Research

We focus on the grand challenges of the energy transition — the questions whose answers matter most for accelerating a secure, equitable, and affordable transition.

We analyze energy innovation across technology, investment, and policy domains. Our work builds on interdisciplinary expertise spanning the social sciences, economics, engineering, and the natural sciences.

Our work is grounded in a data-driven approach: we prioritize collecting and analyzing the data that matters most, rather than relying solely on what is readily available, often developing and analyzing original, bottom-up datasets that can also inform energy systems and integrated assessment models.

Technology development and diffusion determine whether and how innovations reach the market. Clean technologies don't all follow the same path from invention to impact: they may stall, scale unevenly across regions, or reshape entire sectors. We combine real-world deployment data, techno-economic analysis, policy evaluation, and systems models to track technologies from early development through diffusion to system-level impact. 

Our ongoing projects include: 

• Development and deployment of emerging technologies — tracking trajectories from early demonstration toward scale-up, including carbon removal, methane mitigation, and energy storage. 

• Demand-side policy shaping technology diffusion, examining how both supply- and demand-side policy design influences where and how cost-effectively technologies such as green hydrogen spread. 

• Geographic diffusion and knowledge and spatial spillovers, including how manufacturing networks and demand from lead markets shape innovation across countries and regions. 

Selected Publications: 

• Network structure matters: how coordination and cooperation mechanisms drive solar-battery co-adoption (Environmental Research Letters): https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/ae30f2/meta 

• Assessing innovation in the nascent value chains of climate-mitigating technologies (Environmental Research Letters): https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/adf763/meta 

• How do global manufacturing shifts affect long-term clean energy innovation? A study of wind energy suppliers (Research Policy) https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0048733322000828 

• Modeling direct air carbon capture and storage in a 1.5 °C climate future using historical analogs (PNAS) https://www.pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1073/pnas.2215679121 

• The power of sand: Can solid gravity close the energy storage gap? (Journal of Energy Storage): https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2352152X2501552X

 Firms — as investors, start-ups, and incumbents — are key decision-makers in the energy transition, yet how they interact with public policy remains an emerging area of research. With public and private resources both limited, understanding these interactions is essential to making partnerships between the two sectors as effective as possible. We examine how firms respond to policy and capital, and where public-private partnerships are most effective at accelerating energy innovation. 

Our ongoing projects include: 

• Mobilizing early-stage innovation, examining how government R&D, incubators, and public-private partnerships shape start-up outcomes. 

• Corporations and private capital as a driver of deployment, examining how different types of stakeholders, including institutional investors, venture capital, and corporate investors, complement public funding to shape investment and scaling. 

• Industrial policy at scale, including its role in supporting equitable, full value chains — not just end-product firms — and in enabling new infrastructure such as data centers. 

Selected publications: 

• Informed investments in clean energy technologies (Nature Energy) https://www.nature.com/articles/s41560-025-01867-w 

• Rapid rise in corporate climate-tech investments complements support from public grants (Nature Energy) https://www.nature.com/articles/s41560-024-01554-2 

• The effects of corporate investment and public grants on climate and energy startup outcomes (Nature Energy) https://www.nature.com/articles/s41560-024-01530-w 

• The role of corporate investment in start-ups for climate-tech innovation (Joule): https://www.cell.com/joule/fulltext/S2542-4351(23)00087-9 

• Energy and technology entrepreneurship – chapter in the “Handbook for Energy Innovation”: https://www.elgaronline.com/edcollchap/book/9781035310418/chapter27.xml 

System change determines whether technological progress translates into real-world impact. Legacy fossil infrastructure creates lock-in and stranded-asset risk, while new low-carbon infrastructure faces its own barriers and opportunities — permitting delays, underperforming grids, and misaligned policies, but also potential for smarter market design. We assess these barriers and opportunities and identify what it takes to retire old assets and build new ones at the pace required for meeting energy goals. 

Our ongoing projects include: 

• The energy–AI nexus, examining how AI and data-center growth interact with grid stress, flexibility opportunities, storage needs, and access to clean energy. 

• Enabling infrastructure buildout, quantifying the causes and costs of delays in transmission and hydrogen infrastructure, and the potential of global electricity trade to ease investment needs. 

• Stranded-asset risk in low-carbon infrastructure, examining how misaligned policies can leave new low-carbon assets, not just legacy fossil infrastructure, exposed to lock-in and stranding risk. 

 Selected publications: 

• Spatially-informed demand-side policies for green hydrogen diffusion (accepted at Nature Energy): https://www.researchsquare.com/article/rs-8366173/v1 

• Geoeconomic scenarios of renewable-hydrogen-based industrial production (Nature Reviews Clean Technology)  https://www.nature.com/articles/s44359-026-00164-3 

• Implications of intercontinental renewable electricity trade for energy systems and emissions (Nature Energy) https://www.nature.com/articles/s41560-022-01136-0 

• Air pollution co-benefits from strengthening electric transmission and distribution systems (Energy) https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0360544223001299 

• Global mitigation opportunities for the life cycle of natural gas-fired power (Nature Climate Change): https://www.nature.com/articles/s41558-022-01503-5 

• Digitalization and AI impacts on energy transitions and climate targets (under review in a Nature Portfolio journal): https://assets-eu.researchsquare.com/files/rs-8941019/v1/5ca270ee-0a72-4839-89dd-5f2860637537.pdf 

• The AI-energy storage nexus: opportunities for clean energy transitions (Energy and Climate Change): https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2666278726000255