RESEARCHER STORIES
In conversation with (opens in a new window)Lisa Ryan, Professor in Energy Economics in the School of Economics at University College Dublin.
Lisa has a PhD in environmental economics from University College Dublin (UCD), a Masters in Economics and other postgraduate and undergraduate degrees in economics and chemical engineering from UCD and Colorado School of Mines, USA. Lisa previously worked as a senior energy economist in the Energy Efficiency Unit at the International Energy Agency (IEA) in Paris where she led research projects relating to energy efficiency finance, transport, and cross-sectoral policy. She subsequently worked as an independent consultant in energy and environmental economics. From 2006-2009 she was the Director of Research at Comhar Sustainable Development Council and research fellow in the School of Geography, Planning and Environmental Policy, UCD. Lisa also previously worked as policy analyst in the R&D division of Volkswagen AG in Germany.
How did you first become interested in energy policy?
In secondary school I liked maths a lot, especially applied maths and physics. I was always interested in the environment, and engineering was a very applied way of looking at solutions to environmental problems. After finishing a Bachelors degree in engineering in UCD, I was offered a scholarship to go to Colorado to do a Masters, with a thesis on emissions. There I carried out my research in an engine laboratory in Denver bus station where we measured the emissions coming out of heavy duty lorries. While researching vehicle emissions and air quality for my Masters thesis, I learned a lot about engines as well. When I finished, I decided to stay in transport because I felt there were a lot of environmental issues in that field.
My first job was with Volkswagen in Germany. I spoke German and had spent a year at school in Germany before doing engineering. I started in a great graduate program in Volkswagen, where we rotated across different parts of the company during the first year. I then chose to go into the emissions regulation and policy section of the engine development division of VW R&D. I used to travel to Brussels quite a lot for policy negotiations and that’s how I started to come into contact with economists and the whole policymaking process. I became interested in analysis that took a wider societal perspective rather than the more narrow technical approach favoured in engineering work. I started reading some books on economics, benefit-cost analysis, societal issues and how you can apply maths to societal issues and the environment.
What led you to come back to Ireland?
I decided to do a PhD in economics. I had seen in America that it was possible to do engineering as an undergraduate and then a PhD in economics, but it was a little trickier in Ireland because that wasn't common at all. Most of our PhD programmes didn't have much coursework at that point. Students just carried research for their PhD thesis without any additional classes, and I wasn't equipped to do that in economics. So I had to do a HDip in economics and a masters in economics; I did these inUCD, as I had won a grant to do the PhD there. I did these simultaneously with the PhD and I worked in the summer as a consultant for the Sustainable Energy Authority of Ireland. Then it was clear to me that I was going to specialise in environmental or energy economics.
Can you say more about your work in Colorado?
Colorado is at a high altitude and Denver is exactly a mile high. At that altitude, combustion in vehicles works differently, which means emissions are different and they have some significant pollution problems as a result. So testing of emissions in this setting was very interesting and the United States was the only place that was able to test them at that altitude at the time.
Did you always want to pursue an academic career?
Originally, my idea hadn't been to work in academia. I wanted to do a PhD to become an expert in the economics of the environment and to work in the policy arena. My first job after the PhD was with the secretariat of the Irish Sustainable Development Council (Comhar), which was an offshoot of the Department of Environment. I was the Director of Research, and we would do research, review and write reports, and give input into policy. From there I went on to work as senior economist in the energy efficiency division of the International Energy Agency, part of the OECD in Paris. This was fascinating and gave me an insight into energy policy across the globe. In this type of work, you act as a convener of policy research for lots of different countries and try to find an overview of best practice by reviewing lots of detailed work. I realised that I wanted to do the research myself and decided to return to academia. Also, with three young children, it was a good time to return back to Ireland. I came into UCD as a Research Fellow in the School of Electrical Engineering, before taking up a lectureship which was a joint position between the Energy Institute and the School of Economics. That's how I came into academia and I’m delighted to be here.
Why is interdisciplinary research important in your work?
Interdisciplinary work is important in that a lot of solutions require different perspectives on a particular topic, but I think in the area of energy it’s particularly important because energy is a service that touches every part of society. If you look at electricity markets for example, you need economists to understand the economics of markets and industrial organisations, but those markets have to have to be subservient to physical constraints, because we need to keep the lights on, and electricity is an electrical engineering area. Then there are a lot of increasingly wider societal challenges as we're switching from fossil fuels to renewables, to ensure a just transition. In the field of energy, it’s unavoidable to work in an interdisciplinary way.
