Eric Hittinger

Rochester Institute of Technology | RIT · Department of STS/Public Policy

As office workers shift to telework, office building space requirements should decrease, but this relationship has not been empirically studied. We construct a dataset describing historical office building space, number of office workers, and number of teleworkers from 2003-2019 in the US, and use linear regression to estimate the effect of telewor...

Understanding the adoption patterns of clean energy is crucial for designing government subsidies that promote the use of these technologies. Existing work has examined a variety of adoption models to explain and predict how economic factors and other technology and demographic attributes influence adoption, helping to understand the cost-effective...

The economic and policy justifications for clean energy subsidies are complex and difficult to internalize. A subsidy induces additional consumers to buy, reducing carbon emissions through reduced fossil fuel consumption. Over the long term, subsidies encourage industry investment and cost reductions. Ideally, subsidies can be removed when the tech...

Complementary renewable technologies support renewable energy use as they can help balance the intermit tency of solar and wind generation. Previous research has shown that environmental policies directly targeting renewable energy can drive innovation in solar PV and wind technology. This study explores the impact of renewable policies on innovati...

Multiple forms of marginal and average emission factors have been developed to estimate the carbon emissions of adding technologies, such as electric vehicles or solar panels, to the electricity grid. Different methods can produce very different results and conclusions, indicating that choosing between methods is not trivial. Researchers would ther...

In this paper we develop an integrated model to identify optimal subsidy schedules for clean energy technologies that maximize social benefits less subsidy costs. The model uses historical cost, adoption, and emissions data and accounts for both environmental and technological progress benefits of the subsidy. An alternative analytical model is als...

Electric Technology Vehicles (ETVs: hybrid, electric, and plug-in hybrid) may reach price parity with incumbent internal combustion vehicles (ICEVs) in the near future. Climate policy for transportation will depend on the degree to which consumers prefer ETVs, and price parity is a key factor. In this study, we explore the interaction between futur...

The low capital cost, low lead times, and flexible operation of natural gas combustion turbines are qualitatively different from other power generation technologies and have the potential for faster investment payback. We explore this hypothesis with a retrospective analysis of natural gas combustion turbine economics in six locations, with revenue...

How do we design clean energy subsidies to deliver greater benefits to society? Analytical answers to this question are scarce. Modeling should address both direct benefits from stimulating consumer adoption the year the subsidy is paid as well as indirect benefits from lowering future technology costs. We develop a benefit-cost analysis of residen...

Plug-in electric vehicles charged with zero-carbon electricity are important for decarbonizing regional energy systems. Flexible charging of these vehicles aids with grid integration of wind and solar generation but may require drivers to provide information about their travel patterns and allow grid operators to control the charging of their vehic...

As energy storage is integrated into grids through policies or market forces, it has an effect on the dispatch, economics, and retirement of other generators. While the complementary relationship between storage and renewables is well-known, the effect of storage additions is not necessarily limited to renewables. This work models the system effect...

With an increase in renewable energy generation in the United States, there is a growing need for more frequency regulation to ensure the stability of the electric grid. Fast ramping natural gas plants are often used for frequency regulation, but this creates emissions associated with the burning of fossil fuels. Energy storage systems (ESSs), such...

In recent years, analytical tools and approaches to model the costs and benefits of energy storage have proliferated in parallel with the rapid growth in the energy storage market. Some analytical tools focus on the technologies themselves, with methods for projecting future energy storage technology costs and different cost metrics used to compare...

Future cost reductions in renewable generation and storage technologies hold promise for dramatic changes in the design, cost and carbon emissions from microgrids. Microgrid design depends nonlinearly on technology costs and this article analyzes this non-linear relationship by developing an analogy between phase transitions in physical systems and...

The energy consumption of an electric vehicle is primarily due to the traction subsystem and the comfort subsystem. For a regular trip, the traction energy can be relatively constant but the comfort energy has variation depending on seasonal temperatures. In order to plan the annual charging operation of an eco-campus, a simulation tool is develope...

New York state recently passed a food waste (FW) disposal ban, which will prohibit landfilling of FW produced by commercial entities generating more than 2 tons/week by the year 2022. This will redirect 370,000 tons/year of FW from landfills. In this work, we investigate three questions about the landfill ban: 1) How can this waste be diverted to t...

Despite their low environmental impact, electrical vehicles have low penetration in the automotive market. Consumers are reluctant for technical reasons (limited driving range and long charging time) but also for an economic reason (high investment costs). Electric vehicle total cost of ownership (TCO) is often perceived as higher than for a therma...

We develop a new parsimonious model of residential solar diffusion that, with only two regression parameters and one independent variable, reasonably explains empirical observations. Additional solar customers resulting from an increase in Net Present Value (NPV) are modeled as a normal distribution. This leads to adoption as a function of NPV bein...

To broadly contribute to sustainable mobility, electric technology vehicles (hybrid, electric and plug-in-hybrid) must become more price competitive with internal combustion vehicles. This study assesses the economic and carbon benefits of electric technology vehicles in the U.S., accounting for household-by-household behavioral variability and geo...

Environmental outcomes from energy storage depend on its usage patterns, the existing generation fleet, and fossil fuel prices. This work models the deployment of large, non-marginal quantities of energy storage and wind and solar power to determine their combined effects on grid system emissions. Two different grid environments are analyzed: a coa...

Networked digital devices may cause rising energy use, although devices save energy locally

This work uses marginal emission factors to analyze avoided emissions from household energy efficiency improvements in air conditioning and lighting. This approach considers CO2, SO2, and NOx emissions avoided from the marginal power plant that would have been dispatched to meet demand, and compares the results to the more commonly used average emi...

