Students who interact in energy studies at MIT develop an integrative understanding of energy in addition to expertise required of tomorrow’s energy professionals, leaders, and innovators in analysis, business, coverage, administration, and governance. Two energy alumni just lately shared their experiences as half of MIT’s energy group, and how their work connects to energy right this moment.
Abigail Ostriker ’16, who majored in utilized arithmetic, is now pursuing a PhD in economics at MIT, the place she is conducting analysis into whether or not backed flood insurance coverage causes overdevelopment. Prior to her graduate studies, she carried out two years of analysis into well being economics with Amy Finkelstein, the John and Jennie S. MacDonald Professor of Economics at MIT. Addison Stark SM ’10, PhD ’15, whose levels are in mechanical engineering and expertise and coverage, is the affiliate director for energy innovation at the Bipartisan Policy Center in Washington, which focuses on implementing efficient coverage on essential matters for American residents. He additionally serves as an adjunct professor at Georgetown University, the place he teaches a course on clear energy innovation. Prior to those roles, he was a fellow and appearing program director at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy.
Q: What experiences did you will have that impressed you to pursue energy studies?
Stark: I grew up on a farm in rural Iowa, surrounded by a rising biofuels business and bearing witness to the potential impacts of local weather change on agriculture. I then went to the University of Iowa as an undergrad. While there, I used to be fortunate sufficient to function one of the pupil representatives on a committee that put collectively a big decarbonization plan for the college. I acknowledged at the time that the college not solely wanted to place collectively a coverage, but in addition to consider what applied sciences they needed to procure to implement their targets. That expertise elevated my consciousness of the large challenges surrounding local weather change. I used to be lucky to have attended the University of Iowa as a result of a big proportion of the college students had an environmental outlook, and many school members have been concerned with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and engaged with local weather and sustainability points at a time when many different science and engineering colleges hadn’t to the similar diploma.
Q: How did your time at MIT inform your eventual work in the energy area?
Ostriker: I took my first economics class in my freshman fall, however I didn’t actually perceive what economics may do till I took Energy Economics and Policy [14.44J/15.037] with Professor Christopher Knittel at the Sloan School the following yr. That class turned the discipline from a set of unrealistic maximizing equations right into a framework that would make sense of actual folks’s selections and predict how incentives have an effect on outcomes. That expertise led me to take a category on econometrics. The mixture made me really feel like economics was a robust set of instruments for understanding the world — and perhaps tweaking it to get a barely higher end result.
Stark: Completing my grasp’s in the Technology and Policy Program (TPP) and in mechanical engineering at MIT was invaluable. The give attention to methods considering that was being employed in TPP and at the MIT Energy Initiative (MITEI) has been crucial in shaping my considering round the greatest challenges in local weather and energy.
While pursuing my grasp’s diploma, I labored with Daniel Cohn, a analysis scientist at MITEI, and Ahmed Ghoniem, a professor of mechanical engineering, who later grew to become my PhD advisor. We seemed at rather a lot of large questions on easy methods to combine superior biofuels into right this moment’s transportation and distribution infrastructures: Can you ship it in a pipeline? Can you transport it? Are folks capable of put it into infrastructure that we’ve already spent billions of {dollars} constructing out? One of the essential classes that I realized whereas at MITEI — and it’s led to rather a lot of my considering right this moment — is that to ensure that us to have an efficient energy transition, there have to be ways in which we will make the most of present infrastructure.
Being concerned with and changing into a co-president of the MIT Energy Club in 2010 actually helped to form my expertise at MIT. When I got here to MIT, one of the first issues that I did was attend the MIT Energy Conference. In the early days of the membership and of MITEI — in ’07 — there was a sure “energy” round energy at MIT that basically bought rather a lot of us enthusiastic about careers in the discipline.
Q: How does your present analysis connect with energy, and in what methods do the fields of economics and energy join?
