The University of California awarded more than $80 million in state-funded grants to spur climate action this August through the Climate Action Seed and Matching Grant program. ERG alum Patricia Hidalgo-Gonzalez (PhD ‘20) leads one of the 38 projects receiving an award. Professor Hidalgo-Gonzalez and team will work on “Designing California’s clean and climate resilient electricity grid for vulnerable communities”. Hidalgo-Gonzalez will partner with ERG Professor Duncan Callaway, ERG alums Professor Grace Wu (PhD ‘18) and Professor Ranjit Deshmuku (PhD ‘17), and other collaborators to examine how the implementation of distributed energy resources, such as solar, and the electrification of residential consumption can alleviate the disproportionate burdens on disadvantaged communities from energy generation and energy disruption.
Professor Dan Kammen also received a Climate Action Seed and Matching Grant this August that will drive community level change and equitable transitions. Currently each city and county in California individually collects data on their greenhouse gas emissions and conducts quantitative analysis in order to create their climate action plans. This is expensive and time consuming work for any municipality, and especially daunting for small or marginalized cities. Professor Kammen and collaborators’ proposal for “Climate Action Planning Tools: Empowering Equitable Transitions for CA Communities” will centralize this data collection and analysis, creating a tool that all California municipalities can use. Through key partnerships with Civicwell and Stopwaste, this grant will also provide local governments with consulting for interpretation and action planning. This will accelerate change and allow California municipalities to spend their time and resources on implementation of equitable climate policies.