Watch Ben Finkelor, Executive Director of the UC Davis Energy Efficiency Center, in a segment on California’s role in advancing renewable energy and reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Click here for more.

Watch Jim Bushnell, Professor of Economics, in a segment on California’s efforts to become 100 percent reliable on renewable energy by 2045. Click here to watch the segment.

In a newly released working paper, Katrina Jessoe (UC Davis), Maya Papineau (Carleton University) and David Rapson (UC Davis) focus on the split incentive problems created when energy bills are bundled into the monthly rental commercial contract by comparing electricity usage across tenant-paid versus owner-paid contracts. The authors found that among the top ten percent highest commercial energy users, customers on tenant-paid contracts use 6-14% less electricity in summer months. Jessoe et al. conclude that a targeted policy of submetering and tenant-paid contract promotion would be an effective conservation strategy for policymakers, particularly due to the high concentration of electricity use among the largest commercial customers. This switch has a private payback period of less than one year. Remarkably, fixing the split incentives problem for large commercial firms nationwide would save more energy than doing so for the entire residential electricity sector. The environmental benefits are also large relative to other popular conservation strategies. Aligning incentives at the largest firms will produce greenhouse gas savings of between 615-1200 thousand tons of CO2 per year, or roughly 3.3 to 6.6 times the average annual savings achieved from a year of Weatherization Assistance Program retrofits. (This abstract is pulled from the working paper website)

Click here to read the working paper.

The University of California, a national leader in sustainability, launched the Carbon Neutrality Initiative (CNI) with an aim of emitting net zero greenhouse gases from its activities, buildings, and vehicle fleets by 2025. UC Davis is committed to teaching and research that explores climate change solutions, expanding its energy efficiency efforts, increasing its use of renewably sourced energy, and undertaking other endeavors to achieve this goal. In order to reach carbon neutrality, it will be critical to engage the entire UC Davis community.

To encourage student engagement in the CNI and in general sustainability efforts at UC Davis, and to support work that students are doing to advance sustainable practices on the UC Davis campus, up to two students will be awarded $4,000 each in the form of stipend funds for student engagement-based fellowships with an emphasis on undergraduate students. All students (undergraduate, graduate and professional) are encouraged to apply.

The application deadline is Wednesday, May 17 at 1pm. The application announcement can be found here.