The are many dimensions related to the local implications of renewable energy generation that have yet to be explored in much depth, especially impact that tend to be less visible stages along the supply chain lifecycle. As policies are developed that look to grow renewable energy infrastructure while also aiming for an equitable distribution of benefits, these questions as to how communities will be impacted across the renewable supply chain become increasingly pressing. This grant funds a highly interdisciplinary team at Boston University, the University of Delaware, and Virginia Tech to analyze eight case studies relating to the equity and justice dimensions of renewable energy production in the U.S. Funded case studies will focus on several different stages of the renewable energy supply chain, including resource extraction, construction and manufacturing, electricity generation in rural areas, and end-stage issues like recycling, disposal, and decommissioning.  Studies will be divided evenly between wind and solar generation and will focus on a wide range of geographies including critical mineral mining in Utah and Texas, solar panel manufacturing in Ohio, offshore wind installation along the Northeast Coast, a solar e-waste recycling in Kansas, and wind turbine blade disposal in Iowa. Study methods will include semi-structured interviews with key stakeholders, focus groups, expert elicitations, and observations to explore community experiences, opportunities, and vulnerabilities. The research team will draw on several conceptual frameworks to analyze the equity dimensions of the renewable energy supply chain. These include a feminist lens that addresses gender power dynamics, an anti-racist lens that focuses on racial discrimination, an Indigenous lens that explores historical patterns of land appropriation, and a post-colonial lens that relates to broader geopolitical factors. The team will link these frameworks with the empirical case studies to develop a fuller, multi-dimensional conceptualization of energy justice that promises to help illuminate the impacts of renewable energy development throughout the United States and provide important insights across all stages of the renewable energy supply chain.

One of the challenges to making electricity markets operate more efficiently is that most consumers pay flat electricity prices. While this rate structure provides consumers with cost certainty and insulates them from higher prices during extreme events, it does not provide price signals when electricity demand is high and therefore expensive. Some states and utilities are attempting to encourage load shifting or reduced use of electricity during key moments of grid stress through demand response programs, including time-of-use (TOU) programs that define peak and off-peak periods with different prices well in advance, and critical peak pricing (CPP) programs that announce and implement higher electricity prices on shorter notice. Uptake of these demand response programs remains limited in the United States, and there is a lack of research as to how consumers respond to these programs, especially in non-coastal and rural areas. This grant, resulting from an open Request for Proposals on Energy System Electrification, supports a team of economists and engineers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Massachusetts, Amherst aiming to empirically study consumer participation in demand response programs in rural areas through a randomized controlled trial (RCT). Grant funds will allow the team to complete three phases of work through partnerships with local electric cooperatives who have agreed to deploy demand response pricing experiments among their consumer bases. First, the team will implement a demand response RCT, covering at least one winter and one summer season, with a total sample of 43,000 electricity consumers. Participants will be offered different enrollment incentives and information relating to TOU and CPP programs. Next, the team will integrate findings from this RCT into an energy system capacity expansion model that will help understand the impact on broader energy system operations. Finally, the team will analyze the distributional and equity dimensions of the RCT, and they will assess what those findings might imply for other demand response programs across the country. Results from this research will also help electric cooperatives and similar utilities design and implement demand response programs.

The goal of this project is to grow and diversify the field of energy and environmental (EEE) economics by supporting an integrated set of training and early-career scholar engagement efforts taking place at the Energy Institute at Haas, based at the University of California, Berkeley. Four programmatic activities will be funded through this grant. The first is Grad Camp, a week-long, summer training course that brings 60 graduate students per year from across North American universities to the University of California, Berkeley for a rigorous introduction to cutting-edge research in EEE. The second is Energy Camp, a multi-day, early-summer gathering of 60 graduate students, postdoctoral fellows, junior faculty, and more established faculty to share and work on early-stage research projects. Three promising graduate students from the previous year’s Grad Camp will be invited to attend and present at the next year’s Energy Camp. The third is the EEE Undergraduate Mentoring Program, undertaken in partnership with Berkeley’s Opportunity Lab, which will prepare 18 Black, Indigenous, and Latina/o/x undergraduates per year at Berkeley for EEE graduate study by pairing these students with graduate student and faculty mentors. The fourth is research funding for two EEE graduate students per year that are working on seed projects designed to produce publicly available datasets or outputs that can be used by other scholars in the field. This proposal will help ensure that these programs will continue to enrich the EEE field and train the next generation scholars from a diverse range of backgrounds and institutions.

This grant provides ongoing support to Pecan Street, a non-profit research organization based in Austin, Texas seeking to improve researchers’ access to high resolution residential electricity use data by instrumenting households with energy monitoring devices. Pecan Street installs eGauge devices in participating households to directly measure power flow at the level of the circuit breaker. Each household gets access to their own energy use information, and Pecan Street collects and uploads the data to Dataport, a data sharing system for academic and commercial researchers. Grant funds will allow Pecan Street to greatly expand and diversify the number of instrumented homes in the research testbed by 40%, adding at least 50 homes in each of 4 different geographies, 210 homes in total: Atlanta, Georgia; Central Pennsylvania; Oklahoma City, Oklahoma; and Portland, Oregon. All of the newly instrumented homes supported in this project will be from communities of color or lower-income communities not yet represented in Pecan Street’s network. Pecan Street will work closely with academic researchers and local community-based organizations (CBO) in each region to engage participating households and use the collected data to study questions of interest to that particular area. Funds will allow Pecan Street to engage 750 new Dataport users, produce 10-20 journal publications, train multiple graduate students across the four local research projects, support the involvement of the CBOs, and update the Dataport infrastructure with upgraded storage and computer processing capacity. This effort will improve our ability to understand household electricity usage and, ultimately, help to facilitate the transition to low-carbon energy systems.