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Past Event
Seminar

Energy Policy Seminar: Destenie Nock on "Energy Limiting Behavior: a Hidden Form of Energy Poverty"

RSVP Required Open to the Public

Join us for an Energy Policy Seminar featuring Destenie Nock, Assistant Professor of Civil & Environmental Engineering (CEE) and Engineering and Public Policy (EPP) at Carnegie Mellon University. Dr. Nock will speak on "Energy Limiting Behavior: a Hidden Form of Energy Policy." HKS Professor Henry Lee will moderate the Q&A.

Attendance: This event is open to the public and hosted on Zoom. For those who cannot attend live, the seminar will be recorded and available to watch on this page.

Accessibility: Persons with disabilities who wish to request accommodations or who have questions about access, please contact Liz Hanlon (ehanlon@hks.harvard.edu) in advance of the session.

Registration: Please RSVP at the link below. Registration will remain open until the event begins.

Date: Time: - Location: Online
Destenie Nock

Summary

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. 

Speaker

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. 

Recording

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