Joshua Sperling

• Doctor of Philosophy
• National Renewable Energy Laboratory

The escalating challenges of water scarcity and carbon emissions require a shift towards climate-smart water desalination processes to ensure sustainable management of our water resources. Desalination has significant potential to address water security, yet energy demand and costs are high. This study employs a novel automated Energy Management Sy...

Natural disasters often result in failures of transportation network components and blackouts that imperil the wellbeing of vulnerable populations. In response to these events, resilience hubs have been proposed as a predisaster planning strategy to improve access to critical services. This paper introduces an optimization-based approach to locate...

The increasing intensity and frequency of water scarcity, carbon emissions, and climate risks pose critical challenges necessitating increased uptake of and a paradigm shift to energy-and climate-smart water desalination processes. This study employs metrics and a decision framework to enable and accelerate the energy efficiency, decarbonization, a...

Desalination, when combined with energy-efficient operations and clean energy, has significant potential to address water security, resilience, and costs. Energy demands of desalination must be met, yet current inefficiencies increase costs, and the use of non-renewable sources exacerbates climate change. This research seeks to fill these gaps by a...

The human relationship with transportation is shaped by social, economic, demographic, and urban form variables, or socio-spatial factors. The spatial dynamics of these are key to generating and interpreting outputs of transportation models that are most relevant for a community and the diverse mobility needs of its members. Here we present a typol...

The COVID-19 pandemic has impacted a wide range of human activities, from food delivery habits to major moving and travel decisions. Results indicate multiple pandemic-related factors have influenced millions of relocation decisions by Americans (e.g., health risk, financial pressures, more space, and employment), and there are various positive eco...

Traditional metrics measuring transportation and energy outcomes can be augmented to better represent impacts on people’s lives and systems-level performance. This study introduces, analyzes, and tests two novel metrics: human-centered road capacity (road capacity for people) and energy intensity (energy use for people’s transportation) using empir...

The electrification of transportation and the integration of electric vehicles (EVs) with buildings connected to clean grids has been touted as one of the key solutions to the global decarbonization challenge. Cities are on the frontlines of current and future electrification, as they depend on and drive electricity generation, distribution, and us...

Exploring multidimensional aspects of differences in technology adoption, travel, and vehicle ownership across settlement types can help inform energy-efficient and affordable mobility system goals. At the same time, mapping key enablers, barriers, and risks for successfully meeting ambitious goals and targets (e.g. by geography, age, income, educa...

There has been growing research interest in understanding the energy signatures of airport access and egress as air travel continues to grow. However, these findings generally focus on airport access from the perspective of air travelers rather than ground access modes by airport employees. Using a data set of employment records, this paper uses re...

In the past decade, transportation network companies (TNCs) such as Uber, Lyft, and Via have established themselves as a viable transportation alternative to other modes. However, the popularity of these services has come with a fair share of criticism for their negative externalities such as increasing vehicle miles traveled and congestion in citi...

Emerging mobility services (e.g., ridehailing, e-commerce, micromobility, etc.) are generating novel and rapidly growing demands to use curbside space, with potentially large impacts on mobility, energy consumption, and related outcomes. This presents both opportunities and challenges to municipal agencies responsible for managing this interface be...

Intersections of food, energy, and water systems (also termed as the FEW nexus) pose many sustainability and governance challenges for urban areas, including risks to ecosystems, inequitable distribution of benefits and harms across populations, and reliance on distant sources for food, energy, and water. This case study provides an integrated asse...

1 Urban Electrification: A Knowledge Pathway Towards an Integrated R&D Agenda Executive Summary This white paper is an outcome of a workshop on urban electrification. 2 It outlines a vision for advancing a research and development (R&D) agenda to thoroughly examine the characteristics and relationships among urbanization and electrification and cit...

Major Findings Urbanization has clear links to energy consumption in low-income countries. Urban areas in high-income countries generally use less energy per capita than non-urban areas due to economies of scale associated with higher density. • Current trends in global urbanization and energy consumption show increasing use of fossil fuels, inclu...

