Juan Moreno-Cruz is an Associate Professor Professor of Economics in Ivan Allen College and a Fellows of the Brook Byers Institute for Sustainable Systems. He serves as faculty co-director for SLS' Fall 2017 Energy Systems for Sustainable Communities Fellows Program, with Matthew Realff (ChBE ).

This fall, SLS launched the SLS Fellows Program: Energy Systems for Sustainable Communities (ESSC), with 28 fellows representing all 6 colleges and various other units on campus, and including faculty, research scientists, graduate students, a post doc, and staff.

The purpose of this program is to emphasize the role of communities in the larger quest towards a sustainable energy system.  The majority of energy policies are oriented at changing the incentives of individuals, those being people, households or firms, in a way that favors adoption of cleaner technologies or practices, an increase in energy efficiency, or overall reduction in energy consumption. But all those policies and interventions forget the fundamental role that local communities have in fostering an environment in which people’s rewards from adopting those technologies are magnified. It is the role of communities as catalyzers of change that drove me to this research. So as soon as I was invited to co-direct this program, jointly with Matthew Realff (ChBE) and under the close watching eye of SLS Director Jennifer Hirsch, I jump at the opportunity. We have prepared an exciting program and I am looking forward to seeing the results of this engagement.

Over the course of the semester, the ESSC Fellows have a number of gatherings where we meet partners within campus and across the local community. We will also tour campus facilities and will have two gatherings off campus: one at Southface on Equity, Resilience, and Community in Southeast Energy Systems and a second visit to Social Circle, GA where we will tour the Silicon Ranch solar array facilities and learn about how it was conceived, then explore that work in the context of the municipality’s efforts to create a livable community. The fellows will also meet in smaller groups to work on their individual projects for the semester related to this topic.

The program will explore questions such as:

Towards the end of the semester, the ESSC fellows will write short reflections for the SLS Blog or create case studies for the new SLS Teaching Toolkit studies about what they learned and produced.