FSI researchers examine the role of energy sources from regulatory, economic and societal angles. The Program on Energy and Sustainable Development (PESD) investigates how the production and consumption of energy affect human welfare and environmental quality. Professors assess natural gas and coal markets, as well as the smart energy grid and how to create effective climate policy in an imperfect world. This includes how state-owned enterprises – like oil companies – affect energy markets around the world. Regulatory barriers are examined for understanding obstacles to lowering carbon in energy services. Realistic cap and trade policies in California are studied, as is the creation of a giant coal market in China.
Join Recruitment and Admissions Manager Meghan Moura to learn more about the Master's in International Policy program and how to apply. Please register in advance: https://stanford.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_RX5OsP56RvmhnFsQOhPHCg
Recent record-breaking heat waves followed by rolling blackouts in California have sparked renewed discussion about the state’s options to address future power outages. Program on Energy and Sustainable Development Director Frank Wolak spoke to Bloomberg about power market reforms as one option where California could open up its electricity to retail competition. While pricing would better reflect grid supply and demand, it’s unlikely this option would have backing given today’s political climate. Read more (may require subscription)
Tara is a communications associate with the Cyber Policy Center. She worked previously at Stanford's Graduate School of Business as the Creative Design and Communications Manager, where she managed student facing communications for MBA students. For the Cyber Policy Center she designs and produces content for social media channels, policy briefs, web pages, publications and white papers. She also works for CASA of San Mateo as a court appointed advocate for foster youth.
Soojong Kim is a postdoctoral fellow, jointly affiliated with the Program on Democracy and the Internet (PDI) and the Digital Civil Society Lab (DCSL). He received his PhD at the Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania. His research centers around social media, misinformation, and computational social science. As a former computer scientist and engineer, he is also interested in applying and developing innovative research methods, including web-based experiments, computational modeling, network analysis, and natural language processing.
He is recently focusing on three research projects. (1) Real-time Misinformation Monitoring: Evaluating the impacts of real-world misinformation messages in real-time and reducing their adverse socio-psychological consequences. (2) Virtual Social Media: Discovering and examining factors that influence behavior and perception of social media users based on interactive multi-agent network experiments. (3) Map of Misinformation: Investigating the structure of disinformation messages and the landscape of the fake news ecosystem and designing effective misinformation suppression/prevention strategies.
Dr. Kim worked at Samsung Electronics as a computer scientist for several years after earning his B.S. and M.S. degrees in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from Seoul National University, South Korea. He also holds his Master's degree in sociology. He is a recipient of the ICA Best Paper Award, Wharton Russell Ackoff Fellowship, Waterhouse Family Institute Research Grant Award, Annenberg Doctoral Research Fellowship, and MisinfoCon Research Grant.
Find more information on Dr. Kim’s research and news at his personal site http://www.soojong.kim/
Encina Hall
616 Jane Stanford Way
Stanford, CA 94305-6055
Michael Bennon is a Research Scholar at CDDRL for the Global Infrastructure Policy Research Initiative. Michael's research interests include infrastructure policy, project finance, public-private partnerships and institutional design in the infrastructure sector. Michael also teaches Global Project Finance to graduate students at Stanford. Prior to Stanford, Michael served as a Captain in the US Army and US Army Corps of Engineers for five years, leading Engineer units, managing projects, and planning for infrastructure development in the United States, Iraq, Afghanistan and Thailand.
Sugar is the second largest agro-based industry in India and has a major influence on the country's water, food, and energy security. In this paper, we use a nexus approach to assess India's interconnected water-food-energy challenges, with a specific focus on the political economy of the sugar industry in Maharashtra, one of the country's largest sugar producing states. Our work underscores three points. First, the governmental support of the sugar industry is likely to persist because policymakers are intricately tied to that industry. Entrenched political interests have continued policies that incentivize sugar production. As surplus sugar has been produced, the government introduced additional policies to reduce this excess and thereby protect the sugar industry. Second, although the sugar economy is important to India, sugar policies have had detrimental effects on both water and nutrition. Long-standing government support for sugarcane pricing and sales has expanded water-intensive sugarcane irrigation in low-rainfall areas in Maharashtra, which has reduced the state's freshwater resources and restricted irrigation of more nutritious crops. Despite its poor nutritional value, empty-calorie sugar has been subsidized through the public distribution system. Third, the Indian government is now promoting sugarcane-based ethanol production. This policy has the benefit of providing greater energy security and creating a new demand for surplus sugar in the Indian market. Our analysis shows that a national biofuel policy promoting the production of ethanol from sugarcane juice versus directly from molasses may help reduce subsidized sugar for human consumption without necessarily expanding water and land use for additional production of sugarcane.
