April 8, 2016
ASU's Human Energy Analytics group, led by Jacqueline Hettel, creates new informatics tools and resources to catalyze, accelerate and improve the human outcomes of global energy-systems change.
ASU researchers work with energy companies to change their organizational cultures; with communities to invent new energy futures; and with policy leaders to accelerate energy innovation. This work leads to a better understanding of how to improve clean-energy technology adoption in diverse, complex communities.
By embodying human-centered principles in data design, tool development and analysis, human energy analytics can identify reliable signals of human values and motivations to optimize the social value of energy transitions.
The Human Energy Analytics group focuses on several key innovation areas, including community energy; helping communities imagine and plan for energy futures, analyzing data from community conversations to accelerate energy transitions, and creating new capabilities for energy forecasting and socio-economic assessment of energy systems and supply chains.
Research also addresses the energy industry by assessing safety culture and enhancing the use of existing safety-review knowledge systems to improve energy operations – like tools for measuring/analyzing social trends in nuclear power incidents.
This research expands into energy policy that develops analytic tools to inform diverse facets of energy policy innovation, including assessment of energy research and development strategies; impacts of distributed solar-energy systems to inform policy design; and text analysis of large-scale document databases – like regulatory filings.
Finally, it expands into energy engineering, which integrates human-centered data about knowledge systems, practices and institutional arrangements with engineering systems and modeling efforts to enhance understanding of the resiliency of energy systems to climate change and transitions.