Energy Policy Commons^™

Towards Supporting Real-Time Estimation Of Vehicle Fuel Consumption And Co2 Emissions In Smart City Applications, Abrar Alali, Stephan Olariu

Computer Science Faculty Publications

This paper evaluates a simplified physics-based energy demand model designed to estimate vehicle fuel consumption and CO₂ emissions—a critical tool for sustainable transportation planning and smart city applications. Unlike data-driven regression models that lack generalizability for user-defined conditions or complex physics-based approaches that rely on extensive, often proprietary data, the simplified model is distinguished by its minimal parameter requirements, depending primarily on a single, overarching powertrain efficiency value. A key contribution is the comprehensive empirical evaluation of the simplified model against official Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) test data across multiple driving cycles and vehicle types, providing a rigorous validation previously …

More Nyc Households To Qualify For Energy Efficiency Upgrades Under Tweaked State Program, Elise Robley

Capstones

The New York State Energy Research and Development Authority's EmPower+ program aims to provide low- and moderate-income households with energy-efficient upgrades. These upgrades help lower people's energy costs, especially how much it costs to heat and cool their homes. Starting this year, more low-income households in New York City will be eligible to apply for the program's benefits. This piece looks at this history of the EmPower+ program, why it's so beneficial to low- and moderate-income New Yorkers, and the potential positive impact the program's tweaks could have on local communities of color that might be dealing with high energy …

Developing A Waste-To-Energy Assessment Framework Integrating Engineering And Policy Dimensions Using A Triple Bottom Line Approach, Izech Brian O. Edwin, King Harold A. Recto

Electronics, Computer, and Communications Engineering Faculty Publications

The management of municipal solid waste (MSW) in swiftly urbanizing Philippine cities has emerged as a critical concern in both energy and governance. Dependence on landfills is approaching critical thresholds as disposal sites near saturation, transportation costs escalate, and host communities increasingly resist garbage transfers. In response, this study proposes a comprehensive Waste-to-Energy (WtE) assessment framework that integrates engineering evaluation with policy and stakeholder analysis to support sustainable decision- making.

Using Baguio City as a case study, the framework applies a Triple Bottom Line (TBL) approach to evaluate three waste management scenarios: (1) current landfill-dominated practices, (2) engineered landfill with …

Data-Driven Evaluation Of Sustainable Waste-To-Energy Pathways For Intelligent Urban Systems, Izech Brian O. Edwin, King Harold A. Recto

Electronics, Computer, and Communications Engineering Faculty Publications

The handling of municipal solid waste (MSW) in swiftly urbanizing Philippine cities poses intricate energy and governance challenges. In Baguio City, reliance on landfills has reached critical levels due to diminishing capacity, rising transport costs, and opposition to trash transfers by nearby LGUs. Although shaped by unique topographical and governance constraints, Baguio’s situation reflects issues faced by other rapidly growing Philippine cities; therefore, analyzing it offers insights for national MSW decision-making. This study applies a triple bottom line (TBL) framework to assess three management scenarios: (1) Status Quo, where all MSW is landfilled with no energy recovery; (2) Landfill with …

Cross-Domain Disaggregation Of Electricity For Heating In All-Electric School Buildings – Learning From School Buildings With District Heating, Synne Krekling Lien, Ada Canaydin, Clayton Miller, Chun Fu, Hussain Kazmi, Jayaprakash Rajasekharan

Research Collection College of Integrative Studies

Electric heating is widespread in Norwegian buildings and significantly contributes to peak loads in the electricity grid. Non-residential buildings are typically heated either by district heating or a combination of electrical heating appliances. Despite its widespread use, most buildings lack sub-meters for electric heating. As a result, the true potential for energy efficiency and load flexibility from heating appliances in buildings remains unknown. Non-intrusive load monitoring and disaggregation techniques offer alternatives to sub-metering by using data-driven methods to extract electricity use for appliances from time-series data. However, little research has been conducted on disaggregating electrical heating loads from low-resolution data, …

Planning For Solar Equity: Zoning And Land Use Strategies For Community Solar Gardens In Rural Minnesota, Mahmoud Othman

Community and Regional Planning Program: Theses

This project examines how land use planning and zoning can support equitable deployment of community solar gardens (CSGs) in rural Minnesota counties and townships. Although Minnesota is widely regarded as a policy leader in community solar, most solar arrays are concentrated in metropolitan areas with greater planning capacity and demand. By contrast, rural jurisdictions must navigate dispersed populations, limited staff, and competing agricultural land uses. Focusing on Clay, Stearns, and Chisago Counties, the study analyzes local ordinances and related land use policies to understand how community-scale solar is defined, sited, permitted, and decommissioned.

