This grant supports the continuation and expansion of a fellowship program aimed at advancing interdisciplinary doctoral student training related to the economic, engineering, and policy dimensions of transportation decarbonization. Research on decarbonizing transportation tends to be highly siloed along disciplinary lines, with economists and engineers utilizing different methodological approaches to understand consumer preferences for low-carbon transport options. However, integration of these disciplinary perspectives is needed to realize a more comprehensive understanding of the behavioral, social, and technological dimensions involved in decarbonizing transportation. This interdisciplinary transportation doctoral fellowship program will provide graduate students from four universities with a broader perspective on transportation decarbonization, train them in how to integrate different methods and approaches into their research, and connect those students with practitioners and decision-makers. This grant provides funding to extend this doctoral fellowship program from the original sites at the University of Maryland, College Park and Carnegie Mellon University to two additional universities that have strong track records on transportation decarbonization research rooted in both economics and engineering in Cornell University and the University of Michigan. The program is led by Joshua Linn, Professor of Economics at the University of Maryland, and Kate Whitefoot, Associate Professor of Engineering and Public Policy at Carnegie Mellon University, and it now includes Ricardo Daziano, Associate Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering, and Shanjun Li, Professor of Economics, at Cornell University and Anna Stefanopoulou, Professor of Mechanical Engineering, at the University of Michigan. Each of the four participating universities will receive funding for one doctoral student fellowship per year, for a total of four students supported in each annual cohort and eight students to be supported in total over the grant period. Funds will support one year of stipend and tuition assistance for participating students, engagement activities with faculty both within and across institutions, an interdisciplinary reading group, interdisciplinary academic mentoring, and involvement of an external advisory group of practitioners who will provide real-world perspectives on prospective research projects. Funds will also support two research dissemination conferences to share findings across scholarly and practitioner communities.

The transition of the United States energy system away from fossil fuels and towards renewable energy and other low-carbon energy sources will involve the greater use of critical minerals and metals. Critical minerals and metals are necessary components for renewable energy technologies like solar panels, wind turbines, and batteries. Domestic demand for these building blocks of the clean energy transition is projected to increase dramatically over the next decades, both in response to rising consumer demand and to domestic sourcing requirements in the Inflation Reduction Act. However, little attention has been paid to the issue of public perceptions of critical mineral and metal mining and how these views might shape future supply chains and policymaking. To address this gap, Mahelet Fikru and Kwame Awuah-Offeil at the Missouri University of Science and Technology will conduct a pair of nationally representative surveys to evaluate public perception of critical minerals and metals. The first survey will focus on gauging public awareness about the role that critical minerals and metals play in clean energy transitions, and it will study public perceptions of policies that aim to advance domestic critical mineral production. The second survey will ascertain how consumers value tradeoffs between different factors associated with the critical mineral inputs of clean energy technologies. In particular, this survey will study how consumers value the source of the critical minerals and metals in terms of whether or not those materials are produced domestically or abroad, the sustainability of the mining practices and environmental impact, and the ultimate cost of the clean energy technologies that use these mineral and metal inputs. Results from both surveys will be used to develop an economic model to investigate the impact of different critical mineral and metal policies on upstream mining companies and downstream clean energy technology manufacturers. The team will also use the model to examine which policies might be well suited to achieve the goals of a low-carbon energy system and develop a more sustainable domestic critical mineral and metal supply chain. Three peer-reviewed journal articles will report on findings, and the team will also make all survey materials, datasets, models, and code publicly available.

One of the primary challenges relating to the widespread electrification of transportation is the timing of electric vehicle (EV) charging. If all EV owners plug in their vehicles at the same time of day, electricity demand on the grid will rise suddenly and dramatically, forcing grid operators to quickly ramp up electricity production. Smart charging programs can help curb the detrimental side effects of a growing number of EVs simultaneously re-charging on the grid. These programs offer financial and other incentives to encourage consumers to shift their EV charging patterns to times of low electricity demand. Some of these smart charging programs incentivize consumers to allow companies to remotely control and manage their EV charging schedule through “vehicle-to-grid” (V2G) technology. This grant funds efforts to advance our understanding of the social, behavioral, and economic tradeoffs of different smart charging program features and assess how various program features might limit or facilitate a smart charging program’s viability, both nationally and in different regions and electricity grid systems. A research team led by John Helveston at The George Washington University and including Eric Hittinger (Rochester Institute of Technology), Alan Jenn (University of California, Davis), and Brian Tarroja (University of California, Irvine) will use a choice-based conjoint survey analysis to estimate how consumers value various smart charging program features. Program features that will be studied include how much consumers would need to be compensated for program participation, the time window a program would have control over vehicle charging, how much of the battery or percent of full charge the program has control over, and whether the program can determine when to charge the EV or when to discharge the vehicle back to the grid as part of a V2G program. The team will study these features both individually and in combination, gauging what mix of features would be most desirable for consumers. Results will be integrated into an energy systems model and used to investigate three case studies of smart charging programs in partnership with three utilities in different regions of the country to assess the real-world impacts of different program features on emissions reduction, peak electricity demand, and electric system costs. The team plans to produce at least two peer-reviewed journal articles, reports and policy briefs for practitioners, and will make survey data publicly available that facilitates integration with energy models for other researchers and utilities to use. Results are expected to help inform the design of future smart charging programs in different utility regions and for different consumer bases.