RESEARCH TOPICS OF INTEREST

Past and Ongoing Projects

I have had the opportunity to learn about a variety of topics during my time as a researcher. The thread which ties these topics together is an interest in energy, policy, and providing insight which can be used to make policy better. I elaborate on some key topic areas below.

GRID-EDGE UTILITIES

Distributed Energy Resources and Greater Minnesota's Utilities

The electricity industry is undergoing a profound shift in form and function; the industry’s future is envisioned to be one with increasingly decentralized power generation, and a business model less driven by large capital expenditures than by energy service provision. An important technological driver of this change is the evolution of distributed energy resources (DER), or, electricity generation or load management technologies which operate at the distribution grid level rather than the transmission grid level. Rapidly declining prices for facility-sized photovoltaic modules and the rise of real-time load control technologies are examples of these drivers. A critical but understudied population in this space is municipal and rural electric cooperative utilities, which serve one in five electricity customers in the United States. These consumer-owned utilities face different challenges and opportunities than investor-owned utilities due to their not-for-profit business models, governance structures, relatively small size, and the socio-economic classes of their customers. My goal is to better understand these utilities so that interested stakeholders can more successfully engage to achieve mutually desirably goals.

LIFE CYCLE ANALYSIS

Considering Cradle to Grave Environmental Impacts

Life cycle analysis, that is considering all activities associated with producing a product or delivering a service, is a powerful tool that can help us make better decisions. LCA allows us to examine trade-offs between, say, water use and solid waste production, and identify otherwise unforeseen negative consequences of changing some part of that production system. I have studied bioenergy systems extensively using LCA to explore uncertainty in greenhouse gas emissions, the impacts of variability in feedstock availability on fuel availability.

You can read some papers I've published on this topic:

UNCERTAINTY AND DECISION MAKING

Accounting for Risk to Improve Our Decisions

Complex systems and hard problems require us to account for the "known unknowns" and make our best guess at the "unknown unknowns". Exploring what we know, what we don't know, and why we don't know what we don't know though analytical techniques help us reduce the likelihood that we'll make a decision that moves us in the wrong direction. Through my work studying bioenergy, I have implemented some of these methods (e.g., Monte Carlo simulation) to make recommendations on how to design policy to better account for risks.

You can read some papers I've published on this subject:

Projects: Project