Planning: CRISES: A Center on Clean Energy and Society

This project supports planning for a new Center on Clean Energy and Society (CES). The goal of the project is to investigate the social, political, and behavioral processes relevant to scaling up clean energy infrastructure in the United States and around the world. The planning grant supports organizational activities over a two-year period including interdisciplinary meetings to identify key research on the societal aspects of clean energy development; a synthesis of existing research on clean energy and society; and an outreach meeting with relevant stakeholders. The approval of solar and wind energy projects is a complicated process involving numerous actors and stakeholders at a range of spatial scales. Institutional factors play an especially key role in energy infrastructure development. This planning project supports the development of a human-centered approach to the reliable, affordable, equitable, and effective solutions needed for clean energy development. This project investigates the social and institutional processes of clean energy development. The research project particularly investigates under what conditions does support for a clean energy economy materialize, and whether clean energy development boosts community resilience, energy reliability, and national security. The benefits and the costs of rolling out clean energy fall unequally to different people along lines of income and racial diversity. The proposed CES Center addresses these challenges, and the organizational activities supported by this planning grant lay the groundwork for a broader research program tackling these questions. Ultimately, the goal of this work is to generate knowledge to understand the complex mechanisms grounding the societal dimensions of clean energy development. This involves identifying various social, political, and institutional barriers to clean energy and assessing the effectiveness of various strategies to surmount those barriers. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.