Stanford University

Environment

FSI scholars approach their research on the environment from regulatory, economic and societal angles. The Center on Food Security and the Environment weighs the connection between climate change and agriculture; the impact of biofuel expansion on land and food supply; how to increase crop yields without expanding agricultural lands; and the trends in aquaculture. FSE’s research spans the globe – from the potential of smallholder irrigation to reduce hunger and improve development in sub-Saharan Africa to the devastation of drought on Iowa farms. David Lobell, a senior fellow at FSI and a recipient of a MacArthur “genius” grant, has looked at the impacts of increasing wheat and corn crops in Africa, South Asia, Mexico and the United States; and has studied the effects of extreme heat on the world’s staple crops.

PESD receives smart grid research grant from Stanford's TomKat Center for Sustainable Energy

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The TomKat Center for Sustainable Energy has awarded four research grants totaling $1.2 million to Stanford University researchers for smart power grid related studies.  One of the four grants went to a PESD-led project that will help regulators overcome barriers to the development of electricity transmission lines needed to facilitate renewable energy deployment.  At present, the lack of adequate transmission infrastructure makes it difficult to connect generators in regions with rich wind or solar potential to major population centers.

One of the biggest challenges in the current transmission planning process is accurately characterizing the benefits of transmission lines to build a case for their development.  "Our research will develop key analytical tools to help regulators and policymakers assess the economic and environmental benefits of transmission expansions to support renewable generation," Wolak said. Such tools can ultimately be built in to grid planning, expansion, and pricing methodologies.

 

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Prospects and Bottlenecks for Clean Energy Cooperation

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The Center for Northeast Asian Policy Studies and the Economic Research Institute for Northeast Asia (ERINA) will host a seminar on the potential areas of cooperation between the U.S., Japan, and China on developing clean coal technology and clean energy markets and policies titled, "Developing Clean Energy Markets: Toward China-Japan-U.S. Trilateral Cooperation" on October 25, 2010.

Researcher He will be participating in the Prospects and Bottlenecks for Clean Energy Cooperation portion of the seminar.

Event Summary from Brookings

In recent years, the United States and China have engaged in high-profile discussions and collaborated on various aspects of clean energy. The United States and China have also separately worked with Japan. However, these nations-the world's three largest economies and three of the four largest energy consumers-have not worked together in a trilateral format.

On October 25, the Center for Northeast Asian Policy Studies at Brookings and the Economic Research Institute for Northeast Asia hosted a seminar featuring presentations by experts from Japan, China, and the U.S. Panelists will describe existing bilateral cooperation on developing clean energy markets and policies, and will illuminate opportunities for truly trilateral cooperation, especially in the areas of energy efficiency and clean coal.

After each panel, the speakers took audience questions.

More information about this event on www.brookings.edu

Falk Auditorium
The Brookings Institution
1775 Massachusetts Ave., NW
Washington, DC

Gang He

616 Serra St.
E420 Encina Hall
Stanford, CA 94305

(650) 725-4249 (650) 724-1717
0
Research Associate
Gang.jpg

Gang He's work focuses on China's energy and climate change policy, carbon capture and sequestration, domestic coal and power sectors and their key role in both the global coal market and in international climate policy framework.  He also studies other issues related to energy economics and modeling, global climate change and the development of lower-carbon energy sources. 

Prior to joining PESD, he was with the World Resources Institute as a Cynthia Helms Fellow.  He has also worked for the Global Roundtable on Climate Change of the Earth Institute at Columbia University. With his experiences both in US and China, he has been actively involved in the US-China collaboration on energy and climate change. 

Mr. He received an M.A. from Columbia University on Climate and Society, B.S. from Peking University on Geography, and he is currently doing a PhD in the Energy and Resources Group at UC Berkeley.

Gang He Panelist
Seminars

ESI Bulletin: The Real Drivers of Carbon Capture and Storage in China

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Carbon capture and storage (CCS) is now widely viewed as imperative for global climate stabilisation. Coal is the world’s fastest growing fossil fuel, and coal combustion is now the largest single source of anthropogenic CO2 emissions.

China’s coal sector is the world’s largest and the rapid industrialisation of China is inexorably tied to the same process that fuelled the West’s development - burning coal. International Energy Agency (IEA) projections suggest that China will have 1,332 gigawatts (GW) of coal power generation capacity by 2030, compared to 583 GW in the US and EU combined.

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Varun Rai
Gang He

2010 Regional Council of Rural Counties Meeting (RCRC)

PESD Director Frank Wolak will be leading the "Petroleum's Future" talk along with Michael Roman from the Public and Government Affairs, ExxonMobil Corporation.  This 3-day event features individuals across academia and the public and private sector.

