When Hurricane Beryl hit, residents all across Harris County, from every economic status, educational attainment, and racial and ethnic background lost power. But even as the storm destabilized life for almost everyone in the region, the impacts of the storm — and the safety and wellbeing of Houstonians during and after it — have not impacted everyone the same.
Just a few weeks ago, the Texas Observer published a powerful expose: After Hurricane Beryl, Cooling Centers Were Few and Slow to Arrive for Houstonians of Color – Some Died of Heat Exposure. For many, the findings of this report were not surprising. When natural disasters hit, communities of color, rural communities, and low-income communities bear the brunt of the damage and struggle the most to access resources for recovery. We saw this in Texas with Winter Storm Uri and Hurricane Harvey. We’ve seen it in other parts of the US with Hurricanes Katrina and Maria. And we saw it once again in the aftermath of Hurricane Beryl.
But it doesn’t have to be this way. The inequities in our disaster response – and our efforts to make communities and infrastructure more resilient to extreme weather – are the result of policy, regulatory, and business choices that can, and should, be changed.
To better understand why these inequities persist, and what can be done about them I spoke to Dr. Sergio Castellanos, an Assistant Professor in Civil, Architectural and Environmental Engineering at the University of Texas at Austin and the Primary Investigator at the Rapid, Equitable and Sustainable Energy Transitions, or RESET, Lab. Sergio started his studies in Mechanical Engineering in Mexico, then transferring to University of Arizona and eventually obtaining both his M.Sc. and Ph.D. at MIT. As a professor at UT Austin, Sergio studies and helps co-create sustainability solutions for communities by using tools and strategies at the interface of energy, equity, and data science.
Sergio and the RESET Lab have done extensive research on natural disaster responses in Texas, including a major report, “Enhancing power system resilience to extreme weather events: A qualitative assessment of winter storm Uri”.
While he’s an engineer, Sergio also has an incredible ability to examine issues he studies holistically – he looks for challenges and solutions not just in the technical, but also the sociological. During the interview, Sergio discussed the RESET Lab’s research and what he's learned has and hasn’t worked in Texas utilities’ responses to extreme weather. We discussed utility communication and outreach strategies during disasters, whether or not utilities are actually responsive to public feedback, distributed generation and access to solar, promising policies and programs to improve equity and resilience, and much more.
I hope you enjoy the episode. Timestamps, show notes, and the transcript below. Please don’t forget to like, share, subscribe, and leave a five-star review wherever you get your podcasts.
Timestamps
3:20 - About the RESET Lab
4:49 - An overview of RESET’s research into Winter Storm Uri
8:21 - Utilities’ communication challenge during and after extreme weather events
14:28 - Strategies for effective communications during outages and mapping social capital
17:51 - Are utilities incorporating public feedback?
23:10 - Inequities in both natural disaster responses and deploying resilience solutions; racial divide in residential solar
30:53 - Impact of current policies and programs in reducing racial and economic inequities in access to distributed energy resources
35:26 - What’s next for the RESET Lab
38:38 - Mexico’s incoming president and Sergio’s outlook on energy and climate action in Mexico
Show Notes
Enhancing power system resilience to extreme weather events: A qualitative assessment of winter storm Uri. International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction (March 2024).
A Synthesis and Review of Exacerbated Inequities from the February 2021 Winter Storm and The Risks Moving Forward. Progress in Energy (March 2023).
Transcript
Doug Lewin
Sergio Castellanos, welcome to the Energy Capital Podcast. Thanks for being here today.
Sergio Castellanos
Thanks for having me.
Doug Lewin
Excited to talk to you, been familiar with you for a few years and tracking your work at the University of Texas. Let's just start, if you could just tell folks a little about yourself and about the Rapid, Equitable and Sustainable Energy Transitions Lab or the RESET Lab at the University of Texas at Austin.