This article reviews city case studies to inform a framework for developing urban infrastructure design standards and policy instruments that together aim to pursue energy efficiency and greenhouse gas mitigation through city carbon budgets and water use efficiency and climate risk adaptation through city water budgets. This article also proposes c...

The term “leapfrogging” has been applied to cities and nations that have adopted a new form of infrastructure by bypassing the traditional progression of development, e.g., from no phones to cell phones—bypassing landlines all together. However, leapfrogging from unreliable infrastructure systems to “smart” cities is too large a jump resulting in u...

This paper explores available city-regional data across infrastructure sectors and the related perspectives of key actors managing or helping to shape larger innovations in and management of transportation, energy, and water infrastructure systems and services in rapidly urbanizing arid regions of the United States. Indicators are developed, critic...

Purpose of Review Energy to source, condition, transport, treat, and deliver water for human use is significant. Stress from mobile populations, irrigation, and climate change means a need to increase energy efficiency in our water systems. This will save billions of dollars in costs for utilities, farmers, and municipalities, reduce pollution, and...

Purpose of Review Water for the energy sector is an interdisciplinary challenge that requires new integrated systems knowledge, well-documented case studies that test various decision processes, and both quantitative and qualitative modeling and analyses to support sustainable decision-making. This review paper highlights water requirements of the...

Purpose of Review Rapid urban expansion of the world’s cities is placing unprecedented demands on the energy, water, food, and other (X) systems (e.g., mobility) that each offer multiple life-supporting services. Coordination that considers inter-sectoral connections among these urban systems and services remains nascent in practice, yet are critic...

This report presents an overview of trends in the LAC region with the aim of disseminating information and facilitating discussions on accelerating and achieving nationally determined contributions (NDCs) for reductions in greenhouse gas emissions and long term LEDS. An important high level assertion is that improving coordination and integration b...

This chapter focuses on the anthropogenic greenhouse gas (GHG) emission trends from urban energy systems and the drivers of urban energy-related GHG emissions. As much as possible, quantitative information on GHG emissions in cities are compiled and key insights are shared on why and how they vary within and across cities. Place-based case studies...

Understanding how households, ranging from poor to wealthy differ in levels of vulnerability to hazards, such as floods and heat waves and knowledge of the mechanisms creating this difference is fundamental to enhancing resilience, fairly, across urban populations. A complex problem exists, however, in determining the relative influences of various...

The National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) and the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Fuel Cell Technologies Office (FCTO) convened a two-day roundtable to explore options for structuring a new hydrogen regional sustainability (HyReS) framework. This paper presents a review of the literature and synthesis of the roundtable proceedings in order...

DOE Annual Merit Review presentation 2016

Many cities worldwide seek to understand local policy priorities among their general populations. This study explores how differences in local conditions and among citizens within and across Mumbai, India shape local infrastructure (e.g. energy, water, transport) and environmental (e.g. managing pollution, climate-related extreme weather events) po...

Develop a regional hydrogen sustainability analysis assessment framework (HyReS) that can be applied to hydrogen supply and fuel cell systems and is consistent with a broad range of existing sustainability assessment tools used by relevant stakeholders. • Apply the framework as an enhancement to the existing suite of hydrogen systems analysis model...

Cities need to understand and manage their carbon footprint at the level of streets, buildings and communities, urge Kevin Robert Gurney and colleagues.

If infrastructure is considered the basic physical and organizational structure needed for the operation of a society, how will the rapidly urbanizing centers in the developing world, many of which have large informal communities (i.e., slums), provide it? Various tools exist that assist engineers in the design and evaluation of sustainable project...

Independent lines of research on urbanization, urban areas and carbon have advanced our understanding of some of the processes through which energy and land uses affect carbon. This synthesis integrates some of these diverse viewpoints as a first step towards a co-produced, integrated framework for understanding urbanization, urban areas and their...

Sustainable urban infrastructure interventions can help achieve both public health and low-carbon goals in cities. This paper explores the extent to which civil infrastructure (i.e., water, sanitation, energy, transport and building infrastructures) and environmental factors (e.g. air and water quality) associated with these infrastructures shape c...