 

Talk abstract:

Petroleum's Future
Despite volatile price swings, the political instability in major oil-producing regions and the recent devastating spill in the Gulf of Mexico, petroleum remains the primary source of California's energy needs. Removing our society's dependence on petroleum remains a difficult proposition involving alternatives, pricing and cost, and stability during any attempt to phase-out its use. More importantly, how will the role of petroleum affect rural counties - those living and working in rural areas as well as rural county governments making day-to-day decisions involving the use of petroleum-based products?


Finally, where does petroleum in California fit into a "post-AB 32 world"? This session will discuss all of these issues and more as two renowned experts in the field of energy share their views.

 

Click here to view Frank's presentation.

Marriott Napa Valley Hotel

Frank Wolak

Stanford University 
Economics Department 
579 Jane Stanford Way Stanford, CA 94305-6072 

Website: https://fawolak.org/

(650) 724-1712 (650) 724-1717
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Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies
Holbrook Working Professor of Commodity Price Studies in Economics
Senior Fellow, by courtesy, at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research
frank_wolak_033.jpg MS, PhD

Frank A. Wolak is a Professor in the Department of Economics at Stanford University. His fields of specialization are Industrial Organization and Econometric Theory. His recent work studies methods for introducing competition into infrastructure industries -- telecommunications, electricity, water delivery and postal delivery services -- and on assessing the impacts of these competition policies on consumer and producer welfare. He is the Chairman of the Market Surveillance Committee of the California Independent System Operator for electricity supply industry in California. He is a visiting scholar at University of California Energy Institute and a Research Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER).

Professor Wolak received his Ph.D. and M.S. from Harvard University and his B.A. from Rice University.

Director of the Program on Energy and Sustainable Development
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Conferences

Energy Working Group: Heidi Hjaernet on the Petroleum Sector Management in Azerbaijan

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Heidi Kjærnet will be presenting her paper "Petroleum sector management in Azerbaijan: A case study of the national oil company SOCAR". The paper focuses on the interactions between the Azerbaijani government and the State Oil Company of Azerbaijan, SOCAR, and explores the complex interconnections between the government and its national oil company (NOC). In the post-Soviet period, SOCAR has played the role as the national partner in consortiums with international oil companies producing oil and gas fields in Azerbaijan, as well as having important policy tasks and social responsibilities.

The paper argues that there is a profound lack of separation of commercial and regulatory responsibility in the Azerbaijani petroleum sector. While Azerbaijan is certainly giving preferential treatment to SOCAR, Heidi argues Baku is less likely to follow the example of Kazakhstan in pursuing a resource nationalist line through curtailing the activities of international oil companies due to the Azerbaijani government's ambitions for regional leadership in the South Caucasus, and its strong commitment to cooperating with the international oil companies.

Heidi's research on SOCAR and Azerbaijan is a part of her PhD dissertation with the working title "Petroleum, politics and power: The National Oil Companies of Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan and Russia".

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Heidi Kjærnet is a Fulbright Visiting Researcher at the Program on Energy and Sustainable Development (PESD) at Stanford University.  She is visiting from the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs and the Fridtjof Nansen Institute where she is a Research Fellow.

She holds an MA in Russia and Post-Soviet Affairs from the University of Oslo. She has taken intensive Russian language courses at the Norwegian Center in St Petersburg and interned at the Royal Norwegian Embassy to Azerbaijan. Currently she is a PhD student in Political Science at the University of Tromso.

Encina Hall
Stanford University

Heidi Kjaernet

The Program on Energy and Sustainable Development
616 Serra St.
Encina Hall East
Stanford, CA 94305

(650) 724-1714 (650) 724-1717
0
PhD Student at the University of Tromso
Heidi_Kjærnet_Sept_2010.jpg MA

Heidi Kjærnet is a Fulbright Visiting Researcher at the Program on Energy and Sustainable Development (PESD) at Stanford University.  She is visiting from the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs and the Fridtjof Nansen Institute where she is a Research Fellow.

At PESD Heidi is working on her research project on the National Oil Companies of Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan and Russia, focusing on how these post-Soviet governments manage their oil and gas sectors. The project aims to contribute to our knowledge on state-business relations in the post-Soviet area as well as on the governments' strategies and capacities in managing their important petroleum sectors.  The project's theoretical ambition is to explore the usefulness of principal-agent theory in authoritarian contexts.

Heidi's previous research has included work on the potential for renewable energy in Russia, the interconnections between energy relations and foreign policy strategies in Azerbaijani-Russian relations, and on the community of internally displaced persons in Azerbaijan in light of the country's oil boom.

Heidi holds an MA in Russia and Post-Soviet Affairs from the University of Oslo. She has taken intensive Russian language courses at the Norwegian Center in St Petersburg and interned at the Royal Norwegian Embassy to Azerbaijan. Currently she is a PhD student in Political Science at the University of Tromso.

