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Student Spotlight: Derek Lemoine
Student Spotlight Directory
 PHOTO/R. NORGAARD
ERG Master's/PhD candidate, Derek Lemoine.
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"Developing Climate Solutions"
Derek Lemoine is a second year MS/PhD student in the Energy and Resources Group (ERG). His current research centers around his proposal to create greenhouse gas property, and his initial research at ERG concerned plug-in hybrid electric vehicles in California energy markets, game-theoretic models of unilateral climate policy, and the correlation of wind power over large distances in the western U.S.
For his Master’s Project, Derek is researching his greenhouse gas property idea from several different angles. By the time he is done, he will have described historical and theoretical conceptions of the atmosphere as property, explained the importance of a greenhouse gas property regime for the development of air capture technologies that can remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, calculated the firm-level option value created by various implementations of a property-based climate policy, and used an institutional economics analysis to explore how a government could credibly commit to implementing the property policy. His policy proposal based on these ideas has been selected as a finalist in the 2007 Science, Technology, & Engineering Policy Group (STEP) White Paper Competition.
Plug-in hybrid electric vehicles (PHEVs) can run in gasoline-fueled hybrid electric mode like a Toyota Prius or in battery-powered mode using electricity from the grid. Derek first explored the economics of PHEV use for two ERG classes, and last summer he expanded this work to include electricity grid impacts and the acceptable vehicle and battery costs implied by expected fuel savings. He is publishing the resulting paper with ERG Professors Alexander E. Farrell and Daniel M. Kammen, and he is working on a second paper with these faculty members and fellow student Sam Arons that evaluates the cost-effectiveness of greenhouse gas mitigation through PHEV adoption. Derek is also using these results to contribute to the electricity portion of a study on California’s Low Carbon Fuel Standard.
Derek came to ERG because it offered the freedom for intellectual exploration. Here he can combine disparate academic fields to develop new solutions to environmental problems. ERG encourages students to study new disciplines and then to incorporate the ideas and perspectives of these disciplines into their research. Indeed, many of Derek’s project ideas have come from connecting concepts learned in seemingly unrelated classes.
Originally from Louisiana, Derek received a BA in Philosophy and in Integrative Environmental Solutions (a student-designed major) from the University of the South in Sewanee, TN in 2003. After college, he lived in the Costa Rican rainforest as part of an experimental conservation program before going to the World Resources Institute in Washington, DC as a researcher with the Material Flows Project. He then returned to Sewanee to extend a previous project with the Sewanee Landscape Analysis Lab. His research used Geographic Information Systems (GIS) to measure riparian buffers in clear-cut areas of the Tennessee Cumberland Plateau and culminated in an article in the Journal of Forestry. In the year before coming to ERG, he surveyed the marshes of Fort Drum, New York as a Wetlands Inventory Specialist and then joined the Baldwin County Commission in Alabama as a Natural Resource Analyst. In this last position, he implemented a GIS-based wetlands model and developed new conservation development regulations that use incentives to protect wetlands, preserve open space, and encourage development. Derek’s graduate work is funded by the National Science Foundation’s Graduate Research Fellowship Program.
5/1/07
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