Sergio Castellanos
Sure thing. Yeah, well, I'm Sergio Castellanos. I'm an Assistant Professor in UT's Civil, Architectural, and Environmental Engineering department. And as you said, I'm leading the RESET lab, which stands for Rapid, Equitable, and Sustainable Energy Transitions. And the type of work that we do here in the lab is data-driven research that is applied to the benefit of communities. But we also do community engagement work that can refine our data-driven approaches, the data sets that we use, the models that we construct, and the resources that we use. So broadly speaking, how we operationalize that is we work with capacity expansion models to evaluate the grid. We engage with community members to address some environmental justice issues and energy justice issues as well, mostly here in Texas. And we also evaluate the clean tech deployment inequalities, meaning how the rollout has been with some experience working in solar, but also venturing into other new technologies. So inevitably, as we think about the grid and its intersection with other systems, logical overlap is also with resilience. And as we know by now, it's quite fragile here, especially in Texas. So that's yet another point of research that we expand upon in our day-to-day work.
Doug Lewin
Yeah, and what I think first caught my attention about the work you were doing at the lab was some research you did after Winter Storm Uri called “Enhancing Power System Resilience to Extreme Weather Events: A Qualitative Assessment of Winter Storm Uri.” Can you tell us a little bit about that paper, just kind of other research you did after Winter Storm Uri? Kind of key findings and where things need to change, maybe where you think they have changed for the better, and where we're still lacking?.
Sergio Castellanos
Absolutely. So you know that paper, first we engaged in analysis of the impact from Winter Storm Uri, taking a stock of how it impacted different infrastructure systems, be it the power grid, transportation, housing, you name it. And so in that process, we learned that there was a breadth of impacts in these interconnected systems. And so that led to us to set our aims at understanding a bit more the operation and how this type of challenges occur, not only for communities, but also for utilities specifically. And so from all the infrastructure systems, we look at utilities.
So we organized a team, engineers, colleagues from the School of Communications, and we undertook an approach to interview utilities, be it power utilities, water utilities, and community members. And through that effort, we started understanding a bit more the impacts of these extreme weather events, but also the response from these utilities. So the power sector, specifically in the power sector type of work that we did, we interviewed 14 utilities across the state. First we reached out to many, of course. Some of them responded, some of them did not. But then after conducting the first interviews, utilities share that with other utilities. so that basically snowballed and increased our conversations with our utilities.
But essentially, we identified sources and gaps across different resilience dimensions. And in this case, just for the audience in general, when we talk about resilience, we're talking about the ability for a stakeholder to prepare, to plan, and then to absorb and recover afterwards, and lastly, to adapt to a potential adverse event. And so there's a whole process that goes before having an extreme weather event and then after. And in this case, we interviewed utilities, we asked questions about the environmental dimension, the infrastructure, the governance, the social implications, economic as well.
And to summarize this, or to make the story not that long, in infrastructure, we identified different resilient sources. Some utilities fared well when it came to the rotating blackout process. They had good SCADA monitoring systems. They had sufficient resources to restore power. They also had some challenges, of course. Some of them couldn't rotate blackouts in a proper way. And I can go deeper in some of the examples here, but others, of course, they had issues with generators that they failed. And after all, the type of responses that they had were some of them started to install backup power, some others started to winterize their generators.
But I think a common thread that we saw across the power sector, the water sector, and communities was the communication aspect. And I think specifically in the power sector, that became very evident in very poor communication efforts, or I guess within systems of governance, in this case utilities, but also with community members. And so I think that's one of the issues that in more recent examples, we're starting to see again and again. They happened in 2021, but they're happening back again, even though there's a different type of extreme weather event that we're seeing.
Doug Lewin
Yeah, I mean, we saw that again, right in Hurricane Beryl, right? I mean, that was universally acknowledged as one of the biggest problems was again, a lack of communication. We seem to see that over and over. Are there concrete things you're seeing? Are there utilities that really do this well? Are there things that are emerging from the research that if utilities or power providers are doing these things, the communication is much better, or is it not quite that concrete yet?
