This grant supports two projects led by the Environmental Defense Fund to investigate the environmental impacts of the wastewater used in the extraction of shale gas and oil. In the first project, EDF will partner with chemist Michael Thurman from the University of Colorado, Boulder to develop standard methods for identifying the chemical characteristics of wastewater generated by hydraulic fracturing. Fracking wastewater can differ significantly from site to site due to procedural and environmental factors. Wastewater from different sites might have vastly different environmental impacts, and thus necessitate different treatment and disposal procedures. Thurman’s research will allow for the characterization of wastewater samples from across different fracking sites and enable the creation of standardized reference benchmarks that researchers can use to better determine the constituents of fracking wastewater. In the second project, EDF will work with environmental engineer Karl Linden of the University of Colorado, Boulder, and molecular biologist Kartik Chandran of Columbia University to develop better treatment and disposal techniques for wastewater produced by hydraulic fracturing. In a series of experiments, Linden and Chandran will explore how biological treatment processes could be used to metabolize the organic compounds present in such wastewater. In addition to providing scientific and technical input to their scientific partners, EDF will help manage each collaboration, and assist in disseminating the research results.

High-quality, easily searchable data on the transmission, distribution, and use of electricity are hard to come by. Existing data sources usually fall short in a number of ways. Many data sets report electricity usage statistics only at monthly or yearly intervals, making it impossible to measure how demand varies from day-to-day, hour-to-hour, or minute-to-minute. Usage data are often aggregated at the household level, not broken down by individual appliance, making it difficult to study consumer behavior. Often, data are only available in hard-to-use formats that are not amendable to manipulation, combination, or visualization. Pecan Street has created a data analytics tool, called Dataport, to provide timely, disaggregated electricity usage information to researchers. Data are collected from more than 1,000 homes outfitted with appliance-level sensors that report energy usage at fine-grained intervals. These data are also presented in a way that can be easily queried and visualized. Funds from this grant support three initiatives aimed at strengthening Dataport and increasing its usefulness to researchers. First, the Dataport team will implement several technical improvements to the platform, including better visualization tools, an improved user interface, and a new capacity that allows researchers to draw information from multiple data sources simultaneously. Second, Pecan Street will expand and diversify available data through importing and integrating electricity usage and pricing data from several government, utility, and regional transmission sources. Third, Pecan Street will extend its academic outreach and education activities to expand use of the platform, including on-campus training sessions, a research conference, and a paper competition for papers using Dataport data.

Fuel cells, which use chemistry rather than combustion to generate electricity, have a wide range of potential applications, from large arrays that can be integrated into the electricity grid to small cells that can power vehicles. Experts in the field, however, remain uncertain about a number of important issues, including how efficient fuel cells will become, how much costs will drop, and to what degree hypothesized benefits will be achieved when fuel cells leave the lab and enter the real world. This grant supports an emerging cohort of scholars at Carnegie Mellon University’s Scott Institute for Energy Innovation plan to clarify these uncertainties. A team led by Jay Whitacre will conduct an expansive literature review and background assessment, laying out the current state of development of various fuel cell technologies, their advantages, their drawbacks, and what is and is not known about each. The team will then undertake an in-depth expert elicitation process that utilizes surveys, in-person interviews, and group discussions to identify consensus and critical uncertainties associated with the different fuel cell technologies being studied. The iterative expert elicitation process will provide a method for aggregating this diverse array of expert perspectives and will result in a series of high-profile, peer-reviewed journal articles that will cover topics related both to stationary fuel cell applications and the use of fuel cells in transportation. The effort promises to clarify the current state of fuel cell research, identify gaps in our knowledge, and expose promising ways forward.

This grant supports a series of research projects coordinated by researchers at the National Bureau of Economic Research examining the distributional and efficiency tradeoffs and implications of U.S. energy policy. Sixteen researchers will carry out eight different studies that will look at a variety of interrelated issues, including whether the energy reductions achieved by current policies could be obtained at lower cost, how the costs of current energy policies are distributed across and within different income groups, and whether and to what extent these burdens could be upset by additional tax and transfer policies. Policies to be examined include vehicle and appliance efficiency standards, renewal energy subsidies, electric and hybrid automobile purchasing subsidies, and green building codes. The resulting research papers will be published in a special peer-reviewed issue of the Journal of the Association of Environmental and Resource Economists.   Though the papers concern U.S. energy policies and will have obvious relevance to environmentalists and policymakers, the focus of each will be strictly empirical. No policy recommendations will be made.