What are the areas of research you are working on?
My two big areas of research are the uptake and policies relating to clean energy technologies such as the electrification of heat and transport, and the redesign of electricity markets to facilitate renewable electricity. At the moment, we are focusing on electric cars, solar PV and heat pumps, particularly for the residential sector, looking at which policy mechanisms are likely to have an impact on people taking these up.
In previous research, we modelled technology uptake by doing a cost benefit analysis: in other words, does it pay back for a house to either buy an electric vehicle and save on fuel cost or buy a heat pump and save on fossil fuel bills?
But we understand more and more from colleagues working in behavioural science that it's not just costs that drive human beings. For instance, we need to understand more about peer effects, and differences in risk taking. With climate change technologies in general you pay upfront, but benefits are spread over a much longer period, and this is not acceptable to many potential consumers of the technology. In any technology uptake strategy, you need to think about how people are going to view it, and you have to tailor your policy instruments with respect to that.
As part of this, in 2018, we carried out a survey of households in Ireland and their attitudes to different energy-using technologies. In the model we've developed from that survey, we can forecast the takeup in the population associated with particular policy instruments, such as a grant, or an interest free loan, in different settings, i.e. rural and urban settings and different socio demographic groups.
You lead the interdisciplinary EMPowER project relating to the decarbonisation of electricity and consumer technologies in climate change mitigation policy - can you give us an overview of the project?
Within EMPowER, we model the full implications of residential technology policy. We model, as previously mentioned, the adoption of EVs, heat pumps, and solar PV as a result of policy incentives, as well as the implications this has for the distribution grid and the electricity power system overall. This means that we can model a policy from the very start, in the household right through to the impact on the overall power system. I think that's very unique about the EMPowER project.
What are some of the findings from the project?
When we did our survey in 2018, a lot of Irish households hadn't even heard of heat pumps. We were at an early adoption stage of heat pumps, EVs and solar PV but found that with sufficient incentives, households were willing to take up these technologies in 2030. We are about to run that same survey again this year, and we suspect that responses will be very different. There are a lot more EVs in the country now for example, a lot more people have solar PV, and heat pumps are more common. So we may have moved from early adoption to a more mainstream situation. We are investigating whether you need different policy mechanisms when something is at its early stages compared to whether it's further along.
Based on 2018 data, 12.5% of households said that they would install a heat pump. How was this finding taken by policymakers?
There had been grants available for heat pumps but were under consideration for a phaseout. Our results led to the government deciding that they needed to keep the grant going for longer. Another of our findings was that grant level alone wasn't a barrier for people, but it was the whole package of requirements needed to get financing, such as having a BER rating carried out. Now that policy has changed a little, so you can apply to different organisations that provide this One Stop Shop where a wrap-around service in terms of finance and grant is available, getting the work done. I think our results were influential in developing that policy.
What are your thoughts on the process of how research can influence policy and what are some challenges?
Our EMPowER results are directly fed to officials in the Department of Energy, Climate and Communications. Policymakers, in my experience, are keen to hear about our research - it's just a question of making sure that we have suitable material that is clear and readable. One challenge is that everybody is very busy and therefore policy makers do not have the time to read long technical papers. Our core business is writing academic articles, but it's very important that we translate them into shorter policy reports. Just sending on an academic journal article alone isn't sufficient in terms of communication. We need to translate it into policy briefs or something more digestible for the policy system and spell out the impact. The other challenge I find is that you need to know who to target in the policy sphere. You build up personal relationships to be able to know who to send your material into, only for staff changes to happen. But overall it is a very positive and rewarding process.
We're very lucky within the EMPowER project because we can draw upon research from other colleagues within the Energy Institute to provide policy-relevant outputs, who are usually delighted to have a channel through which to communicate their results. The challenge for me is to keep up with what my colleagues are all doing so I have an idea of if there's something that might be useful to the department, but it’s very enjoyable.
Can you give us an overview of your projects within NexSys?