Sergio Castellanos
Yeah, well, if you ask utilities, they will all tell you they're doing great. And that's what we found, from a self-assessment perspective, I think they were pleased to a large extent with what they were doing. When we spoke with community members, I think that was a different story. And that calls for a need to reconcile some of these diverging opinions on how things went. The issue that we found significantly here with utilities is, or multiple when it came to first, communication from an infrastructure perspective. You have to have a pulse of where things are failing. So communication systems that can inform the utilities where to sectionalize a segment of the grid or where to restore power. That was not homogeneous. And in fact, some of the procedures that were set in place were all over the place. Some had, as I mentioned before, supervisory control and data acquisition or SCADA systems that could inform the restoration process, but some others had a Excel Spreadsheet. They were just flying solo essentially understanding and trying to take a guess of where to restore power and for how long.
The other communication side of things was with community members, as I said. And so some of them, when we spoke with them, they only use phone calls. Some of them only use Facebook. Others an Instagram post. So there was a, you know, a huge variety of types of communication channels, but that was not consistent. Also the language, you'd be surprised that, or you would think that in a state where a third of the population speaks a language other than English as a primary language in their homes, you would have multiple languages being disseminated or being used for the communication efforts, but that was not the case. And so language was an issue that was not properly addressed.
And then the other factor was the cadence. How frequent were the messages being sent out to the community members? I think that also varied across on a per utility basis. And that was one of the things that community members recognized as an issue. And I think we've seen that also in recent situations with Beryl where the portal didn't work out as planned, but then they didn't know when the power was going to be restored. Same thing happened in Winter Storm Uri. And so those are some concrete examples that we identified.
But moreover, as I mentioned in this group of engineers and communication professionals, we're also understanding and evaluating the role of language brokers. So as you communicate, the utility should also be aware and know that there are kids that are translating for their parents. And so the role of language brokers is an important one that we're exploring as well. We're working with some utilities in the state, water utilities for that matter. But I think, you know, it's helping the preparation process. Also, how you frame a message, it seems to be important. And that's one thing that we're testing right now. You know, the agency that someone can have and the type of framing and words that the utility can use can influence the community member or a household to prepare better. And so decision making can be strengthened by the type of communication that you put into it. So as an engineer, you can imagine I'm fascinated by all these solutions that are not technical as we typically think, because we think about, yeah, solar and storage, or let's harden the poles and whatnot. But there's so much more out there that we're seeing that should be done and could be done that could have a big impact as well.
Doug Lewin
Well, there's an interconnection between these things too, obviously, right? Because a lot of times as you described the utilities communications were poor, but sometimes that was because they didn't know, right? They didn't know where the outages were or how bad the outages were because they were working off of a spreadsheet or didn't have the kind of control system in place. So, even if you have all of that, which to be clear, Texas utilities do not have best in class and that needs to be a goal. But even as that goal is hopefully achieved over time, there needs to be serious attention and focus put on how you communicate with people. Like you said, just the way you frame things actually can flavor the experience of how people are either finding safety or not, feeling safe and secure, actually being safe and secure or not.
One thing I love about the research that you're doing at RESET is that you have this interesting mix, if I could frame it this way, and you describe it differently if I'm doing it wrong, but of like engineering and sociological research. And you're really talking to community members. So it's not just about SCADA systems and solar panels and generators. It's also about people. What are some of the things you heard from people or stories that stick out that are instructive as to the kinds of changes we could make, whether to the physical system or to the non-physical systems, the way we communicate and talk during these kinds of disasters?
Sergio Castellanos
Well, yeah, I think you know overall when conducting this type of research and having more formal types of inquiries, you know, be it through interviews, we learn different mechanisms that community members took up on themselves. Some of them were using existing platforms where people share and have things for free that they can share with each other. So they started to use their own existing social media platforms and networks to help each other. And so through that process, we also identify the double dipping of vulnerabilities because you have to recognize that there are temporary vulnerabilities as well. For example, there were pregnant women that have a higher need for having a safe environment, but that we're subject to these extreme weather events. And so in those situations, we learned that they were relying so much on their current networks, but also using, as you said, this type of social media tools.
