This grant funds a collaboration between University of California, Davis energy economists James Bushnell and David Rapson and distribution systems engineer, Duncan Callaway of the University of California at Berkeley. The group plans to study how the rise of distributed energy resources (DERs) like rooftop solar panels and electric vehicles impact power quality and distribution system performance in California. Working with utilities (such as Southern California Edison and Pacific Gas & Electric Company) and state government regulators (including the California Public Utilities Commission and the California Air Resources Board), Bushnell and his colleagues will collect and combine data on solar photovoltaic installations and electric vehicle registrations and then map them to individual circuits in the California electricity distribution grid. This will allow the team to analyze in fine-grained detail how increases in solar photovoltaic installations and electric vehicles are likely to strain elements of the California electricity distribution system. The team will then investigate how the performance of distribution systems maps to various socioeconomic and demographic characteristics of California residents.

The Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) employs a substantial number of postbaccalaureate and postdoctoral scientists and economists. These positions train scholars how to undertake policy-relevant science and economics research in an applied setting, outside the university. This grant provides support to EDF to develop a more formalized training, networking, and mentoring program that will train 25 to 30 early-career researchers in the ancillary skills needed to succeed in applied research environments. Training will cover such topics as communications, proposal writing, program management, and team leadership. EDF will also organize a series of workshops that separately target postbaccalaureates and postdoctoral researchers to reflect the different skill development needs among these two groups and will implement a formal mentoring system that will link their postdoctoral fellows with senior scholars across the institution. Finally, EDF’s in-house social scientists will implement a series of surveys among participants to track the impact of this program over time.

To properly understand and model the changing US electricity distribution grid, economists and other social scientists need in-depth training on the technological and engineering complexities of the electricity distribution system. This grant provides funding to the Colorado School of Mines (CSM) to organize and host a week-long summer school for early-career economists and other social scientists designed to provide such training. Each week-long summer school, to be held twice each summer over the course of two summers, would include tailored classroom training; engagement and lectures by senior utility, government, and nongovernmental experts; and an experiential component through tutorials held at NREL’s Energy Systems Integration Facility. Participating expert instructors include those in distribution systems planning (Doug Arent and Michael Coddington), grid integration (Barbara O’Neill), and power systems engineering (Benjamin Kroposki). Summer school participants—which include advanced graduate students, postdoctoral fellows, and junior faculty—will be broadly recruited from professional societies, such as the Association of Environmental and Resource Economics and the United States Association of Energy Economics, and from with universities that have doctoral programs with a strong focus in energy economics.

This grant funds work by power systems expert Michael Caramanis to develop a sophisticated, granular framework for pricing electricity at different points on the electricity distribution grid, especially for those systems that feature increased levels of load varying distributed energy resources like consumer solar panels. Decades ago, the introduction of locational marginal prices (LMPs) helped to match generation and consumption in the bulk power system. Caramanis plans to extend this framework and take on the more technically complex challenge of developing distribution network locational marginal prices (DLMP) for different nodes in the electricity distribution grid. After developing algorithms to model DLMP for electricity distribution, Caramais will work in close collaboration with at least two utilities to test his model on actual distribution system networks. The proposed work will help address a critical gap in the academic literature and could lead to improved regulatory policies regarding distribution network pricing.

This grant funds a project led by Meghan Busse (Northwestern), Christopher Knittel (MIT), and Kate Whitefoot (Carnegie Mellon University) to spur research on energy consumption in the transportation sector by fielding an open call for papers on the topic and providing funding and support to the best submissions. Areas of interest include changing patterns of personal vehicle demand, vehicle electrification, the economics of changing fuels for commercial and heavy-duty vehicles, and the rise of vehicle automation and ride-sharing.  The group will widely distribute an open call for papers, evaluate submissions, select eight papers to receive funding, organize an initial working session to discuss methodology and preliminary research approaches, and hold a final conference to share and disseminate results. Papers will be published as NBER working papers and then submitted to top economics journals.