Event

ME Seminar: Destenie Nock

Monday, November 25, 2024
12:00 p.m.
DeWalt Seminar Room 2164, Martin Hall

"Identifying Energy Poverty In the Built Environment"

Abstract
Broadly, energy poverty is defined as insufficient energy access. One often missed sign of energy poverty is an inability to maintain a safe and comfortable indoor temperature. We add to the literature by quantifying the cooling slope gap (i.e., amount of electricity households forgo over the cooling season). We first map a household's electricity consumption across outdoor temperatures using a five-parameter regression model. Next, we identify the household's cooling slope as how much additional electricity they consume per 1 °F increase in outdoor temperature once they start using their air conditioning systems. Using these slopes, we quantify the cooling slope gap in our study region (Arizona). We find that households making less than $15,000 limit their electricity consumption for cooling by 1.03 kWh per 1 °F increase compared to high-income households.

About Our Speaker
Destenie Nock is a leader in energy justice and sustainable energy transition trade-off analysis. In her role as an assistant professor in civil & environmental engineering and engineering and public policy she creates optimization and decision analysis tools which evaluate the sustainability, equity, and reliability of power systems in the U.S. She has created new measures of energy poverty to help utility companies identify energy limiting behavior in low-income households, a hidden form of energy poverty. Dr. Nock is also the CEO of Peoples Energy Analytics, a data driven company which uses energy analytics to identify energy poverty in vulnerable households.