Clinton J. Andrews

Building a Micro Foundation for Industrial Ecology

: Industrial ecologists study phenomena at several distinct scales, and linking the resulting insights could advance the field. The disciplines of ecology and economics have each attempted, with partial success, to accomplish this by building a behavioral micro foundation, and industrial ecology should do the same. These fields all study evolving systems made up of autonomous individuals who operate in a largely self-interested manner, exhibit diverse behaviors, and self-organize many higher-level structures such as communities or sectors in a bottom-up fashion. Industrial ecologists should explicitly attempt to integrate empirical and normative views about agency, and more carefully distinguish between two types of agents—firms and individual humans.

Designing Buildings for Real Occupants: An Agent-Based Approach

Building information modeling is only beginning to incorporate human factors, although buildings are sites where humans and technologies interact with globally significant consequences. Some buildings fail to perform as their designers intended, in part because users do not or cannot properly operate the building, and some occupants behave differently than designers expect. Innovative buildings, e.g., green buildings, are particularly susceptible to usability problems. This paper presents a framework for prospectively measuring the usability of designs before buildings are constructed, while there is still time to improve the design. The framework, which was implemented as an agent-based computer simulation model, tests how well buildings are likely to perform, given realistic occupants. An illustrative model for lighting design shows that this modeling approach has practical efficacy, demonstrating that, to the extent that users exhibit heterogeneous behaviors and preferences, designs that allow greater local control and ease of operation perform better.

Greenhouse gas emissions along the rural-urban gradient

This paper investigates how land use relates to greenhouse gas emissions, using data sources that are readily available to municipal planners. It presents a causal framework linking settlement patterns to greenhouse gas emissions via landscape impacts (deforestation, carbon sequestration by soils and plants, urban heat island), infrastructure impacts (transportation-related emissions, waste management-related emissions, electric transmission and distribution losses) and buildings (residential, commercial). This is not a full accounting because it does not include impacts from industrial activities, agriculture and consumer behavior not related to land use, such as food consumption and air travel. Exploratory case studies of municipalities lying along a gradient of increasing population density suggest that per-capita carbon dioxide emissions vary widely, following an inverted ‘U’ shape, with post-war suburbs riding the pinnacle. Reflecting their central regional roles, municipalities with good jobs-to-housing ratios have higher per-capita emissions because they host both residential and commercial buildings. Buildings typically contribute more emissions than personal transportation. Vehicle-miles traveled per capita shrink most dramatically at very high population densities and where transit options exist. Changing land-use patterns is a political challenge because localism and outdated zoning ordinances subvert regional solutions. Technical fixes, especially green buildings, must be part of the solution.

Evaluating risk management strategies in resource planning

This paper discusses the evaluation of risk management strategies as a part of integrated resource planning. Value- and scope-related uncertainties can be addressed during the process of planning, but uncertainties in the operating environment require technical analysis within planning models. Flexibility and robustness are two key classes of strategies for managing the risk posed by these uncertainties. This paper reviews standard capacity expansion planning models and shows that they are poorly equipped to compare risk management strategies. Those that acknowledge uncertainty are better at evaluating robustness than flexibility, which implies a bias against flexible options. Techniques are available to overcome this bias. >

Analyzing Quality-of-Place:

In this paper I assess the current state of knowledge about quality-of-place (QOP) analysis. I find that there are persistent problems in measuring QOP, highly personal links between individual QOP perceptions and aggregate QOP measurements, mostly unintended impacts of public policy decisions on QOP outcomes, and inadequate triangulation across model approximations and data limitations when building tools to support local decision-making. The analytical community should therefore acknowledge that people hold diverse preferences, increase efforts to detect and model the consequences of policies, look across levels of decision-making for influences on QOP, and build adaptive analytical capacity.

Putting Industrial Ecology into Place Evolving Roles for Planners

Abstract Industrial ecology is an evocative metaphor that has evolved into a new paradigm for environmental management. It locates human activity in a larger, environmental context and uses the natural world as a model for organizing industrial activities. To date the concepts of place and jurisdiction have been missing from industrial ecology, even though many important environmental decisions are made within local political boundaries. Planners are uniquely equipped to advance this field because they (a) study locally-open systems such as economies, and (b) link big-picture ideas to incremental decisions. In return, industrial ecology offers planners an integrative framework for describing, explaining, and solving environmental problems.

Restoring legitimacy to the systems approach

The systems approach is a mainstay of engineering theory and practice, but it has been misapplied in the public policy arena and it is now viewed skeptically. This article briefly analyzes the problems that have been encountered with certain prescriptive applications of system concepts in the field of public policy. It then suggests steps that could restore credibility and legitimacy to policy-related applications of the systems approach.

Energy Conversion Goes Local: Implications for Planners

Problem: Emerging energy technologies are bringing planners a new set of issues. The supply-oriented framework from engineering economics within which energy planning has traditionally been conducted may be useful for siting large refineries, power plants, and transmission corridors, but it is not helpful for mitigating conflicts at the site level, encouraging new technology adoptions, managing the demand for energy, or, especially, coordinating the diverse users of smaller, local energy facilities. Purpose: I provide an alternative conceptual framework for thinking about emerging energy planning tasks. I highlight factors not considered in the traditional model, and introduce terminology for characterizing key characteristics of the changing energy economy. Methods: I draw on concepts from industrial ecology, urban metabolism, and ecological economics, and apply my new framework to a set of examples illustrating its advantages relative to the traditional approach to energy planning. Results and conclusions: I propose that planners use network models to think about energy systems and focus especially on nodes where energy is converted from one form to another. Understanding the scale, scope, commodification, and agency of such nodes, and whether and when these attributes are open to change, can improve energy planning decisions for traditional energy investments such as power plants and for energy initiatives such as wind farms, rooftop solar systems, energy-efficient buildings, cogeneration, compact growth, and plug-in hybrid electric vehicles. Takeaway for practice: Planners should do more than just mitigate energy facility siting conflicts. They should also identify points of governmental leverage on private decision makers, keep track of evolving technologies, bundle energy users with different temporal demand profiles, and help build smarter energy networks. Focusing on energy networks and their nodes should help planners see how they can be most effective. Research support: This work was supported by the National Science Foundation and the New Jersey Board of Public Utilities.

Visions of a hydrogen future

This article examines key issues facing public and private decision makers advocating for - or affected - by the possible emergence of a hydrogen economy. It offers alternative visions of a hydrogen future, explores the extent to which society can manage this technological transition identifies key business and public policy issues, and offers recommendations. Hydrogen advocates should take the time to understand the culture of a sector, industry, or enterprise to enable identification of events and circumstances that prompts action. Also, hydrogen as currently conceived is expected to evolve from a local market to a continental market over time, implying that state and local policies is also strongly influencing its development.

Deliberating on Statewide Energy Targets

This article reflects on a process of analytic deliberation about the future energy economy of New Jersey. Scenario analysis looking forward thirty years identifies tradeoffs and synergies among environmental, economic, and security objectives identified by stakeholders. Modest, unilateral greenhouse gas reductions seem affordable and may improve energy security. More dramatic, long-term greenhouse gas reductions seem less feasible given current technologies and policies, indicating the need for research now to invent “Solution X.” The two-year effort has helped align expectations among divergent policy actors and also helped embolden political leaders, who have acted in parallel with this project rather than waiting for its conclusion.