Projects
How Do We Manage the Energy Mid-Transition? Transitioning from a mostly fossil to a fully non-fossil energy system requires managing intricate interactions between two sets of infrastructure not designed to work well together, which poses reliability, cost, culture, and other risks. My work on the mid-transition asks questions like, what is the minimum scale at which fossil infrastructures can operate? What discontinuities should we expect? What is the role of planning and coordination as energy infrastructures change, while providing crucial services for everyone?
How Does Deep Building Efficiency Shape Grid Futures? Deep decarbonization implies the need for grid capacity many times that of today — suggesting that capacity expansion models might not be capturing important qualitative alternatives to extremely large and rapid buildout of new electricity generation. In particular, making homes safer and more comfortable via deep building efficiency could have major benefits not just from an adaptation perspective, but also by dramatically reshaping the future of peak electricity demand for heat and cooling.
Can Advance Planning Facilitate Better Energy Transition Outcomes? We know that sudden closures of large facilities, particularly those in communities with limited other industries, can be highly disruptive — and we see these closures and this disruption all the time in the context of an unjust transition away from fossil fuels. I’m looking at how advance notice might improve communities’ ability to plan effective transitions, building on prior work arguing that infrastructure age matters.
How is the Electricity System Changing? The US has a lot of power plants, some of which are nearing their end-of-life. As policies, cost profiles, and public preferences change, so too does the electricity system. Check out a map of power plants by capacity, fuel, and oldest unit in-service year that I made here: did you know the oldest operating generator in the US was put into service in 1891? These changes affect utilities and resources in different ways. I’m currently working on projects to characterize future expectations about operating assets by utility and to characterize the hydroelectric system’s operational parameters, in part to help understand how that system interacts with the rest of the electricity system–particularly under high intermittent electricity penetration.
What Socioenvironmental Attitudes Do Written Texts Reveal? Surveys and interviews are expensive. This major ongoing project asks: how well can we derive information about societal attitudes from existing texts using computational methods? I look at fiction and nonfiction narrative works, Internet-based texts like Tweets and Facebook posts, and other ephemeral texts like newspapers, court cases, and meeting minutes to try to test how well computationally derived data performs against traditional attitudinal data. I am especially excited about the potential for computational approaches to enable retrospective analysis, in addition to potential cost and time savings and reduced research fatigue in highly studied communities.
Some of my other ongoing projects–including work on how deep building efficiency contributes to human safety and grid stability, what it means to be in the energy mid-transition, the role of public ownership in a coordinated transition, and community response to infrastructural development, is at early stages–drop me a line at egrubert@nd.edu if you’d like to hear more.