This proposed grant will provide partial funding for four Ph.D. students per year for two years (eight total) to conduct research on energy data analytics at Duke University’s Energy Data Analytics Lab (EDAL). Candidates will be drawn from a range of natural and social science disciplines—economics, engineering, environmental science, computer science, statistics, mathematics—and will be required to have faculty supervisors drawn from both energy-related domains and data-science relevant disciplines. Each pre-doctoral fellow will be expected to produce at least one paper that emerges from their fellowship research. All datasets produced will be made available through the EDAL repository. Fellows will has access to EDAL’s high performance computing environments and have the opportunity to lead an undergraduate energy data science team over a summer term. An Energy Data Analytics Symposium will be held at the end of the grant period to feature student work and that of invited internal and external senior scholars.

Among the most critical, unanswered research questions in energy and environmental policy is determining the economic impact of carbon dioxide emissions on society. This measure, the social cost of carbon (SCC), is defined as the dollar value cost to society of emitting one ton of carbon dioxide (or carbon dioxide equivalent gas) into the atmosphere. Estimating the SCC is necessary for conducting cost-benefit analyses of more than 150 federal laws and regulations in the United States. This grant to Resources for the Future (RFF) provides partial support for a large scale initiative that would develop an improved computational platform for estimating the SCC. RFF plans to put in place an integrated, modular framework that disaggregates the SCC estimation process into four distinct modules: socioeconomics, climate, damages, and discounting. Doing so will allow the best natural and social science research in each area to inform projections and estimations on each topic. These modules will then be linked together through an open source, computationally efficient, publicly accessible, and fully documented platform. This approach will help economists and climate scientists better compare similarities and differences among the three major integrated climate assessment models that underpin the SCC.

This grant to the Council on Library and Information Resources funds a fellowship program for four, two-year postdocs interested in working at the intersection of energy economics and data science. As large, complex datasets on energy production, transportation, and use become increasingly available, demand has emerged for a new type of scholar with one foot firmly in energy economics—the data it uses, the questions it asks, the methodologies it deploys—and one foot in data science. These fellowships aim to fill some of that need by creating postdoctoral positions that provide such training. Supported fellows will work on a diverse array of projects such as energy data visualization, integrating multiple datasets, and establishing university-wide energy data storage and access platforms. Fellows will be placed at four energy research centers that are existing grantees in the Foundation’s Energy and Environment program: University of California Berkeley’s Energy Institute at Haas, the Energy Institute at the University of Texas at Austin, Duke University’s Energy Data Analytics Lab, and the Energy Policy Institute at the University of Chicago. Fellows will be selected in close cooperation with researchers at each institute, ensuring that candidates have both the skills and research interests each institute needs. As a signal of demand for the fellows, participating Centers have agreed to cover 50% of each fellow’s stipend and benefits costs. The fellowship program will be administered by the Council on Library and Information Resources, which has experience running several successful fellowship programs and has well-established recruitment, selection, mentoring, and professional development processes, including annual network-building workshops and the provision of micro-grants to selected fellows for collaborative projects.