In NexSys we're expanding the technology adoption research we're doing in EmPowER into the transport sector. In Empower, we have mainly developed models for households of EVs, whereas in NexSys, in the transport work package, PhD student Nadya Saba is getting ready to survey SMEs on their adoption of EVs. We hope to be able to extend our agent-based model so it will have the capacity to understand how SMEs make a decision to switch out their vans for an electric van.
Collaborating with ESRI researchers using the (opens in a new window)I3E model, we will also investigate impacts of technology adoption on the energy sector and, in turn, the Irish economy.
We're also looking at how communities are responding to offshore wind, and, finally, we have some work going on around the electricity market. Working with Oleksandra Perfilova, a postdoctoral researcher from Ukraine, we are looking at the electricity market reform that we know is coming down the track.
Overall, it's quite a diverse package, but the unifying research interest is investigating how we can decarbonize electricity for households and businesses, and how we can make sure that markets and society are ready for it.
Within NexSys you are responsible for the society theme across all of the different strands. Can you tell us about this?
Research across all areas of focus in the NexSys project is relevant to society. Some is more directly focused on societal themes, while other researchers are more involved in technical questions that have an indirect impact on society and therefore it may be less obvious.We started to examine the extent of awareness of societal themes among NexSys researchers this last year, when we ran a survey of NexSys researchers, which received 39 responses. We found that the majority are interested in connecting their research to society, but there are quite a few who haven't managed to do so yet. We listed the sustainable development goals and most people in NexSys are doing something related to sustainable energy. But when it came to societal areas such as policy, just transition, and socio-economics, it wasn't the focus for most researchers, but there's very little research that doesn't have an impact on society, and that's something that has become more recognized by the technical researchers over the years.
To build on this, we are using a series of workshops to explore some topics further. We are also preparing a list of different societal data sets available both in Ireland and Europe to show researchers what data are out there, and, if that appears useful to them, help them get access to it.
What are some interesting developments in your field?
The good thing about working in policy is that things are always changing, and you have to keep moving. For example, the government's talking about bringing interest-free loans to households for retrofits, which is something that we've been recommending for quite a while. It will be really interesting to see how people react to that. The whole process of switching to renewable energy is fascinating because we are in a time of transition. For instance, the whole physical and market structure of the electricity system is changing.
What motivates you in your daily work?
I've always had a passion for the environment, and I think we've made quite a mess of things as humans, so that still drives me quite a bit. Plus, as academics, we have a unique opportunity to talk to young people. I think that it's very important that students learn about climate change and sustainable energy, no matter what discipline they're coming from. For example, in the School of Economics I started an energy economics master's class, and I've started two new modules for undergraduates, climate change economics and natural resource economics. I don't think the environment, sustainability or renewable energy should be niche areas. I really would like every student going through UCD to have come across these topics in some way. I find that really motivating.
I’m also the Director of the UCD sustainability degree program, which is an undergraduate program which allows the students to come into contact with lots of different schools and disciplines. The students come into first year without having chosen their pathway, and by the end of the year they choose between environmental science, social science, policy and law, and business and economics, all studied through the prism of sustainability.
What advice would you give early career researchers on what it takes to be successful in academia?
If you want to do good research, it takes hard work, thinking for yourself and thinking of new areas you like. When you're embarking on something, you have to really think about what might be interesting in three years' time, and not just carry out similar work to what's already out there. You need to think of interesting research questions, and find research questions that you are interested in, because it is a bit of a hard slog sometimes. So you do need to remain motivated to work hard at it. I also encourage people to take opportunities to be open minded and look around and work with colleagues that aren't specifically from the same field, because you may find interesting data, or interesting ways to collaborate. So keeping an open mind but also picking a few projects to focus on and doing them well is very important.
What are your views of research culture in an academic context?
In economics, when we're hiring, we tend to focus very much on quality of research published by candidates, but unfortunately journals don't always value interdisciplinarity. We need to make sure that we value less conventional publication outlets if people are active and doing really good research in different fields or in collaboration with different fields.
Another important point is that sometimes research can be a lonely area, so in my own group and in the UCD Energy Institute, I try to help create the feeling of being part of a team. For example, we have regular team meetings so researchers have people to bounce ideas off of. It's important to ensure that individual researchers don't feel isolated, especially early career researchers who need support and to be exposed to different experiences.
Learn more about Lisa's research:
Video: (opens in a new window)Helping Ireland transition to a renewables-led economy
Impact case study: Helping Ireland transition to a renewables-led economy | UCD Research