Pairing electric irrigation systems with mini-grids in communities that currently lack electricity has the potential to both increase the productivity and resilience of smallholder farms and contribute to rural electrification in Africa. This research develops a solar mini-grid irrigation viability model to assess the feasibility of such a technology setup.

Since fall 2024, the Clean Air Task Force and Duke University’s Nicholas Institute for Energy, Environment & Sustainability have led in-person and virtual meetings and one-on-one dialogues with Southeastern energy and environmental regulators, utilities, consumer advocates, and businesses to discuss clean firm generation and how it could help meet electricity demand growth.

In response to rising extreme heat risks across North Carolina, this study refines and evaluates the North Carolina Division of Public Health (NCDPH) Climate and Health Program’s Heat Health Alert System (HHAS), a health-based warning framework first introduced in 2018.

Affordable, reliable electricity is essential for productive, healthy and thriving communities. Achieving this goal at least partly requires understanding the dynamic relationship between electricity prices and consumer demand is critical for utilities, regulators, and governments seeking to deliver affordable, reliable, and efficient energy. This paper presents updated estimates of a standard measure of price responsiveness in the US residential electricity market—price elasticity of demand for electricity (PEDE)—and explores how it varies across states. 

In fall 2025, ACORE, Duke University’s Nicholas Institute for Energy, Environment & Sustainability, the EFI Foundation, and the World Resources Institute convened technology developers, finance providers, large-load customers, and legal and policy experts to explore how to keep finance flowing toward clean electricity sectors. 

Participants defined three central challenges to keeping capital flowing into these projects:

Small-scale fisheries in Kenya support more than 1.5 million livelihoods but face mounting climate and market shocks that threaten food security and income stability. Research led by Duke University and the University of Nairobi evaluated the Keep IT Cool model—a private enterprise linking fishing communities around Lake Victoria and Lake Turkana to higher value markets trough solar-powered cold storage and logistics.

Fishing plays a central role in the livelihoods and food security of many rural communities in Kenya, particularly around Lake Turkana, where climate variability, spoilage of catch, and limited market access have historically constrained economic opportunities. Keep IT Cool (KIC) is a social enterprise that provides solar refrigeration and cold chain logistics for smallholder chicken farmers and fisherfolk in Kenya.

Household biogas can significantly contribute to sustainable energy transition by supporting the decarbonisation and modernization of the cooking energy sector. Nearly 450,000 household biogas plants were reported to have been installed in Nepal as of 2023. This study assesses their sustainability using large-scale household survey data combined with statistical analysis. The findings in this article inform recommendations to improve the performance and sustained use of household biogas systems in Nepal and other countries with similar geographical and socioeconomic conditions.

The diverse material properties of plastic polymers have prompted their extensive use, resulting in widespread pollution, including environmental contamination by chemical additives used to enhance polymer properties. Additives have diverse biological impacts, underscoring a need to understand the hidden complexity of additive exposures from plastic polymer pollution.

The rapid growth of artificial intelligence (AI) and cloud computing has dramatically increased global data center energy consumption, challenging existing low-carbon infrastructure development. This study addresses a crucial gap by comparing the Levelized Cost of Electricity for wind, solar, solar plus battery storage, nuclear, and natural gas technologies tailored explicitly for meeting Meta’s data center energy demands through 2030. Our custom model incorporates detailed capital and operational costs, capacity factors, site-specific data, and sensitivity analyses of key variables.