Ashok Sekar

• National Renewable Energy Laboratory

Increasing the adoption of solar among low-to-moderate income (LMI) households remains an important policy goal because of its promise to simultaneously reduce energy burden and support the just distribution of benefits of renewable energy. However, scaling LMI solar remains challenging due to affordability and access issues. Most existing LMI adop...

The economic and environmental benefits of efficiency are typically assessed assuming that all consumers use appliances in the same way. There are, however, significant differences in consumer usage patterns, as well as geographical variability in prices and environmental impacts of electricity. To explore the importance of het- erogeneity, we firs...

Latent constructs are fundamental for theory-building and practice in various disciplines of the social sciences. Passive datasets and machine learning approaches provide an opportunity to predict latent constructs, thereby offering a strong potential to build scalable, granular, and theory-grounded models for various phenomena of interest in socia...

Lifestyles are changing due to information technology and other socio-techno- logical trends. We study the energy effects induced by lifestyle shifts via trade- offs in time spent in performing activities. We use the American Time Use Survey to find changes in times performing different activities from 2003 to 2012. The results show that Americans...

Given increasing demand and importance of rare earth elements (REE), exploration is underway to find alternatives to ore-extracted product. With REE concentrations varying between 270 and 1480 ppm, coal ash has been deemed as one such potential source. A number of research groups are exploring tech- nologies to separate REEs from coal ash and super...

This paper examines the relationships between: (i) Sense of Place (SOP); (ii) non-motorized travel; and (iii) the use of information and communication technologies (ICT). A guiding principle in built environment design for sustainability and livability is a latent construct termed Sense of Place (SOP), which leads visitors to perceive and associate...

We use the American Time Use Survey (ATUS) to characterize how different consumers in the US might use Autonomous Vehicles (AVs). Our approach is to identify sub-groups of the population likely to benefit from AVs and compare their activity patterns with an otherwise similar group. The first subgroup is working individuals who drive to work with lo...

As the market penetration of mobile information and communication technologies continues to grow, visitor feedback, such as online reviews of locations or sites visited, will continue to grow in parallel at finer temporal and geographic scales. This growth in data opens the opportunity for travel demand analysts to assess location attractiveness on...

The two main paths to power vehicles with sunlight are to use photosynthesis to grow biomass, converting to a liquid fuel for an internal combustion engine or to generate photovoltaic electricity that powers the battery of an electric vehicle. While the environmental attributes of these two paths have been much analyzed, prior studies consider the...

Carbon capture and storage (CCS) for coal power plants reduces onsite carbon dioxide emissions, but affects other air emissions on and offsite. This research assesses the net societal benefits and costs of Monoethanolamine (MEA) CCS, valuing changes in emissions of CO2, SO2, NOX, NH3 and particulate matter (PM), including those in the supply chain....