This grant funds a study by scholars at the University of Maryland, College Park and the University of Wisconsin, Madison that will examine the impact of corporate venture capital investments on advancing innovation related to low-carbon and greenhouse gas mitigation technologies. Analyzing a comprehensive dataset of corporate investment in clean energy technology, the i3 Cleantech database, the research team will look at how venture capital investments affect the cost and performance of such technologies. In addition, the analysis will include detailed studies of investment in particular clean energy sectors, including energy storage, transportation, and precision agriculture aimed at capturing carbon dioxide gas from the atmosphere. Data will also be used to improve the representation of private investment in GCAM, an open source model linking climate change, energy systems, and socioeconomic factors.

There are more than 150 academic research centers located at universities across the United States exploring different dimensions of the energy system, all with different topic areas of focus, disciplinary emphases, and level of funding.  Funds from this grant support the creation of a collaboration network, the University Energy Institute Collaborative (UEIC), that will facilitate coordination among these academic research institutes, foster the exchange of ideas, and promote collaborative research. Grant funds will cover the costs of running the network’s subcommittees and communication activities, develop a web portal for members, and planning and holding two annual summits that will bring together center representatives in person. Funds will also go toward the design of a small, seed grant program that would support cross-institutional collaborative projects among UEIC members.

Climate change is already affecting how energy systems function, with higher temperatures and more intense storms making energy systems more vulnerable overall, leading to a rise in the number of power outages in recent decades. This is evident in numerous recent events, from hurricanes destroying power generation systems in Puerto Rico to California wildfires disrupting transmission lines to the February 2021 Texas blackout caused by extreme cold. This grant funds a multi-institutional research effort led by the Houston Advanced Research Center (HARC), in partnership with researchers at the University of Houston and Lehigh University, to begin advancing our understanding of how extreme weather events might impact the U.S. energy system. It will examine ERCOT, the Texas electricity grid, and researchers on this project will create an integrated modeling framework, called Pythias, that links together components of five separate models covering separate aspects of energy and climate systems: a power grid management model, a regional climate model, a regional water use and hydrology model, the open source GCAM model that links energy and climate change to socioeconomic factors, and an agent-based decision model to help game out how planners and other stakeholders might respond to changes in energy systems. The team will then use Pythias to model how ERCOT grid might respond to various plausible climate scenarios that could arise in the future.

Carbon capture, utilization, and storage technologies (CCUS) aim to capture carbon dioxide (CO2) when it is generated and before the CO2 is released into the atmosphere.  The captured CO2 is subsequently stored or re-used in ways that do not involve putting it back in the air. CCUS technologies seem promising in theory, but uptake has been sluggish due to a variety of factors, including high upfront costs, poorly developed markets for captured CO2, and policies that provide inadequate incentives for adoption. This grant funds a multidisciplinary team of scholars, led by Sheila Olmstead, from the University of Texas, Austin and the University of Wyoming to launch four studies designed to address a range of issues related to CCUS. In the first, the project team will analyze and compare various policy interventions aimed at mitigating the high up-front costs of installing CCUS systems. In the second, the team will identify and analyze the frictions that inhibit coordination between power plant owners, pipeline developers, geologic storage managers, and CO2 utilization customers, and it will analyze the costs and benefits of different policies to ease those frictions. Third, the team will examine current tax policies designed to incentivize CCUS update and compare their efficacy to other possible policies, like a carbon tax or emissions standards. Fourth, the team will model the potential impacts of increased adoption of CCUS across different regions, with a particular focus on the effects on underrepresented and marginalized populations. In addition to their own research, the UT Austin and University of Wyoming teams will use grant funds to spur further research on these topics by holding an open call for projects to be undertaken by scholars at other institutions that will be supported through a small sub-award program. A final workshop will be held for all scholars involved over the course of the project to share methods and findings.

This grant supports efforts by the University of California, Berkeley’s Initiative on Equity in Energy and Enviromental Economics, to attract a more diverse group of students to the study of energy economics, and to provide education and training that will prepare these students for success in graduate study and careers in professional energy economics.  Funded activities include a mentoring program for underrepresented graduate students of color, a competitive grant program that will fund ten graduate research projects on issues related to energy equity, and an initiative to hire an underrepresented postdoctoral scholar of color working in energy economics.  Additional grant fund will support a series of networking and convening events to build community across all levels of this initiative to connect supported students to one another and with energy economics faculty at Energy Institute at Berkeley’s Haas School of Business—one of the leading energy economics centers in the country—and Berkeley’s Opportunity Lab.