One challenge in general, of course, is that as we encourage utilities, for example, to increase their media presence, diversify, use WhatsApp, WeChat, you name it, different platforms. If you don't have electricity, then it's hard to be participant in that effort, right? And because you have limited juice in your phone to access all this. But back to the point, that's one of the things that community members have coped with. And, you know, the important piece here is how do you feed that back into utility decision making? And one of the things that we've been thinking about is reflecting the social capital, which is just informal networks of how people structure and communicate among themselves. So you know, you could be part of the church, can be part of a volunteering group, you can be part of a political affiliation, you name it. But those tend to be hard to map. And they also tend to be the first one that you go back to in terms of an emergency. And so are there mechanisms, can we creatively map this social capital, existing social capital, this infrastructure, or virtual infrastructure in place to help guide investments from the utility perspective. And I think that's an ongoing conversation. In fact, we have some conversations with a national lab to try to explore this in more detail, because some of my students, amazing students, have participated in a competition or a data hackathon, if you will, to address this type of resilience issues. And that was one of the goals that we wanted to implement, this social capital metric into the communication side of things, but also to guide investments from a utility perspective.
Doug Lewin
So there's like a couple things going on there. Informal networks actually responding to the crisis and communities, these social connections, and I don't mean on Twitter, though it could be, but I mean actually like in real life, neighbors talking to neighbors, kind of a resilient strategy in and of itself, right? Neighbors checking on neighbors, making sure they're okay spreading the word as to where resources are, here's a cooling center, getting the word out through those informal networks. But then there's also the kind of, after the fact and preparing for future events is how do you mine, if you will, the information and the wisdom of the local community about where the real problems are and integrate that into a utility planning process?
Like is that stuff actually going on? Like I know right now, CenterPoint is holding a series of a bunch of like meetings, you know, they call them neighborhood meetings or whatever they're calling them in Houston right now. I don't know if they're doing that sort of thing, yeah whether it happens in Houston with CenterPoint or in other places, like is that actually happening where utilities are there examples you can point to of utilities really not holding an event to, and I don't know what CenterPoint is doing. I'm not saying they're doing this or not doing this. I don't know what's going on there. I haven't been to one of these events, but I know from the past, there are times when utilities will hold things like just to be present and show people they're there, but they aren't necessarily really like getting that information and taking it back and changing the way they do things. Have you seen that happen?
Sergio Castellanos
Well, conversations that we've had with different utilities guide us to believe that no, that's not the case as of now. When we asked a couple of utilities in the Midwest how they were doing things, it's all by a number of customers. Whenever you have a circuit that has the most number of customers affected, that's it. There's no further analysis going in there in terms of who has been historically more affected or anything of the likes. And so that's one of the approaches that have been done.
But I'll tell you, now that the federal investment dollars are percolating and through requirements from the infrastructure or Inflation Reduction Act or the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, now you have this Justice 40 which is you have to have 40% of the benefits flowing down to community members, especially those disadvantaged. And so now you start to think, if I'm going to apply for funding, get these dollars and put them to work to really help our communities, we have to demonstrate that we're doing things differently because they have been done in the way that I just told you. And so we are noticing that, yes, this has not been the case in the past, but we're also seeing a little bit more of an appetite to explore different ways.
And so these engagements that I just talked to you about that we're exploring how to map social capital, it's in response basically to a curiosity from utilities to start implementing this into their approaches. And it's in preparation for those funding resources that are coming in line. So I'm hopeful that that will be the case. It comes with its challenges because you know, speaking with neighbors here in Austin, they're like, yeah, we meet at El Pollo Feliz in this location. And sure, you can map that one specific, but that doesn't mean that all roasted chicken places in Austin will be a focal point of congregation or people go and feel safe and just share help with each other. So how do you contextualize that to specific regions, to specific cities? I think you can come up with a general framework, but you have to work really hard and with intention to really show evidence of the impact that you can have very locally. So hopeful, optimistic, but to date I have not seen that much.
