Energy investment and management decisions are increasingly facilitated and driven by information technology; these decisions have important impacts on the environmental, economic, and social characteristics of global energy systems--a collection of social-physical systems that weave together electric grids, fossil fuel production and utilization, regulation, development, markets, and diverse users and managers. Researchers from multiple disciplines are finding new ways of understanding and transforming energy systems as information technology and clean energy converge at an information-energy nexus.
INTELLECTUAL MERIT This project will facilitate a new research community and build research infrastructure focused on understanding and shaping information-energy nexus research with a focus on electric power systems' critical role in human development and environmental performance.
The research community will bring together researchers who work in the developing and developed world. It will support a multidisciplinary and growing community of experts in energy and power systems analysis, engineering, social science approaches to energy development and public policy. The core community will be formed by colleagues at the University of California, Berkeley and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory with partners that include energy practitioners working in low-income communities in the US and in rural Kenya.
The research infrastructure will focus on data collection and sensor design efforts that enable the exchange of perspectives. It will result in three sets of innovations that lead to research findings at the information-energy nexus: 1) new data sources and tools for household and firm energy analysis that leverage ubiquitous information technology, 2) improved data structures for linking interdisciplinary energy development datasets and models in time, space, and across other factors, and 3) targeted data analysis tools for addressing the critical issues of privacy, ownership, and the value of emerging energy datasets.
BROADER IMPACTS Environmental and Social Impacts: Investments in infrastructure and modern loads are enabling factors for increasing the efficiency of the energy system, a key benefit for society and the most important broader impact of this work. Affordable and sustainable provision of energy services is the goal in both the US and Africa. Beyond environmental benefits, superefficient appliances and modern electricity infrastructure hold the promise to deliver more reliable and widely accessible energy services to global end-users, including the global poor.
Technological Impacts: This research will contribute broadly to understanding new architectures for organizing social-technical systems and specifically to innovation in clean energy technology and policy. Both data collection and data sharing challenges currently hinder these efforts.
Educational Impacts: The concepts in this research will be incorporated into undergraduate education in engineering and public policy, and in environmental studies, and will be shared with a diverse international network of educators and scholars working on issues of energy access.
