This grant supports a multidisciplinary research effort led by the Institute for Transportation Studies at the University of California, Davis (ITS-Davis) to examine natural gas as an alternative fuel option to power trucks, other long-haul vehicles, municipal bus and taxi fleets, and light-duty passenger vehicles. Bringing together leading economists, engineers, geographers, policy experts, and computer scientists, ITS-Davis will organize a workshop on the issue and commission a series of papers providing a comprehensive overview of the tradeoffs associated with the use of natural gas as an alternative fuel in the transportation sector. Data from the workshop will then be used to enrich ITS-Davis’s model of the infrastructure and refueling network that must sustain any transition to natural gas as an alternative fuel. Working closely with researchers at Arizona State University, ITS-Davis also plans to expand its model to accommodate changes in diesel and natural gas fuel prices, alternative technology costs, various rates of new vehicle diffusion, altered traffic flow patterns, and changes to state-level policies.

Funds from this grant support an initiative by the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) to create a research working group on energy infrastructure. Bringing together leading economists as well as junior scholars entering the field, the working group aims to develop and implement a research agenda focused on two issue areas: the transport of hydrocarbons and the increase in distributed energy generation and storage. Spurred by the discovery of new oil and gas resources in the U.S., research in the first issue area will explore the economic costs, benefits, and policy issues associated with moving oil and methane by truck, rail, and pipeline. Research in the second issue area will focus on issues such as the expanding market for rooftop solar panels, utilization of electric vehicles as backup battery power, developments in smart grid technologies, and how these new technologies interact with existing energy generation and distribution infrastructure. Grant funds will support an initial workshop on each of the two topic areas, the development and implementation of up to 16 separate studies, and a capstone conference for the presentation of research results. The effort will be led by James Bushnell from the University of California, Davis; Ryan Kellogg from the University of Michigan; and Erin Mansur from Dartmouth College.

This grant provides three years of continued support to the E2e project, a multi-institutional collaboration of researchers who have come together to examine the “energy efficiency paradox,” the name given to the puzzling phenomenon of consumers’ failure to widely adopt money-saving energy efficiency practices, products, and technologies. Headquartered at the University of California, Berkeley and with organizational nodes at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Chicago, the E2e collaboration brings scholars and students together to share and access data, connect with policymakers and the private sector, and work together on the design and implementation of individual and joint research projects. Topics being investigated by E2e researchers include understanding consumer decision-making in the residential sector; how framing, discounting, and choice architecture contribute to informational and behavioral inefficiencies; how to use insights from behavioral psychology and economics to increase the impact of policy interventions; and how well engineering models predict actual real world efficiency gains of adopted technologies. Grant funds provide operating support for the project, including funds for the expansion of the research network to include new scholars, publication of a working paper and policy brief series, data acquisition, a seed funding competition for junior scholars, the development of an online tool to help researchers craft effective experimental design, and a series of training workshops for students and practitioners.

Funds from this grant provide two years of support to the Women in Energy project at Columbia University’s Center on Global Energy Policy (CGEP) as it undertakes a series of educational, networking, mentorship, and career-development activities aimed at supporting and encouraging the involvement of female students in careers related to energy. Funded activities include organizing lectures and small group conversations with leading women in the energy sector, arranging visits for female students to key energy sites in the region, developing a formal mentoring program that connects students with leading women in the energy sector, and offering a handful of small stipends to female students to defray the cost of summer internship opportunities.