The economic and environmental benefits of efficiency are typically assessed assuming that all consumers use appliances in the same way. There are, however, significant differences in consumer usage patterns, as well as geographical variability in prices and environmental impacts of electricity. To explore the importance of het- erogeneity, we firs...

This work quantitatively analyzes the evolution of hybrid stand-alone microgrids in the US, Germany, Pakistan and South Africa to determine the grid price parity date for a solar PV/Diesel/Battery hybrid system in each market. The energy system model and NREL’s HOMER software are used to simulate the microgrid operation and forecast the levelized c...

Selecting the capacity of a central air conditioning (AC) system is based on a long list of structural factors within a home, but is normally chosen without considering effects on stakeholders outside of the home. Energy use by residential air conditioners is relevant to consumers as an expense, but also to utilities as a contributor to peak demand...

The variable and non-dispatchable nature of wind and solar generation has been driving interest in energy storage as an enabling low-carbon technology that can help spur large-scale adoption of renewables. However, prior work has shown that adding energy storage alone for energy arbitrage in electricity systems across the U.S. routinely increases s...

Grid-level energy storage is an emerging technology that provides operational flexibility for managing electricity demand, integrating renewable energy, and improving system reliability. However, it has been established that revenue-maximizing grid-level energy storage tends to increase system emissions in current US electricity grids. In this work...

The potential for future cost reductions in wind power affects adoption and support policies. Prior analyses of cost reductions give inconsistent results. The learning rate, or fractional cost reduction per doubling of production, ranges from −3% to +33% depending on the study. This lack of consensus has, we believe, contributed to high variability...

Declining costs for solar photovoltaics (PV) and excitement about new technologies have led to speculation that self-sufficient PV/battery storage systems will soon become competitive with traditional electricity service. We compare a grid-tied residential solar system with an off-grid solar-plus-battery system at 1020 US locations, and calculate t...

The combined effect of increased variability of demand due to distributed generation and domestic storage deployment represents a new feature in modern electricity systems.

Plastic pollution in the world's oceans has received much attention, but there has been increasing concern about the high concentrations of plastic debris in the Laurentian Great Lakes. Using census data and methodologies used to study ocean debris we derive a first estimate of 9887 metric tonnes per year of plastic debris entering the Great Lakes....

A Monte Carlo analysis of the levelized cost of electricity yields probability distributions for the costs of major generation technologies rather than the usual point values. A Monte Carlo approach is only slightly more complex than using point values, but provides more realistic information about risk and uncertainty and enables more useful analy...

Bulk energy storage is generally considered an important contributor for the transition towards a more flexible and sustainable electricity system. While economically valuable, storage is not fundamentally a "green" technology, leading to reductions in emissions. We model the economic and emissions effects of bulk energy storage providing an energy...

A high-resolution model allowing for the comparison of different energy storage technologies in a variety of realistic microgrid settings has been developed. The Energy Systems Model (ESM) is similar to the popular microgrid software HOMER, but improves upon the battery models used in that program. ESM adds several important aspects of battery mode...

In power systems with many wind generators, market rules have been slowly changing in order to mitigate or internalize the system costs relating to wind variability. We examine several potential market policies for mitigating the effects of wind variability. For each market policy, we determine the effect that the policy would have on the operation...

Abstract We performed a study to determine whether flue gas bypass and solvent storage can increase the profitability of a power plant equipped with post-combustion carbon capture technology. By increasing flexibility, these technologies allow increased output when electric energy prices are high. We used the Integrated Environmental Control Model...

The profitability impacts of solvent storage are modeled for new coal and natural gas-fired power plants with amine and ammonia-based post-combustion CCS facing variable electricity prices. With perfect information of future prices, up to 3 hours of solvent storage was valuable due to price volatility at carbon prices up to $40/tonne CO2 and no reg...

Total energy consumption of video game consoles has grown rapidly in the past few decades due to rapid increases in market penetration, power consumption of the devices, and increasing usage driven by new capabilities. Unfortunately, studies investigating the energy impacts of these devices have been limited and potential responses, such as ENERGY...

While energy storage technologies have existed for decades, fast-ramping grid-level storage is still an immature industry and is experiencing relatively rapid improvements in performance and cost across a variety of technologies. In this innovation cycle, it is important to determine which properties of emerging energy storage technologies are most...

Wind generation presents variability on every time scale, which must be accommodated by the electric grid. Limited quantities of wind power can be successfully integrated by the current generation and demand-side response mix but, as deployment of variable resources increases, the resulting variability becomes increasingly difficult and costly to m...

The use of aqueous emulsions as the media when conducting cross-coupling reactions, instead of homogeneous solutions, produces covalently cross-linked conjugated polymer particles (see picture). The size of the spherical particles can easily be tuned over a wide range (mm to nm) by modification of the reaction conditions. The resulting materials ar...

Conjugated poly(p-phenylene ethynylene) networks with interesting optoelectronic properties were synthesized by the palladium-catalyzed polycondensation of 2,5-diiodo-4-[(2-ethylhexyl)oxy]methoxybenzene, and 1,4- diethynyl-2,5-bis-(octyloxy)benzene, with 1,2,4-tribromobenzene as cross-linker. The cross-linker concentration was varied and materials...

Cover: The cover picture shows the schematic and detailed chemical structure of a cross‐linked conjugated poly( p ‐phenylene ethynylene), together with a picture of a gel based on this highly fluorescent material. Cross‐linked conjugated polymers exhibit potentially interesting optoelectronic properties and can be processed into films and other sha...