Solar regulations are systematically coded for key …

Information Strategies In The Electric Vehicles Battery Reverse Supply Chain With Blockchain Technology, Tianqin Shi, Yanting Huang

Mineta Transportation Institute

The surge in demand for electric vehicles (EV) and EV batteries, coupled with supply chain vulnerabilities and price instability, has driven the need for efficient and sustainable EV battery recycling processes. This report investigates the potential of blockchain technology to address the challenges in the EV battery reverse supply chain (moving goods from the end customer back towards the manufacturer), focusing on enhancing transparency and coordination, as well as mitigating the impact of unregulated recycling. Key stakeholders in this analysis include manufacturers, recyclers, and regulatory bodies. To achieve these objectives, the study employs a mixed-methods approach. It includes semi-structured interviews …

Decarbonization Of The Fishing Fleet In The Galapagos Islands : Governance Challenges And Opportunities For Implementing Renewable Energy Sources, Byron Eduardo Robles Romero

World Maritime University Dissertations

No abstract provided.

Poster Abstract: Field Evaluation Of Body Thermoregulation-Based Dynamic Bedroom Air Temperature Control To Improve Sleep, Wenhao Zhang, Stefano Schiavon, Clayton Miller

Research Collection College of Integrative Studies

Sleep is essential for human health and well-being. Previous lab-based studies have shown that dynamically adjusting bedroom temperature according to body thermoregulation can improve sleep quality and thermal satisfaction. However, such strategies have not been tested in real-world settings, and there is a lack of practical solutions developed for residential buildings. In this work, we test a body thermoregulation-based dynamic air conditioning (AC) control strategy designed for typical Singapore homes and evaluated it in a pilot field deployment. The preliminary findings suggest that the proposed strategy can be successfully implemented in real bedroom settings and may improve sleep outcomes.

Enhancing Urban Energy Modeling: A Case Study Of Data Acquisition, Enrichment, And Evaluation In Berlin, Felix Rehmann, Martín Mosteiro-Romero, Clayton Miller, Rita Streblow

Research Collection College of Integrative Studies

Urban Building Energy Modeling (UBEM) has become a critical tool for developing local heating and cooling plans, as required by the European Union. Despite growing interest, the reproducibility and reliability of UBEM studies remain limited due to data scarcity and workflow complexity. This paper presents a comprehensive framework to evaluate the data pipeline in UBEM, with a particular focus on data acquisition, enrichment, simulation, calibration, and information application. The approach applies three distinct UBEM workflows (CityEnergyAnalyst, DistrictGenerator, and SimStadt) to the Mierendorffinsel district in Berlin, Germany. We compare the based on quantitative performance metrics and qualitative framework criteria. The results …

Innovation Within Sustainable Technologies: The Future Of Energy Conserving Hardware In Data Centers, Brooke Cruz

Journal of the Symposium of University Research and Creative Expression

Project Mentor(s): Susan Rivera, PhD

The US is confronting a growing energy demand crisis, with analysts projecting a 2.4% rise in data center energy consumption by 2030. Data centers are major energy consumers, with primary usage concentrated in IT equipment and extensive cooling systems. While Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) remains the leading metric for assessing energy efficiency, it is limited to assessing total facility energy and IT energy use without accounting for environmental and social impacts. Supplementary metrics of data center energy consumption include Water Usage Effectiveness (WUE) and Carbon Usage Effectiveness (CUE), which measure water use and carbon emissions, …

Debt Accumulation In Fossil Fuel-Reliant Localities During The Shale Boom And Implications For The Energy Transition, Brandon Charles

Center for Policy Research

The energy transition away from fossil fuels poses long-term economic risks for communities reliant on oil and natural gas production and some may face exceptionally difficult challenges in adapting to the change. Bonds issued by these localities during the shale boom may undermine their financial resilience as shale activity dwindles. Declining tax revenue may undermine their ability to service the debt and maintain the associated physical assets. This study addresses the extent to which local governments in oil- and natural gas-producing communities accumulated significantly more municipal debt during the shale boom than other communities. The analysis uses bond issuance data …

Compensation, Horizontal Diffusion, And Bottom-Up Pathways: State Climate Policies In The United States And Australia, Ian Bailey, Roger Karapin

Publications and Research

Recent years have seen growing interest in subnational governments as arenas of climate governance, but limited systematic research exists on the extent, conditions, or pathways through which subnational climate policies can influence, or compensate for deficits in, national policies. This article addresses this gap by examining options for states to influence climate policy in the United States and Australia, two countries where federal governments have made limited progress in developing national climate policies. As an analytical framework, it conceives a typology of state government approaches to climate policy that distinguishes among compensating, horizontal diffusion, and bottom-up pathways. It then uses …

Identifying Latent Workforce Capacities For Extreme Heat Resilience: An Artificial Intelligence Assisted Approach, Jieshu Wang, Patricia Solís