One other point that I'll say is, you pointed at it very nicely, there could be engagements happening, but there's always the question, how meaningful are these community engagements occurring? There's a whole amount of effort being done by many to quantify the meaningfulness. And you start adding metrics, okay, how many people attended, how many questions they asked and whatnot, but it's not a foolproof approach. That's still a challenge, even when you condition funding to do meaningful engagement, there's some challenges still to quantify how meaningful. So there could be engagement happening right now. I also do not know the extent to which they are happening, incorporating or listening to community members, but there ought to be a way to be transparent about what was said and the agency that community members have in that process. How much of that was really used to create changes or if it was just something that, it was just a performance that really led to nothing?
Doug Lewin
And that is harder to measure, right? It's really easy to put down on a form, this many people showed up, this many questions were asked. It's much harder to say: this many ideas were actually introduced and then there was follow-up and there was actually action taken from the input that we received. I'm gonna be really interested to see if that does come out of the CenterPoint process and the 20 or 25 meetings they're having.
We're recording about a month in advance of when the Public Utility Commission will hold a meeting in Houston, by the way, it'll be October 5th. I'll just say that so folks that are listening before then know that. And as to my memory, that's the first time that the PUC will have had a meeting in Houston in probably decades. There might've been one in there somewhere I missed, but it's very rare. And again, what is the metric? Listening is good. That is a good end in and of itself. And there should be more. There should be some follow through on the ideas that happen there.
I want to come back to something you were talking about earlier and what has been a focus of your research. It's in the name for RESET is equity. And just as you talk about the sort of informal networks that can influence adaptation to a storm and all of that sort of thing. I think it's really important that we acknowledge that there are informal networks at play as well in the sense that if there is a place, take Houston as an example, we're talking a lot about Houston in this conversation, West University or River Oaks, if there's repeated outages there. There are social networks at play where the people who live there who are of means and are very well connected to people in power are going to make their displeasure known. And that's why, it is one reason, why typically you don't see outages as bad in those kinds of places. Whereas in Third Ward or Fifth Ward, you see repeated, prolonged outages in these kinds of events.
So one of the papers you wrote, contributed to, “A Synthesis and Review of Exacerbated Inequities from the February 2021 Winter Storm and The Risks Moving Forward.” And I think there's a lot of people that kind of tune out at these kinds of discussions. I really do believe that if there really is something that connects everybody here and if the communities that have the least power and the least wealth, aren't having a resilient grid, that means everybody else isn't going to have a resilient grid too. And if we can fortify the grid in places that are historically marginalized, that will actually accrue to the benefit of everybody. It really is, we should focus on these areas because it's the right thing to do. And it's like enlightened self-interest because the grid is literally connected. And if there's problems one place, there's going to be problems other places. But can you talk a little bit about what you see in your research through the RESET lab and other places, the equity aspect of both the experience of the communities during an event is inequitable and the solutions as they get deployed are typically not deployed equitably?
Sergio Castellanos
Yeah, so, you know, in terms of the experience and the outcomes, of course, many people that we've talked to, have some level of PTSD, you know, something happens once and as soon as there's a heat wave or, you know, cold front, they just get extremely anxious about what could happen again. So having a disproportionate initial impact really pushes them to have also a huge amount of anxiety for incoming events. And when you think about the climate crisis, of course, we're going to continue to see this happening more frequently, bigger magnitudes. So there ought to be a response there that could support that.
But I'll say part of the research that we've done in the past have looked at the technologies. And so we're talking about solutions that a utility is taking right now, which is trimming vegetation, hardening wires and poles, and improving communications. And so that's great. And also, one of the points that many advocate for, let's bring solar and storage, for example.
And so, you know, looking historically at solar in our research with colleagues from Tufts University and UC Berkeley, we looked at the deployment of solar. And there was questions, is it only accessible to higher income people or not? And so with that mindset and understanding that historically environmental justice has been marked more strongly across racial and ethnic lines than on income, you know, we explored, OK, what's the deal with the deployment of solar. And one of the findings that we had is that even if you control for income, so in other words, even if you look at only high-income people or only low-income people, we see racial divides. And so I think that speaks to challenges that are still out there and how to bridge those gaps, how to make it such that everyone can have access to these resources. And so that was for solar.
