Listening to the people results in a more sustainable future energy system
Energy plan for 2050 based on consumer preferences and future demographics of the US population includes 50% more electricity derived from renewable sources than current projections
Peer-Reviewed PublicationIMAGE: THIS GRAPHIC SHOWS THE FRACTION OF DIFFERENT TYPES OF ELECTRICITY SOURCES IN THE US IN 2050 BASED ON AN ENERGY MIX PLAN THAT TAKES INTO ACCOUNT THE PREFERENCES AND DEMOGRAPHICS OF VARIOUS RACIAL GROUPS, WITH PROJECTIONS BY THE US ENERGY INFORMATION ADMINISTRATION BASED ON CURRENT PLANS AND POLICIES FOR COMPARISON (VALUES IN GRAY). DEVELOPED BY A RESEARCH TEAM LED BY KYUSHU UNIVERSITY BASED ON A 2020 SURVEY OF 3,000 PEOPLE IN THE US, THE PREFERENCE-BASED PLAN INCLUDES 50% MORE ENERGY FROM RENEWABLE SOURCES THAN CURRENT PROJECTIONS. ALLOWING SUCH BOTTOM-UP APPROACHES THAT CONSIDER THE PREFERENCES OF THE POPULATION TO INFLUENCE POLICYMAKING COULD HELP TO REALIZE EMISSION AND CLIMATE GOALS IN THE FUTURE. view more
CREDIT: KYUSHU UNIVERSITY
As policymakers around the world aim to cut carbon emissions and meet climate goals, new research points to a critical group whose opinions could help to shape energy planning for the better: the consumers.
By taking into account the demographics and preferences of US racial groups, clarified through a nationally representative survey of 3,000 US residents, researchers led by Kyushu University created a ‘desirable’ electricity generation mix for 2050 that includes 50% more energy from renewable sources than projections based on current plans and policies.
“In the US, consumers are being given more and more ways to choose their energy provider, so listening to and understanding these voices is crucial,” says Andrew Chapman, associate professor at Kyushu University’s International Institute for Carbon-Neutral Research (I2CNER) and leader of the study.
“In light of this, we set out to develop an energy plan that incorporates the broad range of voices and the rapidly shifting demographics of the US and then compared it with the current top-down plan in which energy goals are set by policymakers.”
To develop their energy plan, the international team of researchers from Kyushu University, Nagasaki University, and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign surveyed 3,000 people in the US in 2020 on their preferences, awareness, priorities, and other opinions regarding energy technologies, policies, and issues.
Considering only future construction projects needed to replace power plants at the end of their life and to meet predicted growth in energy consumption, they allocated roughly 2.4 billion kWh of electricity generating capacity out to the year 2050 based on the preferences of each racial group and the predicted future racial demographics of the country.
The resultant energy mix includes nearly 61% renewable-based electricity compared to 42% envisaged under the projected 2050 energy mix according to the US Energy Information Administration based on current plans and policies.
On the other hand, nuclear power is reduced by over half and coal-based generation by over three quarters in the researchers’ plan compared to the projections. Natural gas is similar in both cases, indicating that consumers are aware of the practical need for a stable energy supply.
“There appears to be strong support for a further emphasis on technologies that will help to achieve emission and climate goals when planning the future energy system, as indicated by a strong desire to move away from fossil and nuclear toward renewables,” notes Chapman.
“Though each racial group prefers different sources in the future energy mix, all groups recognize the need for a stable energy supply, combining natural gas with their preference for renewables, led by solar and wind.”
Differences in regional preferences also emerged. For example, along the west coast, there was significantly higher importance placed on dealing with climate change and realizing an equitable energy system. In the future, such input could be used to shape energy plans that leverage divisions among power grids across the US.
The researchers note that their plan’s allotment of hydroelectric and geothermal generation could be unrealistic because of how long such projects take to plan and implement. Furthermore, respondents consistently indicated a healthy economy as one of their priorities, so balancing costs and employment opportunities must also be considered in energy system design.
“In addition to consumer preferences seeming to support more renewables than current plans, we also found that preferences were linked to awareness, which is likewise strongly linked to education,” comments Chapman. “Thus, energy education is likely to be another important aspect for achieving carbon reduction goals and encouraging participatory energy system design.”
