This grant supports a study examining whether the upgrading of existing electricity transmission lines can obviate the need to build new transmission infrastructure corridors. Under the leadership of Principal Investigator Granger Morgan, the research team will study different transmission line upgrading options, including re-engineering existing transmission lines to improve their carrying capacity or switching from high-voltage alternating current (HVAC) lines to high-voltage direct current (HVDC) lines. Data will be collected from state public utility commissions about proposed or planned transmission line upgrades. This information will then be analyzed using an engineering model of the transmission system to understand which transmission line corridors might be best suited to upgrading or current conversion based on their technical and economic specifications.

Innovation in the energy sector often comes from unexpected places, utilizing research on problems or issues that are not directly energy related but that turn out to have application in the energy sector. Understanding these “knowledge spillovers,” as they are called, is critical to gaining a complete picture about how new energy technologies evolve over time. This grant funds a project led by Venkatesh Narayanamurti of Harvard University, Laura Diaz Anadon of the University of Cambridge, and Gabriel Chan of the University of Minnesota to investigate how knowledge spillovers contributed to three different low-carbon technologies—solar photovoltaics, lithium-ion batteries, and solid state lighting. The team will analyze patent data from the PATSTAT database to determine which innovations from other fields have led to significant advancements for the three aforementioned technologies. The researchers will then supplement this patent citation analysis with a bibliometric analysis of academic publications and with additional expert interviews and consultations. The team will then use existing engineering cost models to identify how various innovations from outside the energy sector contributed to cost reductions for each of the three technologies under study. In addition to academic research, the research team will prepare shorter commentaries and policy briefs aimed at informing policymakers and other nonspecialists about research results.

Pecan Street is an independent nonprofit organization that is a leading provider of high-resolution residential energy use data to the research community. Through its testbed of volunteer instrumented homes, Pecan Street is able to collect disaggregated circuit-level energy use information at 15-minute, 1-minute, and, increasingly, 1-second intervals. This unique data set is then provided free of charge to the academic community, helping facilitate research known as nonintrusive load monitoring (NILM), which allows scholars to disaggregate household-level energy use based on the unique power “signature” of each monitored appliance. Funds from this grant will allow Pecan Street to expand their data collection efforts through three interrelated projects. First, they will increase the number of homes within their existing test-bed in Austin, Texas that collect energy use data at 1-second intervals. Second, they will integrate additional data from Independent System Operators (or ISOs) around the country—information such as wholesale market pricing, forecasting, and generation information—that enriches the energy use data collected from the Pecan Street testbed. Third, Pecan Street will expand the number of instrumented homes in its network, adding in 100 additional homes in both upstate New York and the Bay Area of California.

This grant renews funding for a set of predoctoral fellowships in energy economics. In each of the past three academic years, Meredith Fowlie (University of California, Berkeley) and Ryan Kellogg (University of Chicago) have led a committee that solicits applications and selects a number of young academics for these two-year predoctoral fellowships. Selected fellows are generally in the final two years of their doctoral program and are conducting one or more studies examining different dimensions of the energy system. Previous fellows have come from an array of universities, including the University of Tennessee; University of Wisconsin, Madison; University of California, San Diego; and Cornell University, among others. The announcement for predoctoral fellowship applications is shared widely within the economics community, and the selection committee has received approximately 20 high-quality applicants each year. Funds from this grant will fund an additional two cohorts of three fellows each. In addition to covering stipend and tuition coverage, a small amount of money is provided for purchasing necessary data and for travel to professional meetings.