Ana Dyreson (PhD Candidate, Mechanical Engineering):
"In October, I visited Chile for the SolarPACES global conference on solar thermal power and thermal energy storage. The conference was all abuzz with a few recent projects that bring concentrating solar power, a fully dispatchable thermal power technology, significantly closer to cost-competitiveness. For example, in Dubai a project was contracted for $0.073 / kWh."

David Abel (PhD Student, Environment and Resources):
"I have had a busy several months. I published a paper in Environmental Science and Technology in April on the sensitivity of power plant emissions to ambient temperature, which gathered some interesting press from the likes of Popular Science, Scientific American, and Science Daily. I also coauthored a paper published in June on the impact of warmer weather on buildings and emissions from power plants.

In late June, I attended the American Meteorological Society's Policy Colloquium, an intense 10-day immersion in science policy, held in Washington, DC. More recently, I passed my PhD qualifying exam in Environment and Resources in late August, then got married on October 14th, and will head to MIT's Graduate Climate Conference in early November."

Tracey Holloway (Professor):
“Over the past few months, I’ve been moving ahead with two major lines of research: applying satellite data to air quality and health, and integrating energy and air quality modeling. The former is supported by NASA, where I am the director of the NASA Health and Air Quality Applied Sciences Team (HAQAST, haqast.org). For the latter, we are looking for partners and funding to assess the air quality benefits of energy system changes, like more energy efficiency or increased solar. To build these connections more effectively, my research group has a new website at hollowaygroup.org.

This past summer, I also designed and led “Science-A-Thon,” an international event where scientists of all stripes brought the public along for a "day at work" through social media and photos (scienceathon.org.) We even raised $33,000 for the Earth Science Women’s Network! You can see what a day in my life looks like (at least over the summer!) here.

Greg Nemet (Professor/Chair):
“I published a paper in Nature Energy with some German colleagues I began working with during my sabbatical 2 years ago. We looked at forecasts of solar PV deployment over the past two decades and found that even the most optimistic forecasts were consistently under-predicting PV adoption. We looked under the hood of forecasting models to understand why. The short answer is that models have missed learning, effects of policies, and high willingness to pay among solar adopters. Listen to the WPR interview here."