Current Projects
Essential data from pervasive low-cost submetering with sufficient accuracy for equipment and plug loads is necessary to maximize and verify energy savings, as well as to provide critical information on the state and usage patterns of specific equipment to enable monitoring-based commissioning and facilitate the optimization of fault detection and diagnostics of operational faults along with control strategies and integration with the electric grid. This project will leverage existing nonintrusive submetering in developing a human-in-the-loop approach and investigating occupant feedback strategies to change electricity use by reducing load or shifting usage to non-peak hours.
Appliance-level consumption will be obtained via statistical disaggregation of apartment-level metering in the especially challenging and underserved multifamily residential building sector to eliminate the need for costly and intrusive plug load monitors and reduce electric bills. To target usage feedback to the desired consumption change, the project will utilize natural language processing (NLP) based approaches that automatically generate feedback messages that contain various types of illustrations and text. Statistical analysis will be used on disaggregated appliance-level consumption to determine how much reduction or load-shift in electricity use and in electric bills each type of feedback can achieve, and how this may vary by demographic.
Learn more here.
This research project investigated how low-cost, automatically-generated feedback could inform residents about how to lower their energy burden both at an individual financial level and at a community level. This research analyzes the effectiveness of various feedback mechanisms across diverse demographics.
Completed Projects
In his newest book, Steven Cohen provides a broad and engaging overview of the urban systems of the twenty first century, surveying policies and projects already under way in cities around the world and pointing to more ways progress can be made.
The book discusses the sustainable city from an organizational management and public policy perspective that emphasizes the local level, looking at case studies of existing legislation, programs, and public private partnerships that strive to align modern urban life and sustainability.
The work is part of the Research Program’s ongoing effort to develop and communicate a positive vision of a sustainable future; we are making the point that the sustainability transition is already underway.
Learn more and purchase the book here.
Based on her dissertation, Allison Bridges wrote a case study that explored how local government institutional innovations that resulted in sustainable outcomes were conceived and implemented in Florianopolis, Brazil. The case study explores the role of human capital in fostering both technological and institutional innovation by considering how local stakeholders, holding vastly divergent values, accelerated the preservation of natural assets by pursuing common goals.
Learn more about Allison's Lincoln Institute Award-winning Case Study here.
Written by Steven Cohen, Bill Eimicke, and Alison Miller, Sustainability Policy: Hastening the Transition to a Cleaner Economy presents an overview of the opportunities for government to encourage sustainability in the public and private sectors and is a fundamental guide to sustainability policy development, implementation, strategy, and practice. It focuses on the critical role of government and public policy in accelerating the shift to a sustainable economy. Featuring detailed cases highlighting innovative sustainability initiatives, the book explores the elements that constitute effective policy, and the factors that can help or hinder implementation and adoption. Emphasizing politically-feasible policy tools at the federal, state, and local levels, the book focuses on public sector actions that spur innovation and organizational change in the private sector and behavioral change at the individual level towards more sustainable practices. It was written to be accessible to all audiences – including policy leaders and the general public.
Learn more here.
As the United States federal government retreats from energy and environmental regulation, local and regional efforts across the U.S. are scaling up. Cities, in particular, are intensifying their commitments to fight climate change and are playing an increasingly important role in the sustainability of the planet. Energy is at the center of the sustainability challenge, as it is both central to modern life and causes environmental and socio-economic damages through our dependence on fossil fuels. Cities are beginning to understand the importance of a renewable energy economy to maintain a healthy living environment for their communities, as well as to ensure the future sustainability of these communities. / One way cities are demonstrating their energy priorities is by pledging to transition to 100% renewable energy by 2050 under the Sierra Club’s ‘Ready for 100’ campaign. This paper surveyed 56 cities that have made the community-wide commitment to 100% renewable energy, over half of which have pledged since just 2016, analyzing the primary motivations for these pledges, including but not limited to: financial and economic opportunity; public health; environmental preservation; climate goals and action plans; and lack of federal action. It also examined the structure of these commitments, tools used for implementation, political challenges, and the importance of collective efforts in meeting environmental goals.
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While the goal of reducing environmental impact has become an urgent imperative for Chinese leadership, the central and potentially competing objective for policy makers and planners remains economic growth and job creation. This paper systematically examines the perceived trade-offs between pollution control regulation and employment at the microeconomic and macroeconomic scale. We synthesize the theoretical literature on the employment impact of pollution control regulation at the firm, industry, and economy levels and summarize the theoretically sufficient conditions for employment-enhancing regulation. The paper examines the US experience with the impact of pollution control on job growth in the 1980s and 1990s and draws out the mechanisms through which job growth and pollution control can be congruent, examining their adaptability to the Chinese context. Specifically, this paper highlights the importance of targeting regulations toward sectors where labor costs represent a small portion of overall costs or sectors with low labor intensity. We demonstrate that in the Chinese context, a transition to an economy with a higher proportion of tertiary output is likely to facilitate a joint strategy of stringent pollution control combined with job growth.
Learn more here.