researchers and connect their research to decision-makers.

Though industrial processes present many opportunities for decarbonization, realizing these opportunities has historically been challenging. Many sectors—including manufacturing, construction, and chemicals production—have, until recently, simply lacked low-carbon alternatives to current practices. Scholarly work is made more difficult by the lack of interdisciplinary knowledge and connections to networks needed to understand the complex interplay of technology, market structure, supply chains, and industrial organization in any sector. Andre Taylor at New York University is creating a new multidisciplinary, multi-institutional research effort addressing an important aspect of industrial decarbonization: chemical production. Working with Elizabeth Biddinger at the City College of New York, Taylor will establish a Center for Decarbonizing Chemical Manufacturing Using Sustainable Electrification (called DC-MUSE) and has assembled a team of scholars spanning chemical engineering, materials science, modeling, computation, and economic analysis across seven universities. The initial research focus will be decarbonizing ethylene manufacturing, which currently requires burning large amounts of fossil fuels to achieve the high input heat necessary for the chemical reactions that produce ethylene. Ethylene is an important initial target because it is a key ingredient in manufacturing, including in plastics, textiles, and other synthetic materials. The team will explore two alternative processes for generating ethylene that do not require high input heat (and, therefore, burning fossil fuels), then use this information to understand how low-carbon chemical plants might integrate with the grid. This grant will support a manager role for the center who will help coordinate activities among the network and build connections with stakeholders in government and industry.

In 2018, the Foundation supported the launch of the National Bureau of Economic Research’s Environmental and Energy Policy and the Economy (EEPE) initiative. This initiative aims to encourage energy economists to produce policy-relevant research that is more directed at decision-makers than traditional scholarly work in the field. EEPE is led by Matt Kotchen at Yale University, along with steering community members Tatyana Deryugina at the University of Illinois, Urbana Champaign, and Jim Stock at Harvard University. Having been successful in its first few years, the EEPE initiative has been renewed for three years and is expanding to include a postdoctoral fellowship. Research will be presented at an annual conference and published in a volume by the University of Chicago Press. Many of the intended topics of study have an equity dimension, while future topics will include a number with an explicit focus on environmental justice. The grant will also provide funding for an early-career scholar to conduct policy-relevant research, helping to solidify the link between EEPE and policy decision-makers. The scholar will receive mentoring from staff at the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)’s National Center for Environmental Economics, an office that performs economic analysis to inform EPA decision-making.

Though federal agencies make high quality data on the U.S. energy system publicly available, the data is often shared in hard-to-use formats that cannot easily be linked with other data or incorporated into the state-of-the-art computational models often used by researchers.  The effort needed to prepare such data for academic analysis is a barrier to use in the energy systems research. The Catalyst Cooperative is a team of data scientists, led by Christina Gosnell, who are dedicated to making unwieldy energy datasets easily accessible for researchers.  Over the next two years, Catalyst Cooperative researchers plan to curate nine new energy-related datasets into their open source data library, including data on electricity generation, natural gas utilities, pipeline safety, electricity market contracts, and greenhouse gas emissions.  Grant funds also support efforts to make needed improvements to their platform to accommodate growth and improve user experience, to help researchers work with this data library, and to perform analysis related to a variety of important energy issues, including planned research on the thermal efficiencies and environmental attributes of power plants. The Boulder Housing Collective acts as the fiscal sponsor for Catalyst Cooperative.