Though industrial processes present many opportunities for decarbonization, realizing these opportunities has historically been challenging. Many sectors—including manufacturing, construction, and chemicals production—have, until recently, simply lacked low-carbon alternatives to current practices. Scholarly work is made more difficult by the lack of interdisciplinary knowledge and connections to networks needed to understand the complex interplay of technology, market structure, supply chains, and industrial organization in any sector. Andre Taylor at New York University is creating a new multidisciplinary, multi-institutional research effort addressing an important aspect of industrial decarbonization: chemical production. Working with Elizabeth Biddinger at the City College of New York, Taylor will establish a Center for Decarbonizing Chemical Manufacturing Using Sustainable Electrification (called DC-MUSE) and has assembled a team of scholars spanning chemical engineering, materials science, modeling, computation, and economic analysis across seven universities. The initial research focus will be decarbonizing ethylene manufacturing, which currently requires burning large amounts of fossil fuels to achieve the high input heat necessary for the chemical reactions that produce ethylene. Ethylene is an important initial target because it is a key ingredient in manufacturing, including in plastics, textiles, and other synthetic materials. The team will explore two alternative processes for generating ethylene that do not require high input heat (and, therefore, burning fossil fuels), then use this information to understand how low-carbon chemical plants might integrate with the grid. This grant will support a manager role for the center who will help coordinate activities among the network and build connections with stakeholders in government and industry.

In 2018, the Foundation supported the launch of the National Bureau of Economic Research’s Environmental and Energy Policy and the Economy (EEPE) initiative. This initiative aims to encourage energy economists to produce policy-relevant research that is more directed at decision-makers than traditional scholarly work in the field. EEPE is led by Matt Kotchen at Yale University, along with steering community members Tatyana Deryugina at the University of Illinois, Urbana Champaign, and Jim Stock at Harvard University. Having been successful in its first few years, the EEPE initiative has been renewed for three years and is expanding to include a postdoctoral fellowship. Research will be presented at an annual conference and published in a volume by the University of Chicago Press. Many of the intended topics of study have an equity dimension, while future topics will include a number with an explicit focus on environmental justice. The grant will also provide funding for an early-career scholar to conduct policy-relevant research, helping to solidify the link between EEPE and policy decision-makers. The scholar will receive mentoring from staff at the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)’s National Center for Environmental Economics, an office that performs economic analysis to inform EPA decision-making.

Though federal agencies make high quality data on the U.S. energy system publicly available, the data is often shared in hard-to-use formats that cannot easily be linked with other data or incorporated into the state-of-the-art computational models often used by researchers.  The effort needed to prepare such data for academic analysis is a barrier to use in the energy systems research. The Catalyst Cooperative is a team of data scientists, led by Christina Gosnell, who are dedicated to making unwieldy energy datasets easily accessible for researchers.  Over the next two years, Catalyst Cooperative researchers plan to curate nine new energy-related datasets into their open source data library, including data on electricity generation, natural gas utilities, pipeline safety, electricity market contracts, and greenhouse gas emissions.  Grant funds also support efforts to make needed improvements to their platform to accommodate growth and improve user experience, to help researchers work with this data library, and to perform analysis related to a variety of important energy issues, including planned research on the thermal efficiencies and environmental attributes of power plants. The Boulder Housing Collective acts as the fiscal sponsor for Catalyst Cooperative.

This grant supports training and mentoring efforts by the University of California, Berkeley’s Initiative on Equity in Energy and Environmental Economics. The goal is to attract a more diverse group of students to the study of energy economics by providing education and training centered on questions associated with distributional equity and just transitions. Funded activities include a mentoring program for undergraduate students of color interested in the distributional dimensions of energy economics, a competitive grant program that will fund ten graduate research projects on issues related to energy equity, and an initiative to hire an underrepresented postdoctoral scholar of color working in energy economics.  Additional grant funds will support a series of networking and convening events to build community across all levels of this initiative and connect supported students to one another and with energy economics faculty at Energy Institute at Berkeley’s Haas School of Business—one of the leading energy economics centers in the country—and Berkeley’s Opportunity Lab.

There are more than 150 academic research centers located at universities across the United States exploring different dimensions of the energy system, all with different topic areas of focus, disciplinary emphases, and level of funding.  Funds from this grant support the creation of a collaboration network, the University Energy Institute Collaborative (UEIC), that will facilitate coordination among these academic research institutes, foster the exchange of ideas, and promote collaborative research. Grant funds will cover the costs of running the network’s subcommittees and communication activities, develop a web portal for members, and planning and holding two annual summits that will bring together center representatives in person. Funds will also go toward the design of a small, seed grant program that would support cross-institutional collaborative projects among UEIC members.

Climate change is already affecting how energy systems function, with higher temperatures and more intense storms making energy systems more vulnerable overall, leading to a rise in the number of power outages in recent decades. This is evident in numerous recent events, from hurricanes destroying power generation systems in Puerto Rico to California wildfires disrupting transmission lines to the February 2021 Texas blackout caused by extreme cold. This grant funds a multi-institutional research effort led by the Houston Advanced Research Center (HARC), in partnership with researchers at the University of Houston and Lehigh University, to begin advancing our understanding of how extreme weather events might impact the U.S. energy system. It will examine ERCOT, the Texas electricity grid, and researchers on this project will create an integrated modeling framework, called Pythias, that links together components of five separate models covering separate aspects of energy and climate systems: a power grid management model, a regional climate model, a regional water use and hydrology model, the open source GCAM model that links energy and climate change to socioeconomic factors, and an agent-based decision model to help game out how planners and other stakeholders might respond to changes in energy systems. The team will then use Pythias to model how ERCOT grid might respond to various plausible climate scenarios that could arise in the future.