Electrifying industrial manufacturing processes is one of the key pathways to decarbonizing the U.S. energy system, yet decarbonizing industry remains challenging. This project will take an industry-wide look at the potential impacts of electrification on steel manufacturing. Two technologies are being developed that can help electrify steel production processes: direct reduction of iron ore using electricity and deploying low-carbon electricity to make hydrogen, which can then be used to make steel. Existing energy system capacity expansion models do not yet represent these electrified production pathways well. This grant funds a research team at Dartmouth College of Erin Mayfield and Maron Greenleaf, along with researchers at Carbon Solutions. The team will model electrified technology options for replacing, retrofitting, or redeveloping the over 130 steel manufacturing sites in the United States and then expand the analysis to assess associated upgrading costs, production capacity, material demand, and labor impacts.

Improving understanding as to how these electrified steelmaking processes will be implemented will require close engagement with steel industry stakeholders who are making such transition decisions. To integrate this perspective in the study, the team will conduct technical consultations with 3-5 steel manufacturing and technology development firms. They will also conduct a set of community engagement activities by engaging local stakeholders across three steel production locales in the Upper Midwest. Additionally, the team will assemble a project advisory committee to provide feedback on the methodology and facilitate stakeholder engagement.

Along with academic research articles, the primary output from this project will be a multi-objective online planning and mapping platform that can be used to model various industry-wide electrification and decarbonization scenarios, which the team plans to disseminate widely through numerous briefings. The project will involve the training of two graduate students and multiple undergraduate students in industrial systems modeling, techno-economic assessment, and environmental justice. To further the community engagement portion of the work, the Sustainable Transitions Lab and Clinic at Dartmouth College will provide support to engage the interview participants.

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 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.

Rural areas are important, yet challenging, regions in which to advance electrification. In particular, the rural North is in a cold climate, has remote communities, has frequent need for back-up power (like generators) during periods of extreme weather, and has historically been dependent on fossil fuels. At the same time, these rural areas are also becoming likely spots for future renewable energy development, as they tend to have abundant natural resources and sparse population densities. This grant funds an interdisciplinary research team led by Ana Dyreson, Assistant Professor of Mechanical Engineering at Michigan Technological University, who will examine the technical and social barriers and opportunities for electrification in the rural northern region of the United States through three community-engaged case studies in Michigan (Baraga County), Wisconsin (Ashland and Iron counties), and Minnesota (Beltrami and Clearwater counties). Transitions associated with energy system electrification may also raise specific concerns for Tribal Nations in these rural regions, who have longstanding histories of facing energy and environmental extractivism.

The project will focus on studying issues associated with electrifying space heating and cooling, a particularly essential and difficult energy load to electrify in this region. Each case study will involve a pair of surveys in each of these communities, one at the beginning of the study to better understand current heating and cooling options and the other at the end to assess perceived barriers and opportunities for electrification. Surveys will be co-designed with the members of the communities themselves, prioritizing the involvement of Tribal Nation representatives. There will also be engineering analyses to assess the potential readiness of homes in these regions to install electrified residential heating and cooling systems under current conditions and future electrification scenarios. Using the survey results and the technical readiness assessment, the team will develop a model of household energy use and combine it with regional datasets to extend their model to the broader regional level. All of this research will be undertaken with a lens toward understanding and identifying the local and regional energy justice implications of these electrification options. Led by Ana Dyreson, additional research team members at Michigan Technological University include Chelsea Schelly, Timothy Scarlett, and Roman Sidortsov. To closely engage with the communities under study, Dyreson and her team will partner with the Center for Energy and Environment (CEE), a Minnesota-based non-governmental organization with decades of experience working with rural and Indigenous communities in the region on issues related to energy development. In addition to academic outputs, the team plans to develop an online, geospatial decision-support tool that will compare future home electrification scenarios and highlight accompanying technical, equity, and policy considerations.

This grant funds a research project by a team of scholars led by Noah Dormady at The Ohio State University, to better understand the economic, equity, and justice impacts of consumer electricity rate selection in Ohio and Pennsylvania. The academic research team includes Abdollah Shafieezadeh at The Ohio State University and Alberto Lamadrid at Lehigh University. They will examine the practice of consumers being offered and selecting above-market or predatory electricity rates using a number of qualitative and quantitative research approaches.

