This grant supports energy economist Christopher Knittel in his plans to implement a randomized controlled trial to study how individuals respond to information about their driving habits and how the provision of such information affects energy use and automobile fuel economy. In partnership with a company named Automatic, which manufactures and installs driving activity monitoring devices and provides that information to drivers, Knittel will examine how individual driving behavior is influenced by different kinds of information, packaged in a variety of ways. Automatic’s devices can detect and alert drivers during hard accelerations, hard braking, and speeds over 70 miles per hour. Knittel will study how different ways of presenting these data differentially affect driving behavior. Treatment groups will receive weekly aggregated summaries and comparisons of their driving habits to other drivers. In addition, Knittel will study how sustained exposure to these alerts (at either three or six months) changes driving habits. Though Automatic’s sensors will be installed free of charge to participants, individuals will be given the opportunity to purchase the devices, at different prices, at the study’s conclusion, allowing Knittel to estimate participants’ willingness to pay for this information. The transportation sector is the second largest energy consumer in the United States and accounts for over a quarter of all U.S. greenhouse gas emissions. This innovative RCT will help us understand better what interventions might lead consumers to change their driving habits in ways that reduce those emissions.

There are few, if any, reputable studies examining the public perception and public finance dimensions associated with the siting of energy infrastructure, which includes projects such as transmission lines, oil and natural gas pipelines, natural gas export terminals, large-scale wind and solar facilities, and  other large power plants. The studies that have been conducted have tended to focus on a single energy infrastructure project instead of looking across multiple projects simultaneously and have asked about hypothetical energy infrastructure developments instead of real-world examples. This grant funds a team led by David Konisky at Indiana University to conduct highly localized public opinion surveys related to 15 energy infrastructure projects that are currently in the planning stages across seven populous states. In addition to surveying local residents, the team will field complementary national surveys that will examine how public perceptions differ across infrastructure types. Finally, the team will develop a series of local public finance case studies laying out the likely economic impacts of a subset of these infrastructure projects, drawing on information from permit applications, siting and development plans, evidence from public hearings, and interviews with local officials and other stakeholders. All of the survey data, codebooks, and finance analysis will be publicly released at the end of the project, with the material to be archived at Harvard’s Dataverse.

Though most of the 99 operating nuclear reactors in the United States are likely to be retired by 2050, only four new nuclear plants are currently under construction. Since nuclear accounts for 20 percent of all U.S. electricity generation, significant new investment in nuclear generating technology is needed if the United States and the world are to keep a key source of no-carbon power generation. Doing so will require addressing cost, safety, waste, and proliferation concerns and a keen assessment of new reactor designs, technology development needs, new business models, and regulatory barriers.   This grant provides partial support to MIT to examine the potential of alternative nuclear generation technologies from cost, safety, reliability, waste, and proliferation perspectives. The study will also examine the associated research and development needs, regulatory reforms, and industrial support infrastructure needed to commercialize these new technologies. A faculty committee of top researchers from multiple disciplines has been assembled for the study, including Jacopo Buongiorno, Dennis Whyte, and Richard Lester of MIT and Michael Corradini of the University of Wisconsin, Madison. David Petti, of Idaho National Laboratory, will oversee the operational and management dimensions of the study as its executive director. An expert advisory board comprised of senior scholars and practitioners in the field will provide regular oversight of the overall project. The study is a crucial and necessary step in evaluating what role nuclear should play in the future of U.S. electricity generation.

This grant supports two projects led by the Environmental Defense Fund to investigate the environmental impacts of the wastewater used in the extraction of shale gas and oil. In the first project, EDF will partner with chemist Michael Thurman from the University of Colorado, Boulder to develop standard methods for identifying the chemical characteristics of wastewater generated by hydraulic fracturing. Fracking wastewater can differ significantly from site to site due to procedural and environmental factors. Wastewater from different sites might have vastly different environmental impacts, and thus necessitate different treatment and disposal procedures. Thurman’s research will allow for the characterization of wastewater samples from across different fracking sites and enable the creation of standardized reference benchmarks that researchers can use to better determine the constituents of fracking wastewater. In the second project, EDF will work with environmental engineer Karl Linden of the University of Colorado, Boulder, and molecular biologist Kartik Chandran of Columbia University to develop better treatment and disposal techniques for wastewater produced by hydraulic fracturing. In a series of experiments, Linden and Chandran will explore how biological treatment processes could be used to metabolize the organic compounds present in such wastewater. In addition to providing scientific and technical input to their scientific partners, EDF will help manage each collaboration, and assist in disseminating the research results.

High-quality, easily searchable data on the transmission, distribution, and use of electricity are hard to come by. Existing data sources usually fall short in a number of ways. Many data sets report electricity usage statistics only at monthly or yearly intervals, making it impossible to measure how demand varies from day-to-day, hour-to-hour, or minute-to-minute. Usage data are often aggregated at the household level, not broken down by individual appliance, making it difficult to study consumer behavior. Often, data are only available in hard-to-use formats that are not amendable to manipulation, combination, or visualization. Pecan Street has created a data analytics tool, called Dataport, to provide timely, disaggregated electricity usage information to researchers. Data are collected from more than 1,000 homes outfitted with appliance-level sensors that report energy usage at fine-grained intervals. These data are also presented in a way that can be easily queried and visualized. Funds from this grant support three initiatives aimed at strengthening Dataport and increasing its usefulness to researchers. First, the Dataport team will implement several technical improvements to the platform, including better visualization tools, an improved user interface, and a new capacity that allows researchers to draw information from multiple data sources simultaneously. Second, Pecan Street will expand and diversify available data through importing and integrating electricity usage and pricing data from several government, utility, and regional transmission sources. Third, Pecan Street will extend its academic outreach and education activities to expand use of the platform, including on-campus training sessions, a research conference, and a paper competition for papers using Dataport data.