Use this search box to find articles that have run in our newspapers over the last several years.

Lewis tallies up country's future in solar energy

Ashley Lewis
LONGMEADOW Industrial engineering major Ashley Lewis, a senior honors student at UMass Amherst from Longmeadow, is doing research on solar energy that could go a long way toward shaping our country's energy policy related to climate change. Lewis is creating a computer model that will show how much funding the government ought to invest in solar energy, taking into consideration such uncertainties as the future damage caused by climate change and future breakthroughs or failures in solar technology.

"I am working on my senior thesis in climate change economics," Lewis said. "The motivation behind this particular project is to investigate how uncertainty will affect the country's optimal investment in solar R&D [research and development]."

Lewis is part of a research team headed by Dr. Erin Baker, Mechanical and Industrial Engineering Department, who has just received a prestigious five-year, $430,000 grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Program that supports research designed to influence the government's future investments in energy technologies.

Baker is studying the seven most promising alternative energy sources to determine which combination of these technologies represents the best portfolio for reaching our future emission goals. The seven are solar, nuclear, carbon capture and sequestration, bio-electricity, batteries, biofuels, and wind and solar grid integration. Lewis is concentrating on only one of the seven, solar energy.

"Our research is aimed at maximizing the social benefit of energy technologies by minimizing the cost of R&D investment, the cost of emissions reduction and the damage from climate change," said Baker. "Our modeling should determine which R&D portfolio will do all this the best."

The research being done by Baker and Lewis introduces a key variable that policy makers have largely ignored in the past: the role of uncertainty in decision making. In this case, we are uncertain about the amount of future damage from climate change, as well as the future failures and breakthroughs in energy technologies. Without taking into consideration these uncertainties, policy makers can make serious errors about which combination of energy technologies would be the wisest to invest in.

Meanwhile, Lewis is working on the prototype model for the first of those seven technologies, solar energy. She's creating her prototype by adapting a pre-existing Integrated Assessment Model to her specific project. Called DICE (Deterministic Integrated Climate Economy Model), it combines the economics of climate change with the science of climate change.

"DICE is a common model used in numerous climate change economic analyses," explained Lewis. "But I will be reprogramming the DICE model by feeding in a new description of technical change that includes the key factor of uncertainty."

Her reprogrammed version can analyze the relationship between the country's investment in solar energy, the cost of solar energy per kilowatt hour, and the corresponding effects of solar energy on curbing greenhouse emissions. After Lewis completes her modeling later this spring, Baker will take her prototype and apply it to each of the six remaining technologies in her study.

"I have a great interest in the environment and developing the use of alternative energy to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and climate change," said Lewis. "Climate change economics allows me to take my strengths in industrial engineering and use them to research and learn about a topic that is personally important and interesting to me beyond being a student."