Ostriker: Along with my classmate Anna Russo, I’m at the moment learning whether or not backed flood insurance coverage causes over-development. In the U.S., many flood maps are out of date and backward-looking: Flood danger is rising on account of local weather change, so in lots of places, insurance coverage premiums now value lower than anticipated damages. This creates an implicit subsidy for dangerous areas that distorts worth alerts and might trigger a excessive quantity of properties to be constructed. We wish to estimate the measurement of the subsidies and the impact they’ve on improvement. It’s a difficult query as a result of it’s exhausting to discover a technique to evaluate areas that appear precisely the similar besides for his or her insurance coverage premiums. We are hoping to get there by trying at boundaries in the flood insurance coverage maps — areas the place true flood danger is the similar however premiums are totally different. We hope that by bettering our understanding of how insurance coverage costs have an effect on land use, we will help governments to create extra environment friendly insurance policies for local weather resilience.
Many economists are learning points associated to each energy and the setting. One definition of economics is the examine of trade-offs — easy methods to greatest allocate scarce assets. In energy, there are questions akin to: How ought to we design electrical energy markets in order that they robotically meet demand with the lowest-cost combine of generation? As the generation combine strikes from nearly all fossil fuels to a better penetration of renewables, will that market design nonetheless work, or will it have to be tailored in order that renewable energy firms nonetheless discover it engaging to take part?
In addition to theoretical questions on how markets work, economists additionally examine the means actual folks or firms reply to insurance policies. For instance, if retail electrical energy costs began to vary by the hour or by the minute, how would folks’s energy use reply to that? To reply this query convincingly, you could discover a state of affairs through which the whole lot is nearly similar between two teams, besides that one group faces totally different costs. You can’t at all times do a randomized experiment, so you should discover one thing nearly like an experiment in the actual world. This sort of toolkit can also be used rather a lot in environmental economics. For occasion, we’d examine the impact of air pollution on college students’ check scores. In that setting, economists’ instruments of causal inference make it potential to maneuver past an noticed correlation to a press release that air pollution had a causal impact.
Q: How do you suppose we will make the shift towards a clear energy-based economic system a extra urgent situation for folks throughout the political spectrum?
Stark: If we’re critical about addressing local weather change as a rustic, we have to acknowledge that any coverage must be bipartisan; it might want to hit 60 votes in the Senate. Very shortly — inside the next few years — we have to develop a set of strong bipartisan insurance policies that may transfer us towards decarbonization by mid-century. If the IPCC suggestions are to be adopted, our final objective is to hit net-zero carbon emissions by 2050. What which means to me is that we have to body up all of the advantages of a big clear energy program to handle local weather change. When we handle local weather change, one of the worthwhile issues that’s going to occur is main funding in expertise deployment and improvement, which includes creating jobs — which is a bipartisan situation.
As we wish to construct out a decarbonized future, one factor that should occur is reinvesting in our nationwide infrastructure, which is a matter that’s acknowledged in a bipartisan sense. It’s going to require extra nuance than simply the pure Green New Deal method. In order to get Republicans on board, we have to understand that funding can’t be primarily based solely on renewables. There are rather a lot of folks whose economies depend upon the continued and sensible use of fossil assets. We have to consider how we develop and deploy carbon seize applied sciences, as these applied sciences are going to be integral in garnering extra help from rural and conservative communities for the energy transition.
The Republican Party is embracing the position of nuclear energy greater than some Democrats are. The key factor is that right this moment, nuclear is way and away the most prevalent supply of zero-carbon electrical energy that we have now. So, increasing nuclear energy is a critically essential piece of decarbonizing energy, and Republicans have recognized that as a spot the place they want to make investments together with carbon seize, utilization, and storage — one other expertise with much less enthusiasm on the environmental left. Finding methods to bridge occasion traces on these essential applied sciences is one of the greatest items that I feel shall be essential in bringing a couple of low-carbon future.