Advancing Transformational Energy Justice Across the Renewable Energy Supply Chain
Source: Sloan Foundation
Summary: This project utilizes a place-based approach to examining the justice implications of renewable energy production at multiple scales and across lifecycle stages, with clear implications for policy. It asks: What equity and justice issues are associated with solar and wind energy transitions across their supply chain in the United States? What community vulnerabilities emerge related to mineral extraction and manufacturing? Moreover, what energy equity and justice issues may arise related to permitting and use in rural communities, and with disposal and waste? Relatedly, what potential policy remedies exist to minimize negative impacts across mineral extraction, manufacturing, permitting and use, and disposal and waste? The project will include both eight case studies and the use of mixed research methods across multiple scales of renewable energy production for both solar and wind energy. Guiding this empirical data collection, the conceptual framework will be grounded in feminist, Indigenous, and anti-racist energy systems as well as whole systems justice. The project aims to contribute to scholarship and enhance theory and understanding across disciplines on the equity dimensions of energy transitions. Ultimately, the research team led by IGS Director Benjamin Sovacool will translate the broader impacts of its research findings into actionable considerations and guidance for local communities, states, Tribes, and national governments to steer renewable energy transitions onto more just and equitable paths.
L2D: Limits to Digitalization
Source: Research Council of Norway
Summary: Norway faces shifts from energy surplus to deficit and rising household consumption, as emerging industries (data centers, hydrogen, battery production) compete for energy. The transition’s implications are accentuated by digitalization – the reliance on digital technologies for understanding and action. Digitalization underpins Norwegian sustainability policy, promising petroleum decoupling, upholding the welfare state, and structuring civic participation and social interaction; it is also seen as a force for global sustainability. Yet, its benefits are seldom weighed against the energy, material, and local impacts of digital infrastructures. Limits to digitalization (L2D) addresses this gap by studying data centers, central to national policy, but steeped in controversies and uncertainties. Supporting energy and digital “Twin Transitions” while recognizing ecological finitude, L2D probes the need, and options, for socio-environmental limits to the digital. Through this project led by NTNU Social Research (NSR) in collaboration with Boston University (Dr. Ayse Coskun and Dr. Benjamin Sovacool), the research team will consider energy transitions’ socioenvironmental impacts via Norwegian data centers and the ongoing attempt by Norway to become a global hub for digital infrastructure, justified with reference to digitalization’s benefits. In the process, L2D aims to assist Norwegian decision-makers at all levels in efficiently governing the trade-offs around data center construction.
BUSPH-HSPH Climate Change and Health Research Coordinating Center (CAFÉ)
Source: National Institutes of Health (NIH)
Summary: Continued climate change threatens the health and well-being of individuals and communities across the US and around the globe. With unprecedented support from the National Institutes of Health through a cooperative agreement, the Boston University School of Public Health and the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health have joined forces to create the BUSPH-HSPH CAFÉ Research Coordinating Center (RCC). The RCC is a critical component of the NIH Climate Change and Health Initiative and aims to build a Community of Practice by managing and supporting climate change and health research and capacity-building efforts. The CAFÉ will Convene, Accelerate, Foster, and Expand the global climate change and health community of practice. The CAFÉ is jointly led by Drs. Greg Wellenius (BUSPH), Amruta Nori-Sarma (BUSPH), and Francesca Dominici (HSPH) and consists of four related functions. The Resource Function is co-led by Dr. Benjamin Sovacool (BU IGS), Rebecca Pearl-Martinez (BU IGS), and Leila Kamareddine (HSPH).
Energy Justice Indicators: Measuring Community Effects of Offshore Wind Energy Development
Source: DOE Wind Energy Technologies Office (WETO)
Summary: This project will: 1) work with East Coast communities impacted by offshore wind energy development to collaboratively create measurable indicators for energy justice; 2) qualitatively and quantitatively assess these indicators for port communities including New Bedford, Massachusetts, and New London, Connecticut, over three years; and 3) share results with government, community engagement practitioners, industry professionals, and frontline communities.
The Industrial Decarbonization Research and Innovation Center (IDRIC)
Source: EPSRC and ESRC
Summary: The industrial decarbonization challenge aims to accelerate the cost-effective decarbonization of industry by developing and deploying low-carbon technologies. It also aims to enable the deployment of infrastructure at scale by the mid-2020s. It aims to boost the competitiveness of key industrial regions and drive inward investment, creating and protecting jobs for a low-carbon global economy with growing low-carbon export markets. It will support the delivery of the Clean Growth Grand Challenge and the Industrial Clusters Mission, which has set an ambition to establish at least one low-carbon industrial cluster by 2030 and the world’s first net-zero carbon industrial cluster by 2040. The Mission, and this challenge, will help to place the UK at the forefront of the global shift to Clean Growth, by driving the technologies, services, and markets to produce low-carbon industrial products. IDRIC will seek to deliver: (1) Detailed designs and demonstration of industry-scale technologies and shared infrastructure for the cost-effective deep decarbonization of at least one industrial cluster; (2) Roadmaps and feasibility studies for net zero industrial clusters; and (3) Sustainable industrial clusters knowledge creation and sharing function, including the creation of a joint industry/government/academic-led research program.
GeoEngineering and NegatIve Emissions Pathways in Europe (GENIE)
Source: European Research Council (ERC) Synergy Grant
Summary: The most recent UN climate agreement aims to keep global temperature rise well below 2 °C. To achieve this target, negative emissions technologies such as greenhouse gas removal (GGR) are critically important since they can capture carbon dioxide (CO2) from the atmosphere and store it safely. Another significant technology is solar radiation management (SRM), a type of climate engineering in which sunlight is reflected to limit or reverse global warming. The research team of the GENIE project, funded by an ERC Synergy Grant, aims to identify how, where, and when to use these technologies effectively. The intention is to generate a robust, scientific assessment for evidence-based policymaking. Most research on GGR and SRM addresses techno-economic aspects and rarely their social, legal, political, and even ethical dimensions. The new project will address this gap, and provide an urgently needed interdisciplinary and holistic perspective of these technologies, in order to understand whether and how they could be deployed at the required scale to solve the problem. Three lead researchers will integrate insights from social science, engineering, and physical science disciplines to provide a comprehensive view of GGR and SRM, and how they can help with the transition to climate neutrality in Europe and the world. Energy policy expert Benjamin K. Sovacool, environmental economist Jan C. Minx, and environmental systems scientist Keywan Riahi are all leading authors in the current production of reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). They will now combine forces to make a strong contribution to not only climate and energy research but also national and European policy.
