The Women in Energy (WIE) program is an initiative developed by the Center on Global Energy Policy at Columbia University to provide professional development and networking opportunities to female students interested in a range of energy issues. Launched in 2015 with Sloan Foundation support, the program hosts seminars and networking events, provides mentoring, and gives summer internship stipends for students at universities both in the greater New York City region and, increasingly, the larger northeastern area of the United States. The program also connects current female students with female leaders in the energy sector from government, industry, and nonprofits. This grant provide two years of renewed support for the program.

Funds from this grant support a multi-institutional and multidisciplinary research project led by two economists at the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) (Beia Spiller and Kristina Mohlin) working in collaboration with power systems engineers at MIT (Karen Tapia-Ahumada and Ashwini Bharatkumar) and regulatory analysts at New York University (Burcin Unel) to understand how alternative electricity rate designs might impact the reliability of electricity distribution grids. Many households face a fixed, per kilowatt hour rate from their utility for their electricity use—whether it is midnight in the winter (when overall demand for electricity is low) or whether it is late afternoon on a hot, sunny summer day (when demand is high). Some utilities, however, are experimenting with a host of demand-varying pricing schemes, so that consumers pay higher per kilowatt hour costs when demand is high. There are many versions of these time varying rate design schemes (real time pricing, time of use pricing, variable and critical peak pricing, etc.). By changing the economic incentives facing consumers, these policies could impact the introduction of various distributed energy resources on the grid. You may, for example, be more inclined to install solar panels on your roof to generate your own power on hot, sunny summer afternoons to avoid paying much higher electricity rates during those times. Spiller, Mohlin, and their team plan to expand existing engineering simulation models and then apply them to real world data supplied through a partnership with ComEd of Illinois. This will allow them to estimate how various dynamic pricing schemes would affect investments in solar panels and other distributed energy resources, and how the subsequent impacts such investments would have on pollution, electricity prices, and total system costs.

This grant funds a collaboration between University of California, Davis energy economists James Bushnell and David Rapson and distribution systems engineer, Duncan Callaway of the University of California at Berkeley. The group plans to study how the rise of distributed energy resources (DERs) like rooftop solar panels and electric vehicles impact power quality and distribution system performance in California. Working with utilities (such as Southern California Edison and Pacific Gas & Electric Company) and state government regulators (including the California Public Utilities Commission and the California Air Resources Board), Bushnell and his colleagues will collect and combine data on solar photovoltaic installations and electric vehicle registrations and then map them to individual circuits in the California electricity distribution grid. This will allow the team to analyze in fine-grained detail how increases in solar photovoltaic installations and electric vehicles are likely to strain elements of the California electricity distribution system. The team will then investigate how the performance of distribution systems maps to various socioeconomic and demographic characteristics of California residents.

The Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) employs a substantial number of postbaccalaureate and postdoctoral scientists and economists. These positions train scholars how to undertake policy-relevant science and economics research in an applied setting, outside the university. This grant provides support to EDF to develop a more formalized training, networking, and mentoring program that will train 25 to 30 early-career researchers in the ancillary skills needed to succeed in applied research environments. Training will cover such topics as communications, proposal writing, program management, and team leadership. EDF will also organize a series of workshops that separately target postbaccalaureates and postdoctoral researchers to reflect the different skill development needs among these two groups and will implement a formal mentoring system that will link their postdoctoral fellows with senior scholars across the institution. Finally, EDF’s in-house social scientists will implement a series of surveys among participants to track the impact of this program over time.