Highlight
Revamped Energy Policy Course
Achievement/Results
To provide energy policy training to the NSF IGERT fellows at Georgia Tech, Marilyn Brown and Valerie Thomas added several new features to their team-taught graduate level course, “Energy Technology and Policy.” First, they adopted a new textbook written by Marilyn Brown and Benjamin Sovacool, titled “Climate Change and Global Energy Security: Technology and Policy Options.” This book reflect the IGERT project’s view that in today’s society, energy, policy, and economics are inextricably intertwined. The energy security and climate change issues confronting the world are neither technical nor social, but socio-technical. Lecture material was also developed to address the IGERT project’s emphasis on technology diffusion, learning curves, and policy analysis. Second, class lectures were created to introduce students to modeling tools to assist in interdisciplinary research on forecasting and evaluating energy technologies and policies. Specifically, lectures were prepared covering the National Energy Modeling System, Input/Output analysis, and life cycle assessment, and public access software tools were made available to students. With such tools, students can estimate the speed and market penetration of new and improved nanomaterials-based energy technologies. I/O analysis can identify the direct and indirect impacts of new and improved technologies on economic activity including employment, and life cycle tools can be used to identify their cradle-to-grave economic and environmental impacts. Class projects used some of these and other, similar tools. For example, a project on “Energy-Efficient Homes Combat Rising Electric Vehicle Electricity Consumption” used HOMER, which is an energy modeling program, in an interdisciplinary analysis to evaluate EV technology in a policy context.
Address Goals
The Graduate Level course on “Energy Technology and Policy” provides science, engineering and policy students with understanding of how energy technologies, policy and economics are inherently linked. Research in any one of these areas must take the others into consideration. Projects carried out through this course are multidisciplinary in character and have provided Georgia Tech’s NSF IGERT Fellows in this program with an opportunity to interact and work with each other.