Fulbright Visiting Researcher
Heidi Kjaernet Speaker
Seminars

New PESD Working Paper details challenges of designing carbon offsets for the transportation sector

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Programs to enlist developing countries in climate change mitigation by granting credits for carbon emissions reductions across entire sectors like transportation are quite appealing in principle. However, as researcher Adam Millard-Ball shows in PESD Working Paper #97, "Adverse Selection in an Opt-In Emissions Trading Program: The Case of Sectoral Crediting for Transportation, " any practical implementation of such schemes would entail thorny trade offs between economic efficiency, environmental effectiveness, and political acceptability.

Sectoral crediting mechanisms such as sectoral no-lose targets have been proposed as a way to provide incentives for emission reductions in developing countries as part of an international climate agreement, and scale up carbon trading from the project-level Clean Development Mechanism to the sectoral level.

Countries would generate tradable emission credits (offsets) for reducing emissions in a sector below an agreed crediting baseline. However, large uncertainties in the regulator's predictions of the counterfactual business-as-usual baseline are likely to render sectoral no-lose targets an extremely unattractive mechanism in practice, at least for the transportation case study presented here. Given these uncertainties, the regulator faces a tradeoff between efficiency (setting generous crediting baselines to encourage more countries to opt in) and limiting transfer payments for non-additional offsets (which are generated if the crediting baseline is set above business-as-usual).

The first-best outcome is attainable through setting a generous crediting baseline. However, this comes at the cost of either increased environmental damage (if developed country targets are not adjusted to account for non-additional offsets), or transfers from developed to developing countries that are likely to be too high to be politically feasible (if developed country targets are made more stringent in recognition that many offsets are nonadditional). A more stringent crediting baseline still generates a large proportion of non-additional offsets, but renders sectoral no-lose targets virtually irrelevant as few countries opt in.

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China Scope at MIT: Understanding China's Economy and Society

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PESD Researcher Gang He is invited to "China Scope at MIT: Understanding China's Economy and Society" conference hosted by the Boston-area China Care Clubs and M-Stone Advisory, which is being held at MIT from September 17-18, 2010.

Gang will be giving a lecture on "China's Environment Challenges in the Greatest Socio-economic Transformation" on Saturday, September 18th with a Q&A following.

MIT Campus
Building 34, Hall 101
50 Vassar Street
Cambridge, MA 02139

Gang He

616 Serra St.
E420 Encina Hall
Stanford, CA 94305

(650) 725-4249 (650) 724-1717
0
Research Associate
Gang.jpg

Gang He's work focuses on China's energy and climate change policy, carbon capture and sequestration, domestic coal and power sectors and their key role in both the global coal market and in international climate policy framework.  He also studies other issues related to energy economics and modeling, global climate change and the development of lower-carbon energy sources. 

Prior to joining PESD, he was with the World Resources Institute as a Cynthia Helms Fellow.  He has also worked for the Global Roundtable on Climate Change of the Earth Institute at Columbia University. With his experiences both in US and China, he has been actively involved in the US-China collaboration on energy and climate change. 

Mr. He received an M.A. from Columbia University on Climate and Society, B.S. from Peking University on Geography, and he is currently doing a PhD in the Energy and Resources Group at UC Berkeley.

Gang He Speaker
Workshops

Heidi Kjaernet

The Program on Energy and Sustainable Development
616 Serra St.
Encina Hall East
Stanford, CA 94305

(650) 724-1714 (650) 724-1717
0
PhD Student at the University of Tromso
Heidi_Kjærnet_Sept_2010.jpg MA

Heidi Kjærnet is a Fulbright Visiting Researcher at the Program on Energy and Sustainable Development (PESD) at Stanford University.  She is visiting from the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs and the Fridtjof Nansen Institute where she is a Research Fellow.

At PESD Heidi is working on her research project on the National Oil Companies of Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan and Russia, focusing on how these post-Soviet governments manage their oil and gas sectors. The project aims to contribute to our knowledge on state-business relations in the post-Soviet area as well as on the governments' strategies and capacities in managing their important petroleum sectors.  The project's theoretical ambition is to explore the usefulness of principal-agent theory in authoritarian contexts.

Heidi's previous research has included work on the potential for renewable energy in Russia, the interconnections between energy relations and foreign policy strategies in Azerbaijani-Russian relations, and on the community of internally displaced persons in Azerbaijan in light of the country's oil boom.

Heidi holds an MA in Russia and Post-Soviet Affairs from the University of Oslo. She has taken intensive Russian language courses at the Norwegian Center in St Petersburg and interned at the Royal Norwegian Embassy to Azerbaijan. Currently she is a PhD student in Political Science at the University of Tromso.

Fulbright Visiting Researcher
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