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For more information about this research, see “Cultural and demographic energy system awareness and preference: Implications for future energy system design in the United States,” Andrew Chapman, Yosuke Shigetomi, Shamal Chandra Karmaker, Bidyut Saha, and Caleb Brooks, Energy Economics (2022). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.eneco.2022.106141
About Kyushu University
Kyushu University is one of Japan’s leading research-oriented institutes of higher education since its founding in 1911. Home to around 19,000 students and 8,000 faculty and staff, Kyushu U's world-class research centers cover a wide range of study areas and research fields, from the humanities and arts to engineering and medical sciences. Its multiple campuses—including the largest in Japan—are located around Fukuoka City, a coastal metropolis on the southwestern Japanese island of Kyushu that is frequently ranked among the world’s most livable cities and historically known as a gateway to Asia. The International Institute for Carbon-Neutral Energy Research (I2CNER) within Kyushu University is focused on developing carbon-reducing energy technologies and energy analysis of the future ‘carbon neutral’ energy system.
JOURNAL
Energy Economics
METHOD OF RESEARCH
Survey
SUBJECT OF RESEARCH
Not applicable
ARTICLE TITLE
Cultural and demographic energy system awareness and preference: Implications for future energy system design in the United States
Bridging social science and engineering to design energy facilities that serve local communities
Grant and Award AnnouncementNORMAN, OKLA. – There are plenty of novelties cities will proudly claim – ever heard the road trip trope of visiting the biggest ball of yarn? But it has historically been much harder for local communities to take pride in being hosts for critical energy facilities, particularly those that involve the management of the nation’s spent nuclear fuel.
On March 26, 1999, on the outskirts of Carlsbad, New Mexico, the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant received its first shipment of nuclear waste. Congress authorized the construction of the WIPP in 1979 due to its unique geology, a 2,000-foot-thick salt bed resulting from the evaporation of the ancient Permian Sea more than 250 million years ago. Additionally beneficial is its proximity to Los Alamos National Laboratory and the support of key local officials, making the WIPP the first U.S. underground nuclear waste repository to safely store decades of nuclear detritus resulting from Cold War-era bomb making and nuclear research. Since its establishment, however, finding a safe and accepted approach for managing the growing stock of spent nuclear fuel from nuclear power plants has proven to be elusive, drawing opposition from potential host states and advocacy groups.
Now, the Department of Energy is reviewing the process for managing spent nuclear fuel. The Nuclear Energy University Program of the DOE has awarded nearly $3 million to a research team led by the University of Oklahoma’s Institute for Public Policy Research and Analysis with collaborators at the University of Michigan, the University of Wisconsin-Madison, New Mexico State University and Pacific Northwest National Laboratory to develop a new approach to “consent-based siting” of storage facilities that brings the questions, concerns and interests of community members to the forefront of the engineering and planning process for future storage sites.
Engaging Community Stakeholders
“As energy security and climate change have become a bigger and bigger problem, nuclear energy is very promising because it provides reliable domestic energy and doesn't emit carbon in the process of producing energy, but it's blocked by the failure to find a reasonable way to handle spent nuclear fuel,” said Hank Jenkins-Smith, co-director of OU’s Institute for Public Policy Research and Analysis. “This proposal is using what we've learned from decades of work and focusing it on the problem of how to safely sequester spent nuclear fuel for between 50 and 100 years until it can be managed in a permanent way.”
The researchers contend that an essential missing element of past efforts to develop nuclear waste storage and disposal facilities in the United States is that those who want to build the sites have not provided the potential sites’ community members opportunities to meaningfully shape what it is they are being asked to host. By failing to provide the necessary ways to match the designs of the facilities to the aspirations of communities, those proposing the sites erode a community’s perception of self-determination that shapes its identity and values.
“Going back multiple decades, all of the efforts of consent-based siting for spent nuclear fuel have been haphazard, not consistent, not systematic, and happening after facilities have already been designed,” said Kuhika Gupta, associate research director for IPPRA and the project lead investigator.
“We have this spent fuel, it’s already there. We can’t wish it away, and it has to go someplace safe, but the way that these projects were being approached by government agencies and the engineers from the national labs and so forth was almost designed to generate conflict,” Jenkins-Smith said. “The engineers came up with what they thought was an optimal design by assuring safety and keeping costs down. They would approach a community and say, ‘We’d like to put this here,’ and because of the imagery of nuclear issues and radiation and so forth, that evoked an almost knee-jerk anti-siting response.”
