Moreno-Cruz Awarded $300,000 NSF Grant

Posted June 18, 2015

The National Science Foundation has awarded a three-year $300,000 grant for research in environmental sustainablility. The effort is led by School of Economics Assistant Professor Juan Moreno-Cruz with John Crittenden, Brook Byers Institute for Sustainable Systems Director, serving as Co-PI. The project is entitled "Regional Industrial Structure, Economic Resilience and Energy Consumption: Comparative Evaluation, Historical Analysis and Pathway towards a More Sustainable Economy."

The grant will be used to increase understanding of how regional economic activities and energy use interact with each other. Current economic models that aim to understand how energy use and efficiency interact within a regional economy are geared towards a broad scale and do not account well for an unintended consequence that crops up when energy efficiency is in play, known as the "rebound effect."

This project will develop a model that introduces adjustments to comprehensively evaluate the economic impact of the rebound effect, as well as tailoring the model to a more regional scale. Understanding energy use and efficiency on a smaller scale will reveal how both energy efficiency and supply shocks affect a region's economic and energy resilience.