Researchers at the Watson Institute's Climate Solutions Lab led by Jeff Colgan were awarded a $100,000 grant from the U.S. National Science Foundation to support planning for a new Center on Clean Energy and Society (CES). Two new Watson faculty members, Jennifer Hadden and Christopher Rea, will join Colgan as co-principal investigators on the project.
The project aims to investigate the social, political, and behavioral processes relevant to scaling up clean energy infrastructure in the United States and worldwide. The ultimate goal is to generate knowledge to understand the complex mechanisms grounding the societal dimensions of clean energy development. This involves identifying various social, political and institutional barriers to clean energy and assessing the effectiveness of various strategies to surmount those barriers.
According to Rea, "much of the tech we need to decarbonize the economy already exists," but "the socio-political and economic challenges remain as fraught as ever." The proposed center would work to address "everything from figuring out how to overcome regulatory hurdles currently slowing the necessary expansions of the electrical grid, to addressing questions of energy justice for historically and newly marginalized communities, like American Indian Tribes and soon-to-be out-of-work coal, oil, and gas workers," said Rea.