But now this is also topical as we think about solar and storage. Because that's been apparent that it's been on the rise. We've seen some studies that show that extreme weather events is increasing the adoption or is leading to an increase in adoption of storage. Not only solar, but now it’s storage. It's a huge driver. And so, you know, the question is how equitable is that deployment going to be? I don't think we've seen enough evidence just yet to have a statement there. But I'll tell you, people are really curious about that. And they're really looking into it. I was looking at the Google Trends, which you can search how people have searched for different terms over the course of multiple years. And if you look for keywords such as power generator, backup generator, solar generator, solar backup, all of these combinations in Texas, you'll see that the largest incidence of queries happened in Winter Storm Uri, and the second largest happened this past July. And so people are really looking into these solutions, right? Interestingly enough, if you look only for Houston area, the order inverses, in other words, the highest amount of searches for these keywords happened this past month in July, as opposed to in Winter Storm Uri. So all to say that there are some examples of things that could be or technology that could be adopted, but then the question is how are we gonna distribute it? What type of programs, what type of incentives? We have to be intentional about who can have access to these resources. And so I think, as I mentioned, the jury's still out, but there's evidence from previous times that can point us to the fact that this could be a challenge. And so being cognizant of this, I think that gives us the opportunity to be more effective in how do we make this effort to adopt resilience equipment, resilience technology.
Doug Lewin
Yeah, I think we're going to see kind of a compounding effect here that, with each hurricane, and there's just no doubt these hurricanes are going to get, they are already getting, and they're going to get more intense. The floods, the droughts, the wildfires, all of this stuff compounds. And every time it happens, people think more and more about getting their own generation, whether that be a gas generator, like you said, solar, storage.
I'm going to be really interested to watch the state, you know, the legislature at the last legislative session passed a very interesting policy. It was part of the Texas Energy Fund where they were mostly subsidizing large gas plants. But 18% of those funds are to go to microgrids at critical facilities. And we just saw during Hurricane Beryl, you know, nursing homes and assisted living centers, hospitals, fire departments that were without power. And I think what we're going to start to see over time is these kind of concentric circles where first the critical facilities are getting DERs and that's driving down the cost even more. And that you have homeowners who have means and can afford to have those, are going to have them. I’ve already talked to at least a dozen people in the Houston area that are like, yep, I got a generator after this one, or yep, I got solar and storage or whatever it is people that can afford it that will continue to drive down the cost.
And then, and I think this is a big focus of your lab is like, how do we, and you were talking about it just a minute ago, how do we make this equitable? How do we make sure that across economic lines and as you just cited across racial lines that these solutions are deployed equitably?
You know, Harris County and a group of local governments have won a Solar for All competition, a competitive grant out of the Department of Energy within the Greenhouse Gas Reduction fund. And then there's also financing there as well. Are you tracking those? Are you optimistic those will have an impact?
Sergio Castellanos
Yeah, I am optimistic. And I don't think we know just yet the extent of the impacts, if it will do as much as it intends to. Right off the bat, I think it's great, because it's doing something that hasn't been done before. And being part of teams that have been thinking about this from the funding perspective, like as we request funding, it is opening conversations that it creates friction and friction with companies that are really big established companies. And I think that's good. If it wasn't because of that, I don't think we'd be having this challenging thinking and ways to address this inequity. So from that perspective, I think it's already doing great.
What I think about typically in this situation is the community benefits plan, which is the set of requirements or four policy priorities such that if there's any infrastructure to be developed, it has to engage communities in labor. That's the first thing. You have to invest in America's workers, well-paid jobs. The third piece, you have to advance diversity, equity, and inclusion, accessibility in the recruitment and the training process. And the fourth one is just implement Justice 40, ensuring that those 40% of the benefits percolate to disadvantaged communities. Which again, you have to think about how and demonstrate that that's the case. It doesn't have to be in dollars, but it has to be in benefits, whether it's improved air quality, better access to a given infrastructure system, you name it.
