Alternative Energy Technologies and the Sustainability Network

Stephanie McPherson for TEI

Since late Spring 2007, Erin Baker, Assistant Professor of Mechanical and Industrial Engineering along with groups of environmental activists has been working towards bringing sustainability into the Pioneer Valley through the Sustainability Network, supported with EPA funding. “It’s a pretty interesting project,” Baker, says. The Pioneer Valley Sustainability Network was initiated by the University of Massachusetts Environmental Institute and Department of Mechanical and Industrial Engineering and the Pioneer Valley Planning Commission, and is now comprised of many individuals, groups and organizations working on sustainability in western Massachusetts.

Baker has been working with the group in a number of areas. “Part of it was to work with them to help them define what they thought were the fundamental values related to sustainability,” Baker says. “Now we’re trying to come up with a set of sustainability indicators […] things we can measure in the Pioneer Valley that will tell us if we’re moving in the right direction towards sustainability.” These indicators range from housing and transportation to land use and air quality.

Baker is also contributing a more specialized project to the network - a web-based program that will be free and available to the public that will allow any user to measure the cost-efficiency and other benefits of energy technologies that can be used to heat a house or run a business. “They can use this to evaluate different energy technologies based not just on cost, […] but also on some of these other kind of indicators that the Sustainability Network has developed,” she says. “So we’ll show people how their choices impact overall.” All users have to do is plug in key information about their home or business, and the program will do the rest.

Baker uses a similar idea in a different branch of her research. She combines her math and engineering background to calculate the probabilities of success for potential alternative energy technologies. “I’m not trying to predict the future, but we try to quantify the uncertainty that we have about the future, so specifically, we put probabilities on things,” Baker says. She then analyzes these probabilities against certain factors – for example, the potential for technological change, or the uncertainty about damages from climate change. “We then can roll that back and say, ‘well what does that mean for the best near term decision?’ Because a lot of time when you have uncertainties like that, what you want to do in the near term are things that preserve options and flexibility for the future,” she says.

To determine the probabilities, Baker obtains the opinions of three to five experts in any given field of alternative energy, and then takes the average of those reported probabilities. For example, if the government wants to spend money on organic solar cells, what are the probabilities that someone will actually come up with a way to make it happen? Baker is currently using an NSF CAREER grant, awarded in December of 2007, to analyze potential research and development portfolios based on her findings. “The idea of this project is to get insights about what the R&D portfolio should look like, say, for the United States, in the face of climate change,” she says. “We know we’re going to want to diversify [the portfolio], we know we don’t want to put all of our eggs into one basket, but that’s not enough to tell us how many eggs we want to put into each basket.” She hopes these portfolios will add an element of science to policy decisions being made in Washington.

It may seem unusual that an undergraduate degree in Mathematics from the University of Califorina Berkeley, and a Master’s and Ph.D. in Engineering (Economic Systems and Operations Research) from Stanford University would lead to work in an environmental field, but Baker’s two years in the Peace Corps in Ghana allowed her to witness disturbing sights. “The desertification could be observed,” she says. The trees simply weren’t coming back. “I was observing it first hand.”

Since then, Baker has examined a number of potential climate change solutions, and each one has its own pros and cons. “If there was a silver bullet for climate change, it would probably be carbon capture and sequestration,” she says. This technology collects carbon dioxide and pumps it into aquifers, keeping it out of the atmosphere. While it’s not a long term solution, it would give the world at least 50 years to make the switch from coal and other power plants to new, cleaner energy. Baker is intrigued by this idea and says she thinks it is worth pursuing further research into this technology.

Solar and wind energy, according to Baker, are simply limited, given today’s technologies for the electricity grid. Unless we can develop new technologies for electricity storage or grid integration, “They will only provide a small level of what we need,” she says. Wind and photovoltaic cells are dependent on the inconsistencies of nature. Nuclear energy is interesting because, according to Baker, “it’s the technology we actually have right now.” While many people are concerned about the ramifications of nuclear power and waste, Baker feels many of the worries are solvable. The problem that may be unsolvable is proliferation – the fact that with more nuclear power we are likely to get more nuclear weapons. It is possible, theoretically, to solve this technologically, but it requires many countries agreeing to accept less powerful nuclear plants. “Who wants to be the country that doesn’t get the best technology?” Baker asks. It’s a politically rocky situation, but Baker thinks it’s worth investigation.

All of this work boils down to one main goal. “What I’m hoping is to have some influence on the technology policy at the government level,” Baker says. “I’d like to have some influence on these climate change bills before they really get fully implemented, so that based on our findings, […] we’ll be able to say, ‘well, these categories of technology are just really robust, that they should have a fairly high level of investment.’”