This article, by Joie Ling, is part of a series highlighting members of the Office of Sustainability’s Experts Database. In a collaboration with instructor Hannah Monroe’s course, LSC 561: Writing Science for the Public, students interviewed campus sustainability experts and produced short feature stories.
Walking around during graduate school at MIT, Morgan Edwards, who is now an assistant professor at the La Follette School of Public Affairs, would be confronted with the familiar smell of natural gas leaking from the aging gas infrastructure of the city. These tale-tell signs of a failing energy infrastructure have become increasingly common, posing both immediate and long-term risks. In response, governments and communities are working to transition away from traditional energy sources to more sustainable practices.
Edwards and the Climate Action Lab provide guidance through these nebulous transitions by utilizing systems modeling to help map concrete paths forward.
It takes decades to fully implement transitions from fossil fuels and other climate change-mitigation policies. As a result, unforeseen implications and challenges are usually not understood until years later, which makes it hard to assess the policies before significant investments are made.
Systems modeling helps overcome this barrier. By using data about current energy policies, demographics, geographical variables, and other factors, systems modeling helps to simulate different climate change solutions to assess potential impacts on both the climate and people. The models help visualize potential challenges and predict impacts that help better inform the public and policymakers.
One area of research Edwards’s lab is working on concerns electrification, or the switching away from fossil fuel-based appliances like gas stoves to electric-based ones like induction stovetops and heat pumps. In 2022, President Biden signed the Inflation Reduction Act, which offered incentives for individuals to adopt electrification technologies. Solutions like electrification are usually sold as simple switch-overs, backed with incentives that make them attractive to consumers. However, these policies and their purported benefits are not necessarily straightforward, nor are they one-size-fits-all solutions.
When considering the impact of policies like electrification, at the forefront of Edwards’ mind is the idea of distributive energy justice, or the consideration of who has access to these sustainable energy technologies.
“We work on trying to understand who is adopting new energy technologies like heat pumps, and who’s being left out, and what that might mean for future costs of energy for low-income or vulnerable populations,” she said.
Notably, we still don’t know the impacts of the incentives offered by the Inflation Reduction Act on a national level or on energy equity. To address this uncertainty, Edwards turns to big data from the past.
“Our state and local governments are laboratories for climate policy,” Edwards said.
Using data from similar climate policies, Edwards and her lab are working on understanding who these incentives actually help as people adopt new energy technologies.
It’s vital that no one gets left behind in these transitions, both from a sustainability and economic perspective. Edwards provided the example of a neighborhood electrifying away from natural gas. As this process doesn’t happen overnight, communities pass through a transition period.
“You still need to maintain all that natural gas infrastructure that was previously delivering gas to those homes,” Edwards said of the process. But as more people switch over to pure electric, the houses still using gas begin to shoulder more of the cost of maintaining the old infrastructure, getting caught in something experts call “the utility death spiral.” And as these old infrastructures become more expensive to maintain, the energy equity gap widens.
By identifying the groups that may have a tougher time accessing these technologies and by incorporating appropriate coordinated planning and policy, Edwards believes such equity issues can be avoided.
“We’re setting things up,” she said, “not just for this picture that we might have in 2050, but for all the steps along the way.”