And so I think the fact that that is out there, it should improve things. And when we have had conversations from people from the Department of Energy and ask, I have asked them, what is the Community Benefits Plan 2.0 looking like? And I don't think there's an answer just yet. These things are just being rolled out. It's so early in the process. I'll say there are some challenges already because sometimes you, as someone seeking funds, you submit your proposal, it gets accepted, but it's not something that is published everywhere. And so you create your own community benefits plan. It's evaluated by a group of experts. And then you get the verdict whether you get funding to do the infrastructure system or not. But there is no opening process to disseminate this to the community at large, for example. And so they just get to learn about this when funding announcements are coming out. And so I think that just speaks to some of the challenges that are right now. Could be improved in the future, I think so. I think sometimes, I think there's certainly opportunity to improve that. But all to say, yes, there is improvement and it's out yet the jury to determine how the next round of edits to this CBP or Community Benefits Plans will turn out to be in the benefit of communities.
Doug Lewin
Yeah, I agree. There's a lot of work to be done there. I think it's really important that those Community Benefit Plans are there. It is at least requiring companies that, some of whom already would have thought of these things, at least a little bit, to think of it more. And some companies that just weren't thinking of the community at all. They're just thinking of the grid as it's a bunch of widgets. It's a bunch of poles and wires. It's a bunch of physical infrastructure, but there are people on the other side of those lines and actually considering what they want out of their system and actually having those folks think about it and be able to articulate what they want from their system and understand the system. I think this is all very healthy. It's also very new and to your point, we've got a long way to go, which is one of the reasons I'm thrilled RESET exists and you're doing the work you're doing.
Sergio, tell us a little bit about what is next for the lab? Like what are some of the things you're working on now you're most excited about or future areas for research maybe you're not doing yet but are on the horizon.
Sergio Castellanos
Yeah, absolutely. Well, first of all, we're always excited to collaborate. So for those of you in the audience that would like to know more about our work or would like to partner in different projects, please, by all means, reach out. And the type of work that we are currently doing relates to hydrogen. In ERCOT, that's a big one. We're trying to understand the impacts of the expected load growth. And at any time we do any grid-related analysis, we always try to explore the social dimension. So in all our grid analysis, we look at the jobs that are being created. We just conducted a study for offshore wind in the Gulf of Mexico, for example, understanding the job impacts across different sectors, but also regions of the state. We're also super interested in the air quality impacts as well. So jobs, but also health, those two dimensions that intersect with the grid we're constantly looking at and coupling into our modeling.
And so fuels and technologies, as I mentioned, is hydrogen, it’s offshore wind. We'll look at EVs, electric vehicles, the impact on the grid, but also the charging station deployment. So engaging here in Austin, talking to community members about the potential pain points regarding EV adoption, but also EV charging stations. So understanding, how do they see things? What would they like to see if that infrastructure is rolled out in the city?
And then we're also looking at, as I talked about the clean tech equitable deployment, we're partnered also with other researchers to explore the role of credit and financial access and so just different tools that could open up for the adoption of solar or solar/storage.
Lastly, the other piece that we're very excited about is looking, we have decided to focus a lot of efforts when it comes to energy consumption in multifamily buildings. First, when you look at the income divide, you know, the lower section tends to rent the most. And when you look at the rent distribution, it's mostly multifamily. So if we have to pick a slice of the pie, we're looking multifamily. But we're looking at what are the potential opportunities there to electrify different end uses. But also, we have worked with the property assessment, clean energy, PACE in Texas to create tools such that they can rapidly identify potential customers where they can offer their services and we can accelerate this decarbonization process of different end uses. Whether it's heat pumps or heat pump water heaters or cooking stoves, for example, induction cooking stoves. So different appliances, but we're coupling that to the financial piece.
Doug Lewin
That’s a lot.
