A Duke University undergraduate team has taken top honors in the North American division of Schneider Electric’s 2017 Go Green in the City case competition, which focuses on sustainable energy approaches in urban environments. The students trace their own energy management solution back to a 2015-16 Bass Connections in Energy team. Led by Jim Rogers, former Duke Energy CEO, and Tim Profeta, director of the Nicholas Institute for Environmental Policy Solutions, the Bass Connections team designed student projects focused on off-grid electricity access, which were then funded through Duke Engage.

A Duke University undergraduate team has taken top honors in the North American division of Schneider Electric's 2017 Go Green in the City case competition, which focuses on sustainable energy approaches in urban environments. In October, rising juniors Ankit Rastogi and Zui Dighe will head to Paris to compete with 11 other teams from across the world for the international prize. Learn more about the team's solution—and how "the Duke experience" has supported their success. 

In what Inside Climate News described as an important test of state governments' ability to counteract the Trump administration's retreat from climate policies, the nine states in the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative will soon decide whether to deepen greenhouse gas emissions cuts. The media outlet noted a study by the Nicholas Institute for Environmental Policy Solutions and the Duke University Energy Initiative finding that the main driving factor in lowering emissions in the RGGI states was RGGI's cap-and-trade program.

For much of the developing world, reliable, up-to-date data on electricity access is hard to come by. Researchers at EI's Energy Data Analytics Lab say remote sensing can help. For ten weeks from May through July, a team of Duke students in the Data+ summer research program worked on developing ways to assess electricity access automatically, using satellite imagery.

Texas Monthly reports on a study published in February and led by Lauren Patterson of Duke University’s Nicholas Institute for Environmental Policy Solutions, on hydraulic fracturing spill risk in Texas and other states. It indicated that “75 to 94% of spills occurred within the first three years of well life when wells were drilled, completed, and had their largest production volumes.” 

This summer a team of Duke undergraduates developed means to evaluate electricity access in developing countries through machine learning techniques applied to aerial imagery data. The students, participants in the university's Data+ program, created valuable datasets for use by energy access researchers and practitioners—and also developed a tool for crowdsourcing the data collection. Their work was led by researchers from the Energy Initiative's Energy Data Analytics Lab and the Sustainable Energy Transitions Initiative. 

EnergyWire reports that a review of spill records indicates that spills declined about 17 percent during 2016 compared to the previous year. The decrease makes sense to Lauren Patterson, a researcher at the Nicholas Institute for Environmental Policy Solutions who authored a study earlier this year on oil and gas spills (Greenwire, Feb. 21). She found that most spills happen in the first three years of a well's life. "If there's fewer new wells, I would expect the number of spills to decrease," Patterson said.

Each spring, the Duke University Energy Initiative partners with the EDGE Center at Duke's Fuqua School of Business to organize Women in Energy, an event highlighting the insights and experiences of female energy professionals.  Check out some of the advice that this year's speakers shared—and what Duke students had to say about the event. 

California lawmakers extended the state's innovative cap-and-trade program on July 17, 2017. The next day, expert panelists shared insights on the new law's implications for California and Canadian provinces in a webinar moderated by Duke University Energy Initiative interim director Brian Murray (who is also director of the environmental economics program at Duke's Nicholas Institute for Environmental Policy Solutions).  

According to a new report from the Climate Impact Lab, the South is likely to be hit harder than other parts of the United States by the costs of climate change, which range from dying crops to increased energy costs and mortality rates. Nicholas Institute for Environmental Policy Solutions faculty fellow Billy Pizer told Frank Stasio of WUNC’s “The State of Things” that “The important thing about the report is that this is one of the first times we’ve seen the consequences of climate change estimated and monetized and added up into aggregate total numbers for individual counties across the United States and the country as a whole.” He noted that the study is based on very detailed statistical analyses of actual climate change impacts, that the study’s geographical detail and assemblage of data make the study novel, and that “Mortality consequences tend to be the biggest contributor to the cost of climate change.”