Prof. Michael Davidson
University of California San Diego
Seminar Information
Seminar Recording Available: Please contact seminar coordinator, Jake Blair at (j1blair@eng.ucsd.edu)
Planning and siting renewable energy are increasingly bottlenecks on the pathway to reduce carbon emissions from the electricity system. These decisions depend on the physical resource (i.e., quality of wind and solar), engineering economics (i.e., cost-efficient deployment including complementary infrastructure), and political economy (i.e., local support or opposition). In this talk, I will introduce a new open source package, geodata (https://github.com/
Michael Davidson is an assistant professor joint with the School of Global Policy and Strategy and the Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Department at the University of California, San Diego. Dr. Davidson’s teaching and research focus on the engineering implications and institutional conflicts inherent in deploying low-carbon energy at scale to mitigate environmental harms, specializing in applications to China, India, and the U.S. Michael holds a Ph.D. in engineering systems and an S.M. in technology and policy from MIT, and a B.S. in mathematics and physics and a B.A. in Japanese studies from Case Western Reserve University. He has held a post-doctoral fellowship at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, received a Fulbright Fellowship to study at Tsinghua University, and worked on U.S.-China climate policy for the Natural Resources Defense Council.