Sergio Castellanos
Yeah it's a lot. And also on the ground, EJ issues here in transportation, what if it's manufacturing, Austin is growing significantly, but as we're excited about the new tech that is coming to town, that's affecting community members, so we're having discussions with them, we're forming alliances as well, and those things really fall borderline engagement, borderline research, borderline just being part of the community and getting a good listening ear. So lots of different things, pretty excited about them all.
Doug Lewin
Amazing. Before we wind down, there's one other thing I want to ask you. It’s a little bit of a curve ball in a different direction. But I know in your background, you've worked a lot in Mexico. And you've published some papers about Mexico and I think energy efficiency and EVs. And obviously, there's a big change about to happen. Claudia Sheinbaum will be inaugurated as the president. She is not only the first female president, but also a climate scientist.
Obviously, Mexico on the energy front has been strange and kind of hard to comprehend lately. A lot of renewable developers very sort of frustrated at the last years, even though there's a lot of potential down there. How much are you watching or involved with things there? Are you excited about the potential for President Scheinbaum, incoming in about a month? Yeah, what are your thoughts about the changes there in Mexico?
Sergio Castellanos
Well, I'm an eternal optimistic and you know, I hope that scientific climate science background from her will really come and shine. You know, it's hard to say because she's definitely carrying a lot of baggage from the current administration. You know, there's an old refinery being constructed. And I think that has drawn a lot of resources. And so how to play this finance game of reducing the amount of resources funneled to that. And instead, you know, push those to climate solutions, renewable energy. I think that's the hope. We'll see if and when that happens. I'm not sure. I think you'll find people divided along those lines, people that just don't think that will happen. And some of us would hope that it'll happen. But we'll see.
We're still very much plugged in. We just conducted a study about the EVs impact on the grid in Mexico. Not long ago, we conducted another one for energy efficiency in the grid as well. So we're just having conversations with people from CENACE, which is the National Dispatch Center, the ERCOT equivalent, if you will. And so we're pretty excited about the potential. We see people that are committed. But this can get too political. So it's unclear at this point what will happen. But from our trenches, we'll continue to push forward in some of these studies. Right now, we have ongoing collaborations to talk about nearshoring as well and the impact in different industries, but also on energy in Mexico.
And there's a tight relationship between the US and Mexico there. So I see a lot of this joint type of efforts, bilateral efforts coming more and more in our lab, but also, broadly speaking, across many other research institutes. So we're pretty excited about that.
Doug Lewin
Well, and also, you know, there's a big connection between Texas and Mexico, obviously, not only US and Mexico, but Texas and Mexico, both economically, but also, you know, it's often talked about how ERCOT is an island. We don't have interconnections. We actually do have some limited, but like 400 megawatts or so of interconnection to Mexico. And those could potentially be increased without any of the FERC jurisdictional issues, because it's not within the United States. It's going across an international… There could be a benefit to both Mexico and Texas from additional connections for reliability, affordability.
Sergio Castellanos
Absolutely, and one of the studies that we did, what we did start last year was about that interconnection. I think there's a lot that has been said about interconnection east and west, but there could also be an expansion south. And so we have a model for Mexico's grid. We have worked with that for a while. And so as we grow our expertise here in ERCOT, that was a natural question. So yes, I agree there's a lot of opportunity in there. And we hope that with this, November will be an important month for the U.S. elections, but also in Mexico, a new incoming president. So I think, you know, stars align, we would see a cleaner future ahead for all of us.
Doug Lewin
Hey, this has been great. Let me also just ask and we can put this in the show notes as well, but where can people find you?
Sergio Castellanos
Absolutely. So our lab is reset-lab.com. You'll find everything about us, our latest publications, news, and exciting things happening in our lab. And you can shoot me an email directly. It's my first name, S-E-R-G-I-O-C, from Castellanos, my last name, sergioc@utexas.edu. So any questions, inquiries, excitements, exciting things happening your way you want to share with us, please do reach out.
Doug Lewin
Hey, thanks so much for being on the Energy Capital Podcast. Appreciate it.
Sergio Castellanos
Yeah, thank you.
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