Doctoral Dissertation Research: Making Sustainability Through Life Cycle Assessment of U.S. Renewable Energy Projects

University Of California-Berkeley, Berkeley CA

Investigators

Abstract

Project Overview This award supports doctoral dissertation research focuses on the politics of deciding what sustainability means in renewable energy systems, particularly solar and wind energy. It aims to understand how assumptions about the environmental and societal benefits of solar and wind energy are built into sustainability best practices and policies. The PI will provide a broad conceptual analysis of "sustainability engineering" in the US that aims to understand its epistemological and political roots. He will also develop two case studies of solar and wind project development in California?s West Antelope Valley, to understand the politics of Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) in renewable technologies. Intellectual Merit The project will build on insights from Environmental Science and Technology Studies and on Engineering Studies. It will map the connections between professional identity-formation and conceptualization of sustainability as they reflect a spectrum of normative worldviews that increasingly challenge American engineering. It will explore the politics of how and why LCAs have become more dominant in defining sustainability, and it will explore the potential for different views of LCA to be advanced by communities, regulators, activists-engineers, and NGOs. Finally, it prompts reflection on the broader question: Who is a green engineer? Broader Impacts The results of this study will be disseminated broadly through publications in leading STS, engineering, and energy policy journals and through presentations in multi and interdisciplinary conferences. Through reports and publications, the data generated by this study will be made available in a timely manner to STS, engineering and policy researchers. The PI plans to partner with federal, state, and local agencies to analyze his results in formats useful to policy makers. Based on these results, he will create an interdisciplinary, internet-run project, aimed at improving the comprehension of sustainability from an engineering perspective.