Instead, the research team – which includes nuclear engineers, physical scientists and social scientists – has adopted a “community-first approach,” Gupta said. Their project will simulate the process of how to engage a community in the design and construction of a nuclear waste storage facility.
“Part of the problem with previous efforts was that the community was brought in a little too late, so we decided the first phase is going to be community elicitation before anything else,” Gupta said. “We would essentially start with a blank slate, asking the community when thinking about such a facility what are the types of things that come to their mind to try to elicit some of their wishes and needs and vision for such a facility for their community long-term.”
Project collaborators from the Center for Socially Engaged Design at the University of Michigan are helping develop the community engagement assessments. Starting first with a one- to two-day workshop, the researchers will develop tactics to recruit participation in a listening session as well as the questions and mechanisms that could be used to gauge community sentiment. Those “local” data points would then be paired with a national survey to draw out broader themes and gauge public views at both a local and national scale.
“We would take the responses from the community and bring that to engineers and scientists in phases two and three of the project to get them to think about ‘here's what the community wants, now how do we work with this?’” Gupta said. “I think what is truly innovative about this project is that we are flipping that process, going into the community first and then having the scientists grapple with community requests at the outset … then the final phase is bringing them together for a co-design – bringing them together in the same room to come up with broad features of a facility that matches the vision of the community, but also the physical and scientific attributes that the facility needs to have.”
Bridging the Engineering/Social Science Divide
The thread of collaboration and training runs throughout the project, structured in a way that senior scientists on the team would mentor early career scientists. Simultaneously, the team of engineers, physical scientists and social scientists will work together on nearly all phases of the project. The benefits of this are twofold, Gupta said. The collaborative structure provides training for the next generation of experts who would support this work into the future, and cross-training for social scientists and engineers to better understand the throughlines between the fields.
“Finding a long-term, sustainable solution to this problem requires both an understanding of the technical decisions as well as the social and political requirements,” she said. “The project aims to train experts who have an ability to recognize and engage along all of these dimensions.”
“When we started this work decades ago, the idea that social science would have a significant role other than as a critic of technology was really far-fetched,” said Jenkins-Smith. “We’ve lived that friction from the very beginning, and this whole project is designed to reverse that – to have the engineers engage with representatives and leaders of communities in ways that reduce that friction, to engage across the social science/engineering divide. Social scientists need to know what these engineering problems are and how they can be addressed, just as the engineers need to understand how their potential solutions are affecting the perceptions and identity and potential futures of these communities.”
Building for the Future
The materials in spent nuclear fuel have a half-life that can span many thousands of years, making the need for a long-term commitment from a host community central to the project’s success. The interim storage of these wastes – ranging from 50-100 years – will enable the country to develop and implement permanent disposal options.
For Carlsbad and the WIPP, Jenkins-Smith said the success of that site is due in part to “core community leaders, residents and others who were serious about making this work.”
“The community envisioned what they wanted their future to look like, and what kind of a role the relationship with the national labs and technical capabilities would mean for their community,” he said. “The Carlsbad case is often seen as an anomaly, but from our perspective it has these fundamental characteristics that show how socio-technical collaboration can work to address a problem, to deal with really important social issues that are beneficial to all of us in spite of a lot of built-in opposition to those programs.”
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About the Project
The project, “Integrating socially led co-design into consent-based siting of interim storage facilities,” is funded by the Department of Energy, Nuclear Energy Program, DE-FOA-0002516 IRP-MS-2.
About the University of Oklahoma Office of the Vice President for Research and Partnerships
The University of Oklahoma is a leading research university classified by the Carnegie Foundation in the highest tier of research universities in the nation. Faculty, staff and students at OU are tackling global challenges and accelerating the delivery of practical solutions that impact society in direct and tangible ways through research and creative activities. OU researchers expand foundational knowledge while moving beyond traditional academic boundaries, collaborating across disciplines and globally with other research institutions as well as decision makers and practitioners from industry, government and civil society to create and apply solutions for a better world. Find out more at ou.edu/research.
About the University of Oklahoma
Founded in 1890, the University of Oklahoma is a public research university located in Norman, Oklahoma. OU serves the educational, cultural, economic and health care needs of the state, region and nation. For more information visit www.ou.edu.
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