Negative emissions technologies aim to combat rising atmospheric carbon emissions by capturing and removing carbon dioxide already present in the atmosphere and sequestering it safely underground or for reuse. Assessing the potential of these technologies requires insights from the social sciences—including economics, public policy, political science, sociology, and life cycle assessment, among others—on issues like how they might integrate with existing energy systems and how energy consumers and producers would respond to their deployment. Funds from this grant support the creation of a social science research fellowship program across multiple universities that will aim to foster research by young scholars interested in studying negative emissions technologies. Coordinated by Peter Schlosser at Arizona State University, a multidisciplinary committee will review and select four promising postdoctoral researchers for support and embed them for two years at one of a number of partner universities involved in negative emissions social science research.  In addition to salary support for each fellow, grant funds will support networking, learning, and professional development activities for the fellows, including opportunities for fellows to present their research to one another and to other scholars and practitioners in the energy community at large.

Industrial sources account for one-fifth of greenhouse gas emissions in the United States. Despite their important contributions to emissions, many industrial sub-sectors—such as cement, iron and steel, chemicals, and construction—are poorly represented in key integrated assessment models that are used to inform decisions about how to decarbonize the economy. In particular, these models do not reflect emerging low-carbon advancements in these sub-sectors that might improve decarbonization rates and affect overall emissions reductions in these sectors. One of the most often used integrated assessment models is GCAM, a popular open source model used by researchers to simulate how various decarbonization approaches and scenarios would affect both the environment and the economy over the long term. The GCAM module that represents industrial decarbonization has not been updated for nearly a decade and currently reflects only minimal information from a small number of industrial sectors and thus fails to capture new low-carbon developments across a range of industries. This grant funds a team of scholars led by Andres Clarens at the University of Virginia and CGAM developers based at the University of Maryland to update critical components of GCAM’s industrial decarbonization module. The focus of this project will be to combine information from high quality data sources, life cycle assessments, and expert elicitations to improve GCAM’s representation of five crucial industrial sectors: cement (one of the largest industries from a decarbonization perspective), chemicals production, construction, nonferrous metals, and mining.  

Founded in 2013 by Jason Bordoff, the Center on Global Energy Policy (CGEP) at Columbia University has quickly become one of the leading academic research centers focused on analyzing all aspects of the U.S. energy system. A first class research institute in its own right, CGEP also excels at bridging the researcher-policymaker divide.  It accessibly condenses and summarizes complicated research, connects research results with their implications for policy, and creates venues to effectively disseminate research to decision-makers, media, and the public.  Funds for this grant support the creation of two additional professional positions at CGEP: a senior research director and a managing editor.  The research director will be responsible for managing all components of research production and will oversee CGEP’s research quality control procedures, including its internal and external review processes. The managing editor’s role will be to assist in the research review process and generate various outputs for dissemination that will help make CGEP’s work more relevant and accessible to decision-makers. Both the research director and managing editor positions are critical in overseeing the variety of research outputs produced by CGEP and will cement CGEP’s central role of bringing high quality, objective research to those stakeholders entrusted to act in the public interest. Grant funds will support these positions for their initial two-year period to help inaugurate these roles.  

Energy economics research can be a starkly solitary endeavor. Training is rarely team-based, leaving energy economics students with little experience working in large groups or across disciplines, even as demand is rising for the sort of interdisciplinary scholarship that can meaningfully addresses complicated questions about the interconnections between energy, the environment, and climate change. The Energy Policy Institute at the University of Chicago (EPIC) has developed a collaboration-oriented, team-based, two-year research experience and training program for predoctoral students—those with undergraduate or Master’s degrees—that looks to engage researchers early in their career and introduce them to a more integrated, interdisciplinary approach to scholarship. Selected students work with University of Chicago economics faculty on a wide variety of research projects. In addition to receiving high-quality research experience, predoctoral fellows receive dedicated faculty mentorship, cutting-edge data science training, and networking opportunities. EPIC has designed an extensive orientation program for the fellows, along with a series of professional development activities that provide guidance and assistance to help them determine potential next steps in their careers. Funds from this grant will provide stipend and administrative support for four fellows in the EPIC program over the next two years.

This grant provides funding for the continuation and expansion of a doctoral fellowship program focused on training an interdisciplinary cohort of early career researchers to conduct scholarship in energy data analytics. Implemented by Duke University’s Energy Data Analytics Lab, the program provides participants from multiple fields with opportunities to work on extended research projects involving the collection and analysis of data related to the energy system. In this expanded program model, fellows will be drawn from six participating universities from the region, including Duke, University of North Carolina (UNC)-Chapel Hill, UNC-Charlotte, UNC-Greensboro, North Carolina State University, and North Carolina A&T State University, a Historically Black College and University (HBCU). Fellows are drawn from a diverse variety of institutional backgrounds, including computer science; environmental policy; earth and ocean sciences; and electrical, civil, computer, and environmental engineering.  Fellows work with a team of advisors to develop original data-driven research projects that they work on during the summer months.  Past participant projects include using satellite imaging to asses energy loss at solar energy facilities, constructing neural networks for use in predicting energy demand, modeling the energy consumed in the production of consumer products, and enhancing image datasets to allow for the identification of buildings with poor insulation. Six fellows will be supported in each year of the three-year grant period. Grant funds will primarily support student stipends, with additional funds devoted to various support activities, including mentorship, periodic workshops for student participants, and a conference allowing students and other researchers to showcase their work and allowing for networking opportunities with practitioners

This grant provides support to organize an annual, intensive, week-long training program at the University of California Berkeley introduces second- and third-year doctoral students interested in energy and environmental economics to state-of-the-art research in the field.  Each year approximately 60 doctoral students from universities across the country arrive in Berkeley to receive rigorous training in energy and environmental economics and have the opportunity to interact with leading faculty in the field. Nearly a semester’s worth of content is presented in a condensed period of time, helping students participants gain the knowledge necessary to undertake more in-depth research when they return to their home institutions. Grant funds will provide support for a number of student scholarships, with a specific focus on increasing the number of women and underrepresented minorities participants and strengthening mentorship activities over the course of the training program.

Individual states play a significant role in setting and implementing energy policies of all kinds, yet no comprehensive database exists of state-level energy policy initiatives and projects.  Without such a database, it is very difficult to understand how state policies harmonize, augment, or conflict with one another (or with federal policy), how state policies could be altered to better achieve overall energy goals, or how state policies differ (or do not) by region, geography, culture, industrial composition, and much more besides. This grants funds an initiative to address this information gap by creating an inventory that makes systematic information about state energy policies available to the research and policy communities. It will also engage scholars and decision-makers to use this new resource and begin to rigorously analyze the connections, overlaps, and relationships between different state energy policy regimes. After constructing the inventory, the team will analyze state policies across across four dimensions: emissions reduction targets, economic outcome targets, resilience planning, and cross-governmental coordination. Research findings will be published as reports and articles and disseminated at a final workshop and shared broadly, with a focus on engaging state and federal decision-makers.