Energy And Environmental Economics Core Course Sequence For An Interdisciplinary Engineering Science Doctoral Program

An innovative feature of the Energy & Environmental Ph.D. Program at North Carolina Agricultural & Technical State University is a two course sequence in energy and environmental economics. The objective of these core courses is to provide engineering science doctoral students with economics tools that they can use in their dissertations and throughout their careers in analyzing new energy and environmental technologies. The first course, Theory and Practice of Energy and Environmental Economic Policy Analysis, provides the economic framework necessary for analyzing energy and environmental issues. Microeconomic and macroeconomic principles and analytical techniques relevant to the analysis of energy markets and environmental protection are covered. Current energy and environmental regulatory systems at the state, national, and international levels are presented. The second course, Application of Energy and Environmental Economic Policy Analysis, provides the quantitative economic techniques necessary for analyzing energy and environmental projects and issues. The course covers engineering economics techniques for energy project valuation and econometric techniques used in forecasting the supply of and the demand for energy and environmental services. Presented herein are details of the content and methods utilized in the courses and student feedback on them. Introduction The Energy & Environmental (EES) Ph.D. program is a new interdisciplinary graduate program at North Carolina Agricultural & Technical State University that is now in its third year of operation. It has a current student body of eighteen students with its first graduate having graduated during fall 2007. The disciplinary backgrounds of the students include chemical engineering, mechanical engineering, civil and environmental engineering, electrical engineering, environmental science, applied mathematics, chemistry, physics, biology, and agricultural economics. A feature of the program that was incorporated into its initial design is a thread of exposure to energy and environmental economics. The rationale for inclusion of this thread included (1) to provide a vehicle for interdisciplinary conversations among students with a variety of engineering and physical science backgrounds, (2) to respond to numerous reports of the need for engineering graduates with strong technical skills as well as a broader education, and (3) to emphasize to students that energy and environmental technology decisions are driven by economic considerations. The two course sequence EES 810 (Theory and Practice of Energy and Environmental Economic Policy Analysis) and EES 811 (Application of Energy and Environmental Economic Policy Analysis) are the starting point for the thread of economic analysis that runs throughout the EES course of study. This part of the EES curriculum is designed to provide students with some basic economic analysis tools that can be used throughout their career to analyze energy and environmental technologies not just in terms of technology issues but also in terms of economic and regulatory issues. EES 810 and EES 811 are required core courses that are taken during the first two semesters in the EES program. Material from the courses is included in the written qualifying exam that students take at the end of their first year of study. