Dennis has focused his career on technology and sustainability policy in emerging and developing economies. His research interests include technology and innovation policy and impacts to resource and rural development, technology transfer and the political economy of land use management. He has led programs with the Paris based International Energy Agency, as an official of the OECD, working with emerging economies on energy technology policy and contributing to the Agency’s analysis of energy, environment and climate policies (specifically working collaboratively with China and other transition economies in exploring long-term clean energy options, including advanced bioenergy, carbon sequestration and negative emissions systems.) Prior to living in Berkeley, he spent five years in France, and seven years in Beijing, China – advising government and industrial clients on sustainability and technology deployment initiatives. He holds a BA in political science (international relations) and a concentration in East Asian studies from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA).
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I am currently working as Senior Researcher Associate at UCL Institute for Sustainable Resources where I lead the finance research area of the GREEN-WIN project. I focus on climate and sustainability finance policies and governance arrangements in order to contribute to overcoming financial barriers to mitigation and adaptation.
Before joining UCL, I worked for the OECD (Green Growth Unit, Economics Department) as Marie-Curie Fellow, a two-year research grant funded by the European Commission. At the OECD I analysed the effectiveness of energy policies to boost energy investments in Europe. Prior to that, I worked for research centers (FEEM and ICCG) and institutions, including the Italian Association Energy Economics, where I was responsible for the Economic area (2009–2013).
During my PhD, I was visiting scholar at the Renewable and Appropriate Energy Lab, UC Berkeley under the supervision of Prof. Daniel Kammen (2010–2011). I have worked on a range of novel ways to overcome the first-investment costs of energy efficiency and renewable energy.
I got my PhD in Business Administration at Polytechnic University of Marche and University of California, Berkeley (co-tutorship of doctoral thesis) with a focus on energy financing policy. My research interests include renewable and energy efficiency deployment, climate finance and energy policy.
Ian is a National Defense Science and Engineering Graduate Fellow in the Energy and Resources Group and a member of the inaugural “Environment and Society: Data Science for the 21st Century” National Science Foundation Research Traineeship (NRT) cohort. His research interests lie at the intersection of energy systems, climate change adaptation, and global health. He is a member of the Next Generation Ecosystem Experiments Arctic team, investigating biogeochemical factors governing energy fluxes in arctic tundra environments from the plant scale to the model grid-cell scale. He is also interested in developing better tools for characterizing seasonal snowpack variation, in order to improve forecasts of streamflow, water availability, and hydropower production. Ian serves as project manager for Tiny House in My Backyard, a student project to design and build mobile, affordable, and sustainable net-zero energy housing on the Berkeley Global Campus. Prior to arriving at UC Berkeley, he received his BA from Harvard University in Applied Mathematics and spent three years modeling trends in global injury rates at the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation. Outside of academia, Ian is a member of the Tahoe Backcountry Ski Patrol, and he writes about mountain adventures and environmental issues on his blog at TheInertia.com.
Jessica Reilly who is currently supported by a Fulbright Fellowship to study coastal climate change in Mexico, has now also been awarded the Institute of Current World Affairs Fellowship. Over the next two years, Jessica and her partner Josh Moman will sail the Pacific coast of Central America, cross through the Panama canal, and move into the Caribbean to explore the region by way of the ocean, looking at climate change. She will use her mapping experience to gather data and build maps showing vulnerability to sea level rise for each country. By sustainably harnessing wind and sun to travel, Jessica hopes to access remote locations, share the ocean-bound experience of local communities, and listen to and document stories of climate adaptation at the shores of Latin America and the Caribbean with words, images, and video.
Kunkel is the co-author of Mountain State Maneuver: AEP and FirstEnergy try to stick ratepayers with risky coal plants and testified for the West Virginia Citizen Action Group in recent AEP and FirstEnergy cases. She has published articles regarding the design and implementation of carbon cap and dividend policies and created guides for local governments regarding energy efficiency.
Kunkel graduated summa cum laude from Princeton University and received her B.A. in physics in 2006. As a Churchill Scholar, Kunkel completed her Master of Advanced Study from the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics from Cambridge University. Cathy was a Ph.D. student at the Energy and Resource Group at the University of California at Berkeley.
Research Motivation
- How to make millions of old, inefficient homes part of a clean-air, low-carbon & low resource-use future?
- How can block-scale solutions enable better climate-change adaptation & response strategies than individual, home solutions?
- How do you get block-scale inhabitant buy-in, and support from utilities, stage agencies and the cleantech sector?
Hypothesis:
- The block-scale is considerably more efficient & cost-effective than the individual house-scale in achieving resource efficiencies, and takes advantage of emerging energy generation legislation and information systems.
Presumption:
- The block-scale aggregates the flows across multiple units, enabling greater efficiencies and economies of scale
EcoBlock Project:
- Test & benchmark results in real-time, with true case-control capacity via a sister-block.
Urban Block Re-Purposing
Design Objective: Social & Technological POV
- people + energy + water + wastewater ==> lowering resource end-use in the built environment
- design & implement a pilot around neighborhood engagement
- demonstrate efficient, functioning block-scale energy, water & wastewater treatment-and-reuse platform & retrofit process
- prototype & blueprint to replicate, improve & scale-up.
Design elements for resource-use efficiencies:
- Block-scale retrofit: optimized integration & operation
- communal solar & smart grid è electricity, storage & EVs
- communal waste re-use è bio-methane for cooking load, irrigation & compost for local, sustainable food systems
- Home-scale retrofit: whole-house energy + water solutions
- weatherization, EE appliances + lighting, smart controls
- grey-water re-use + water-conserving fixtures
- Institutional pathways: regulatory maneuvering & financing
Urban Block Re-Purposing
Electricity
Water
Funding Needs
- $8M over two/three years, from multiple funding sources (corporate, philanthropic, etc.):
- Microgrid + storage $1.5 million / Waste-water $.9 million / Water $.3 million / Contingency$.3 million
Conclusions
- Radically improve building performance (energy+water) as urban adaptive response to climate change
- Social response & integration of community’s wishes
- Legal & regulatory pathways & advocacy
- Financial innovations based on ‘avoided costs’
- New ways to commercialize green water systems, clean energy technologies, microgrid–storage, DR, systems controls, FDD, behavior analytics, etc.
http://www2.humboldt.edu/environment/faculty-and-staff/dr.-kevin-fingerman
My research is driven by an interest in the broad-based environmental and social impacts of energy technologies and policies. This work seeks to make explicit the trade-offs that are often present between energy security, climate, and other important social and environmental objectives. In particular, I have worked on issues at the water/energy nexus, evaluating the “water footprints” of a range of energy technologies. Water and energy are inextricably linked, with electricity generation second only to agriculture in total global water withdrawals. This connection is particularly acute for bioenergy, as it is by far the most water-intensive of all energy types. My research has employed life cycle assessment (LCA), agro-climatic modeling, and GIS tools to show that biofuels routinely require several orders of magnitude more water than petroleum fuels while often providing only modest climate benefit.
I approach my research with an eye toward implementation. This has led me to work with California regulatory agencies on fuel policy formulation and to serve as vice-chair of the Geneva-based Roundtable on Sustainable Biofuels. Prior to coming to HSU, I worked in Rome for the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization. While there, I provided support to the governments of Indonesia and Colombia in evaluating the environmental and social impacts of their biofuel industries, and in formulating policies to address those impacts.
Dr. Felix Creutzig is head of the working group Land Use, Infrastructures and Transport. He is lead author of the IPCC’s Fifth Assessment Report and was lead analyst of the Global Energy Assessment. Felix Creutzig teaches courses about climate change and infrastructures at Technische Universität Berlin. His research focuses on:
• Conceptualizing and quantifying GHG emissions of cities world-wide
• Assessing opportunities for GHG mitigation of cities world-wide
• Building models of sustainable urban form and transport
• Land rents as a complement for financing sustainable infrastructures
• Analyzing the role of capital stocks and infrastructures for climate change mitigation
• Land use-mediated uncertainty in integrated assessments, particularly those related to bioenergy
Since 2009 Felix Creutzig is also group leader at the Department of the Economics of Climate Change at Technische Universität Berlin. He was a postdoc fellow at the Energy and Resources Group at the University of California, Berkeley, collaborating with Dan Kammen, Lee Schipper and Elizabeth Deakin, and the Energy Foundation China in Beijing. Felix Creutzig received his PhD in Computational Neuroscience from Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, and holds a Master of Advanced Studies (Path III in Mathematics) from Cambridge University, UK.