Harvey Bryan - US grants

Abstract: Sustainability Science for Sustainable Schools

This project teams faculty and graduate-student researchers from Arizona State University?s School of Sustainability with high-school teachers, students, and administrators to address the challenge of becoming a ?sustainable school.?
Fellows, guided by faculty members, will help teachers and students use scientific methods and tools to collect data on sustainability indicators on food, energy, water, waste, landscaping, and quality of life at their schools. Students will collect, analyze, and graphically represent scientific data and then communicate their findings and solutions at community forums and science fairs.
?Sustainable Schools? will influence the curriculum and practices of three large school districts in Greater Phoenix. School districts, teachers, and students across many city boundaries will gain access to original research in a new and exploding field of inquiry of sustainability science.
In turn, the K-12 community will greatly assist graduate students in the world?s first School of Sustainability. The project will: 1) enhance graduate training and career trajectories;
2) sharpen collaboration, problem-solving, and interdisciplinary skills in real-world contexts;
3) empower Fellows to be better teachers by training them in curriculum and science-based instruction; 4) help school districts integrate sustainability research into curriculum and operations; 5) improve teachers? ability to integrate sustainability concepts into their teaching; 6) expand teachers? ability to develop interdisciplinary curriculum; 7) increase awareness of high-school students about global and local sustainability challenges and encourage them to pursue careers in science, engineering, math, and technology.

This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5).

Science Master's Program: Solar Energy Engineering & Commercialization
Lead Institution: Arizona State University (single-institution proposal)

More rapid development of solar energy is stymied by the high (but declining) costs of solar energy systems, the relatively low efficiencies of such systems, regulatory hurdles that impede development, and uncoordinated governmental policies. Overcoming such obstacles demands a new kind of STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) workforce?one skilled in technical subjects at the heart of solar energy technologies, but also well versed in the socio-economic (e.g., social, economic, behavioral, policy) and commercial aspects of solar energy. Arizona State University (ASU) is addressing these needs through a new professional Science Master?s Degree in Solar Energy Engineering & Commercialization. This rigorous 30-credit-hour program is designed for full-time students to complete in 12 months, but it will also be available to online and part-time students. Our students, who will already have a Bachelor?s degree in a STEM field, will take technical and nontechnical courses. Special program features include a course on Solar Energy & Public Policy that involves a trip to Washington DC, and strong interactions with the solar energy industry through a summer research project and internship opportunities.
The broader impacts of the proposed Science Master?s Degree program include the wider application of solar energy achieved by educating the future leaders of the field in the societal, business, policy, and regulatory aspects of solar energy while still maintaining a rigorous technical grounding. Women and underrepresented minorities, including Native Americans, are recruited by working with existing organizations at ASU that target these groups.

1509077
Qiu, Yueming

Commercial buildings are responsible for 36% of electricity consumption in the United States. Interactions among engineering, organizational, and behavioral factors and incentives determine building energy use and related environmental sustainability, and potentially cause divergence between true energy performance and theoretically possible performance. There has been increasing investment in energy efficient commercial building designs and technologies. Among the studies that conduct statistical post-occupancy evaluations (POE), there has been debate about whether "green" commercial buildings (i.e. LEED buildings) actually save energy or not, and this casts doubt on their energy sustainability. Evaluating the true energy performance of green commercial buildings requires empirical analysis of long data histories and larger sample sizes. To understand a complete picture of energy sustainability, social factors such as organizational management and occupant behaviors, as well as environmental and economic impacts of energy use, must be studied. Additionally, evaluating the effects of these factors on the timing of building energy use (i.e. peak hours versus non-peak hours) is essential to understand environmental (i.e. carbon) costs of electricity consumption. This project will conduct such holistic energy sustainability analysis using a comprehensive building energy dataset in a city (Phoenix) that is typical of energy use patterns in many of the world's rapidly growing hot and dry urban areas.

Specifically, the project will: 1) provide reliable statistical evidence of the true energy performance of green commercial buildings based on large datasets; 2) quantify the impact of green commercial buildings on power grid load profiles and electricity generation fuel mix; 3) apply surveys to quantify engineering, organizational, and behavioral factors that determine observed building energy performance; and 4) evaluate the systemic environmental and economic impacts of green commercial buildings in the Phoenix metropolitan area. The project will advance engineering research into energy sustainability of green commercial buildings through a novel "big data" empirical approach. First, this project will analyze much larger and reliable datasets of commercial buildings than previously studied, including historical electricity consumption and other key building level attributes. The dataset contains more than 700 Energy Star and LEED commercial buildings, and more than 17,000 total commercial electric customers. Second, compared to existing POE studies, this project adopts more rigorous and advanced statistical analysis including matching, panel regression, and nonparametric modelling. Importantly, this project uses much more credible control groups. Third, this project will provide the first empirically reliable evidence of how green building technologies impact environmental footprints by time of day and season, which are critical for determining environmental costs associated with electricity consumption. Finally, this project will empirically explore the interrelated factors in the coupled human-environmental systems including engineering (e.g. technical reliability and compatibility), organizational (e.g. principal-agent problem), and behavioral (e.g. bounded rationality) factors that influence the observed energy performance of commercial buildings and the impact on environmental sustainability. The insights produced may be directly implemented by practitioners including state energy policy makers, city environment planners, energy service companies, building engineers, building owners, and utility companies.