This grant funds the Aspen Institute to host a three-year dialogue series, The Aspen Series on Energy Governance, which will synthesize the disparate strands of research that Sloan and other funders have supported in recent years on hydraulic fracturing and shale oil and gas development. The series will consist of three annual forums and two smaller-scale dialogue series that will bring together scholars and practitioners from different fields to develop a set of guidelines and recommendations related to how to oversee shale oil and gas production at the local, state, and federal levels. Discussion papers will be prepared to inform each of the meetings in the series, and a rapporteur will produce a report to summarize the collective results. The Aspen Institute will also develop a web resource that will include materials created for each session in the series and that will serve as a one-stop-shop for all of the publicly available research that the Sloan and Mitchell Foundations have supported on shale gas and oil development. Findings from the discussion series will be presented at public panels and workshops, both in Washington, D.C. and in regions where shale gas and oil development has taken place.

This grant supports energy economist Christopher Knittel in his plans to implement a randomized controlled trial to study how individuals respond to information about their driving habits and how the provision of such information affects energy use and automobile fuel economy. In partnership with a company named Automatic, which manufactures and installs driving activity monitoring devices and provides that information to drivers, Knittel will examine how individual driving behavior is influenced by different kinds of information, packaged in a variety of ways. Automatic’s devices can detect and alert drivers during hard accelerations, hard braking, and speeds over 70 miles per hour. Knittel will study how different ways of presenting these data differentially affect driving behavior. Treatment groups will receive weekly aggregated summaries and comparisons of their driving habits to other drivers. In addition, Knittel will study how sustained exposure to these alerts (at either three or six months) changes driving habits. Though Automatic’s sensors will be installed free of charge to participants, individuals will be given the opportunity to purchase the devices, at different prices, at the study’s conclusion, allowing Knittel to estimate participants’ willingness to pay for this information. The transportation sector is the second largest energy consumer in the United States and accounts for over a quarter of all U.S. greenhouse gas emissions. This innovative RCT will help us understand better what interventions might lead consumers to change their driving habits in ways that reduce those emissions.

There are few, if any, reputable studies examining the public perception and public finance dimensions associated with the siting of energy infrastructure, which includes projects such as transmission lines, oil and natural gas pipelines, natural gas export terminals, large-scale wind and solar facilities, and  other large power plants. The studies that have been conducted have tended to focus on a single energy infrastructure project instead of looking across multiple projects simultaneously and have asked about hypothetical energy infrastructure developments instead of real-world examples. This grant funds a team led by David Konisky at Indiana University to conduct highly localized public opinion surveys related to 15 energy infrastructure projects that are currently in the planning stages across seven populous states. In addition to surveying local residents, the team will field complementary national surveys that will examine how public perceptions differ across infrastructure types. Finally, the team will develop a series of local public finance case studies laying out the likely economic impacts of a subset of these infrastructure projects, drawing on information from permit applications, siting and development plans, evidence from public hearings, and interviews with local officials and other stakeholders. All of the survey data, codebooks, and finance analysis will be publicly released at the end of the project, with the material to be archived at Harvard’s Dataverse.

Though most of the 99 operating nuclear reactors in the United States are likely to be retired by 2050, only four new nuclear plants are currently under construction. Since nuclear accounts for 20 percent of all U.S. electricity generation, significant new investment in nuclear generating technology is needed if the United States and the world are to keep a key source of no-carbon power generation. Doing so will require addressing cost, safety, waste, and proliferation concerns and a keen assessment of new reactor designs, technology development needs, new business models, and regulatory barriers.   This grant provides partial support to MIT to examine the potential of alternative nuclear generation technologies from cost, safety, reliability, waste, and proliferation perspectives. The study will also examine the associated research and development needs, regulatory reforms, and industrial support infrastructure needed to commercialize these new technologies. A faculty committee of top researchers from multiple disciplines has been assembled for the study, including Jacopo Buongiorno, Dennis Whyte, and Richard Lester of MIT and Michael Corradini of the University of Wisconsin, Madison. David Petti, of Idaho National Laboratory, will oversee the operational and management dimensions of the study as its executive director. An expert advisory board comprised of senior scholars and practitioners in the field will provide regular oversight of the overall project. The study is a crucial and necessary step in evaluating what role nuclear should play in the future of U.S. electricity generation.