Technology & Society Faculty Publications

Extreme heat events, intensified by climate change, pose critical challenges to public health, infrastructure, and workforce resilience. Despite the urgency of these challenges, there is no systematic framework to identify workforce adaptive capacities that can help build regional heat resilience. This study introduces a novel large language model assisted approach, using task-level data from the O*NET dataset, to identify workforce capacities that enhance heat resilience. By defining heat-solution tasks as activities mitigating heat impacts, protecting public health, or improving infrastructure, we classify heat-solution occupations and dual-impact occupations, which are both vulnerable to heat and critical to heat resilience. A case …

Four Nebraska Public Power District (Nppd) Irrigation Electricity Purchase Options, Matt Stockton

Cornhusker Economics

Farm managers are destined to face a myriad of choices while looking for and seeking the right balance between methods and outcomes that satisfy their individual farm’s needs. Successful farms require productivity, profitability, and continuity. This holds true for the many production choices made throughout the year. One of these opportunities is the purchase of electricity for irrigation. Nebraska is a unique state in that its electric power is generated and delivered by public power companies. The largest single entity in that system is NPPD, which serves all or part of 84 of the 93 counties within the state. NPPD …

Revealing Building Operating Carbon Dynamics For Multiple Cities, Winston Yap, Abraham Noah Wu, Clayton Miller, Filip Biljecki

Research Collection College of Integrative Studies

Achieving carbon neutrality is a critical yet elusive goal for many cities, hindered by limited understanding of the relationship between building emissions and their surroundings. To address this challenge, we present a generalizable open science framework that integrates building energy-consumption data, multi-modal geospatial inputs and graph deep learning to quantify building operating emissions and their links to urban form and socio-economic factors. Applying this approach to five cities with diverse climates and planning contexts—Melbourne, New York City (Manhattan), Seattle, Singapore and Washington DC—we demonstrate that our models explain 78.4% of the variation in building operating carbon emissions across cities, achieving …

International Comparison Of Weather And Emission Predictive Building Control, Christian Hepf, Ben Gottkehaskamp, Clayton Miller, Thomas Auer

Research Collection College of Integrative Studies

Building operational energy alone accounts for 28% of global carbon emissions. A sustainable building operation promises enormous savings, especially under the increasing concern of climate change and the rising trends of the digitalization and electrification of buildings. Intelligent control strategies play a crucial role in building systems and electrical energy grids to reach the EU goal of carbon neutrality in 2050 and to manage the rising availability of regenerative energy. This study aims to prove that one can create energy and emission savings with simple weather and emission predictive control (WEPC). Furthermore, this should prove that the simplicity of this …

Financial Policy For A Green Economy In A Resource-Rich Emerging Economy, Arlyana Abubakar, Prayudhi Azwar, Riris Shanti, Salman Fathoni, Noer Aida Triandini

Bulletin of Monetary Economics and Banking

This paper analyzes policies aimed at fostering a green economy in a resource-abundant, megadiverse nation such as Indonesia. This study use Delphi and Analytic Network Process methodologies, grounded in the perspectives of regulators, academics, experts, and practitioners in the green economy, to identify the determinants of green financial policies, revealing that fiscal instruments are of paramount importance. Furthermore, both the case and the respondents are Indonesian. This underscores the necessity of instituting incentives in environmentally sustainable sectors and disincentives in carbon-intensive industries. Therefore, the suitable allocation of green budgets within fiscal policy is essential for addressing market failures and expediting …

Energetic And Economic Aspects Of Rebound, Part Ii: Applications Of The Framework, Matthew Kuperus Heun, Gregor Semieniuk, Paul Brockway

University Faculty Publications and Creative Works

Widespread implementation of energy efficiency is a key greenhouse gas emissions mitigation measure, but rebound can ‘‘take back’’ energy savings. However, the absence of solid analytical foundations hinders empirical determination of rebound magnitudes. In Part I, we developed foundations of a rigorous, analytical, consumer-sided rebound framework that is approachable for both energy analysts and economists. In this paper (Part II), we develop energy, expenditure, and consumption planes, a novel, mutually consistent, and numerically precise way to visualize and illustrate rebound. Further, we operationalize the macro factor (k) for macroeconomic rebound. Using the framework and rebound planes, we calculate and show …

Pluriversal Energy Justice Through An Intersectional Feminist Lens: Analyzing Rural Electrification Injustices And Policy Pathways At Kenya's Garissa Solar Park, Carolyne M. Musyoka

Dartmouth College Master’s Theses

Located approximately 4 km from Raya village in Garissa County, the Garissa Solar Park spans

85 hectares and was envisioned as a flagship renewable energy project. Yet, despite its scale and proximity, the marginalized pastoralist community of Raya continues to face acute energy poverty, limited irrigation capacity, and exclusion from the material and socio-ecological benefits of the green energy project. This study critically examines the systemic energy injustices embedded within the Garissa Solar Park—specifically procedural, distributive, and recognition-based inequalities—and critiques the project’s failure to deliver on principles of equity, local meaningful and democratic participation, and gender inclusion.

The research assesses …