The team has assembled a robust electricity market rate database for Ohio, which contains millions of entries on both default standard service offer (SSO) electricity rates and competitive retail electric service (CRES) retail rates offered to consumers. After constructing a similar CRES rate database for Pennsylvania, the team will survey consumers in both states to better understand household electricity rate selection and the distributional impacts of such retail rates among different populations, paying particular attention to engaging low-income and historically underrepresented racial and ethnic populations. The survey will be administered in the Columbus and Cleveland-Youngstown metro areas of Ohio and in the Lehigh Valley, Lancaster, Poconos, and Harrisburg areas of Pennsylvania. The team will then partner with local community organizations in both states to engage underrepresented households in the study. In Ohio, the team will work with the Mid-Ohio Food Collective (MOFC), a large food bank, and the Mahoning-Youngstown Community Action Partnership (MYCAP), a nonprofit that helps administer the Home Energy Assistance Program, and plan to partner with similar local organizations in Pennsylvania.

Outputs from this project are expected to include economics and public policy articles reporting on the project findings in both Ohio and Pennsylvania. The team will also produce a detailed database containing daily electricity market data for both Ohio and Pennsylvania, as well as a separate database containing residential survey data. All data and code used for the statistical modeling and machine learning activities will also be made public. The team plans to leverage their extensive network of partnerships in government and the private sector to ensure broad dissemination of results to germane consumer protection, industrial, and regulatory communities. Numerous graduate students and undergraduate students will be trained in this project.

The shift toward electrified steel production, leading to a greater reliance on utilizing renewable energy, has the potential to increase variability of steelworker schedules and job quality. This would allow steel producers to use clean energy when it is readily available and cheaper, produce and store intermediate goods, and finish the manufacturing process at a later date. Doing so, however, introduces temporal and seasonal variabilities into the steel production process that would impact the jobs of steel workers.

This grant funds efforts by a team of engineers and social scientists to study the impacts on both steel workers and manufacturing processes associated with this increased adoption of renewable energy in the steel industry. The team is led by Rebecca Ciez and Partha Mukherjee at Purdue University. The team will start by conducting structured interviews with 15-20 steelworkers from across Indiana to develop a framework for understanding worker decision-making processes and how they make tradeoffs about employment opportunities. These interviews will inform the development of a survey of steel workers that will be implemented throughout five states in the Great Lakes region (Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, Ohio, Wisconsin) to help quantify how workers value different attributes of their work schedules, such as hourly wages, shift schedules, number of months worked per year, and overtime provided. Survey respondents will be recruited using a number of modalities, including engaging companies, local steelworker union chapters, and direct mailing to engage rural steel workers in areas where non-unionized steel mills are major employers. Survey results will inform the modeling of electrified hydrogen and steel production processes, focusing on better representing how renewable-based hydrogen processes might impact steelmaking production on a daily, weekly, seasonal, or yearly basis.

In addition to survey results and the hydrogen electrolysis modeling framework, outputs are expected to include academic articles, policy briefs, public repositories of shared data and code, and the training of two graduate students and one undergraduate student in survey methodologies and industrial energy systems analysis. While the framework developed will initially focus on electrified and decarbonized steel manufacturing, it may eventually be expanded and applied to other industries and manufacturing processes.

Electrification has the potential to introduce a tension for the electric grid, where electrifying homes increases system-wide demand, as well as peak demand, but it might also offer a means of abating that peak through additional demand response capacity, where power system managers can control how much load is on the system. These concerns are particularly top-of-mind in Texas given the effects of the 2021 Winter Storm Uri and given that the Texas grid is largely isolated from the other two electricity grid systems in the country.

This project supports a team of engineers from The University of Texas at Austin in Sergio Castellanos, Zoltan Nagy, and Javad Mohammadi to assess the impact of residential end-use electrification and demand response on the Texas grid. The team will use a combination of modeling platforms to evaluate four alternative future scenarios, each representing a different combination of climate projections and levels of residential electrification. For each scenario, they will draw on data from the ResStock model from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) to assess the energy use of 150 households across 3 different climate zones in Texas. They will then scale these results to estimate state-wide residential electricity demand out to 2050. These projections will be integrated into a second open-source platform, called CityLearn, to model the effects of building energy coordination and demand response on the projected load profiles. Finally, the team will incorporate the updated projections from CityLearn into a capacity expansion model for Texas to determine the infrastructure and resources required to meet these future demand needs.

In addition to the engineering analysis, the team will partner with the Texas PACE Authority (TPA) to help tailor, process, and disseminate study findings to relevant policy audiences and stakeholders. The team will be able to leverage TPA’s broad network of customers, trade associations, local government authorities, and other financing institutions to help ensure the project reaches an engaged audience.