Research Publications

The coupling of transportation and electrical grid infrastructures through plug-in electric vehicles (PEVs) offers the potential to improve system resilience by diversifying energy supply. In addit...

Existing studies examined the U.S.’s direct GHG emitters and final consumers driving upstream GHG emissions, but overlooked the U.S.’s primary suppliers enabling downstream GHG emissions and relati...

We are pleased to take this opportunity to respond to Christoff Koffler, Jinlong Marshall Wang, and Kurt Buxmann's comments regarding our article “Using Nested Average Electricity Allocation Protoc...

China has built the world’s largest High Speed Rail (HSR) network. Its environmental impacts have been examined by the means of life cycle assessment (LCA) which describes the whole picture of the HSR...

We propose an optimization model based on vehicle travel patterns to capture public charging demand and select the locations of public charging stations to maximize the amount of vehicle-miles-travele...

This project sought to explore options for Technology for Tomorrow, Ltd. to expand access of their sanitary napkins product, MakaPads, to local women in Uganda. At present, approximately 95% of Tec...

Electrified vehicles (EVs) couple transportation and electrical infrastructures, impacting vehicle sustainability, transportation resiliency, and electrical grid stability. These impacts occur acro...

In producing cellulosic ethanol as a renewable biofuel from forest biomass, a tradeoff exists between the displacement of fossil fuel carbon (C) emissions by biofuels and the high rates of C storag...

Many state-level Renewable Portfolio Standards (RPS) include preferences for solar generation, with goals of increasing the generation diversity, reducing solar costs, and encouraging local solar indu...

Due to climate change and ongoing drought, California and much of the American West face critical water supply challenges. California's water supply infrastructure sprawls for thousands of miles, f...

Switchgrass is a biomass crop with no established market. Its adoption will involve a wide range of socio-economic factors, making it a particularly difficult system to analyze for environmental impac...

An examination of the environmental benefits of an expanded RPS in Michigan find that, with higher coal retirements, significantly more natural gas is displaced by the expanded RPS, thereby reducin...

Dietary behavioral choices have a strong effect on the environmental impact associated with the food system. Here, we consider the greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions associated with production of food tha...

Lightweighting is a key strategy to improve vehicle fuel economy. Assessing the life-cycle benefits of lightweighting requires a quantitative description of the use-phase fuel consumption reduction as...

To alleviate fossil fuel use, reduce air emissions, and mitigate climate change, “new mobility” systems start to emerge with technologies such as electric vehicles, multi-modal transportation enabled ...

This paper develops a political-industrial ecology to explore the urban water supply metabolism of Los Angeles (Cousins and Newell, 2015), which sprawls across the American West. Specifically, the ...

The deployment of renewable energy is considered a necessary step towards sustainability and appropriate mitigation of green house gas emissions. To be effective it must achieve a balance between a...

Although it is through commodities that we are inextricably linked to distant places, most of us know little about where the products we consume come from, to say nothing of the conditions under wh...

As more renewable energy sources are integrated into the power system, additional reserves are required to ensure the functionality and reliability of the system. Conventional generators provide re...

Environmentally extended input-output (EEIO) database is increasingly used in studying environmental issues in China. Many repeated efforts have been done to construct EEIO databases for China whic...

Grid-scale energy storage may serve as a solution to the integration challenges of high penetrations of renewable energy, reduce air pollution from the grid, and therefore yield better environmenta...

Efficient urban transportation is critical to the sustainability of any urban systems. Cities suffering from severe congestions, which not only increases energy consumption leading to decreased air...

Wireless charging is an alternative method for charging battery electric vehicles (BEVs) in contrast to the conventional method of plug-in charging. Wireless charging allows BEVs to charge either i...