Energy Policy Seminar

Destenie Nock, Assistant Professor of Civil & Environmental Engineering and Engineering and Public Policy at Carnegie Mellon University, will present "Energy Limiting Behavior: A Hidden Form of Energy Policy."

Destenie Nock, Assistant Professor of Civil & Environmental Engineering and Engineering and Public Policy at Carnegie Mellon University, will present "Energy Limiting Behavior: A Hidden Form of Energy Policy."

Income-based energy poverty metrics miss people's behavior patterns, particularly those who reduce their energy consumption to limit financial stress. Using a residential electricity consumption dataset, we determine the outdoor temperature at which households start using home cooling systems. Using this inflection temperature, we calculate the relative energy poverty within a region, which we define as the energy equity gap. In our study region, we find that the energy equity gap between low and high-income groups ranges from 4.7°F to 7.5°F. In 2015-2016, within our population of 4,577 households, we found 86 energy-poor and 214 energy-insecure, meaning they are at risk of heat-related illness and death. In contrast traditional income-based energy poverty metric identified just 141 households as energy insecure. Only three households were defined as energy-poor or energy-insecure by both our temperature-based measure and the traditional income-based measure. This minimal overlap shows the value of considering consumer behavior when identifying energy poverty and energy insecurity. 

Dr. Destenie Nock is a leader in energy justice and equitable energy transitions. In her role as an Assistant Professor in Civil & Environmental Engineering (CEE) and Engineering and Public Policy (EPP), she leads a team of researchers who create optimization and decision analysis tools which evaluate the sustainability, equity, and reliability of power systems in the United States and Sub-Saharan Africa. Dr. Nock holds a Ph.D. in Industrial Engineering and Operations Research from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where she was an NSF Graduate Research Fellow, and an Offshore Wind Energy IGERT Fellow. She earned a MSc in Leadership for Sustainable Development at Queen's University of Belfast, and two BS degrees in Electrical Engineering and Applied Math at North Carolina A&T State University. She is the creator of the Black Electricity Blog site which posts articles about graduate and undergraduate advice, and research updates in energy and sustainability. 

HKS Professor Henry Lee will moderate the Q&A.

Visit the event page for more information. Register in advance. 

Contact: ehanlon@hks.harvard.edu