The basic features of an efficient short-term wholesale market design do not need to change to accommodate a significantly larger share of zero marginal cost intermittent renewable energy from wind and solar resources. A large share of controllable zero marginal cost generation does not create any additional market design challenge relative to a market with a large share of controllable positive marginal cost generation. In both instances, generation unit owners must recover their fixed costs from sales of energy, ancillary services, and long-term resource adequacy products.
Join Recruitment and Admissions Manager Meghan Moura to learn more about the Master's in International Policy program and how to apply. Registration is required: https://stanford.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_RvF8FTfsSWWDZscWQTHFTw
The Program on Energy and Sustainable Development (PESD) and the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) are partnering on an Impact Lab to design and implement next-generation policies and regulations that support California's ambitious renewable energy goals. “Public support for aggressive climate action in California could decline if there are adverse grid reliability and cost implications from pursuing these goals,” said Frank Wolak, professor of economics and director of PESD. Wolak and the PESD team are working with the CPUC to develop: 1) policies to ensure resource adequacy with a very high share of intermittent renewable energy, 2) distribution pricing to support cost-effective and equitable renewable energy deployment, and 3) transmission planning frameworks that are robust to high wind and solar shares as well as future climate impacts. Read more (fifth white box near the bottom)
Please join the Cyber Policy Center for Exploring Potential “Solutions” to Online Disinformation, hosted by Cyber Policy Center's Kelly Born, with guests Adam Berinsky, Mitsui Professor of Political Science at MIT and Director of the MIT Political Experiments Research Lab (PERL) at MIT, David Rand, Erwin H. Schell Professor and an Associate Professor of Management Science and Brain and Cognitive Sciences, and Director of the Human Cooperation Laboratory and the Applied Cooperation Team at MIT, and Avi Tuschman, Founder & CIO, Pinpoint Predictive. The session is open but registraton is required.
Adam Berinsky is the Mitsui Professor of Political Science at MIT and serves as the director of the MIT Political Experiments Research Lab (PERL). He is also a Faculty Affiliate at the Institute for Data, Systems, and Society (IDSS). Berinsky received his PhD from the University of Michigan in 2000. He is the author of "In Time of War: Understanding American Public Opinion from World War II to Iraq" (University of Chicago Press, 2009). He is also the author of "Silent Voices: Public Opinion and Political Participation in America" (Princeton University Press, 2004) and has published articles in many journals. He is currently the co-editor of the Chicago Studies in American Politics book series at the University of Chicago Press. He is also the recipient of multiple grants from the National Science Foundation and was a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences.
David Rand is the Erwin H. Schell Professor and an Associate Professor of Management Science and Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT Sloan, and the Director of the Human Cooperation Laboratory and the Applied Cooperation Team. Bridging the fields of behavioral economics and psychology, David’s research combines mathematical/computational models with human behavioral experiments and online/field studies to understand human behavior. His work uses a cognitive science perspective grounded in the tension between more intuitive versus deliberative modes of decision-making, and explores topics such as cooperation/prosociality, punishment/condemnation, perceived accuracy of false or misleading news stories, political preferences, and the dynamics of social media platform behavior.
Avi Tuschman is a Stanford StartX entrepreneur and founder of Pinpoint Predictive, where he currently serves as Chief Innovation Officer and Board Director. He’s spent the past five years developing the first Psychometric AI-powered data-enrichment platform, which ranks 260 million individuals for performance marketing and risk management applications. Tuschman is an expert on the science of heritable psychometric traits. His book and research on human political orientation have been covered in peer-reviewed and mainstream media from 25 countries. Previous to his career in tech, he advised current and former heads of state as well as multilateral development banks in the Western Hemisphere. Tuschman completed his undergraduate and doctoral degrees in evolutionary anthropology at Stanford.
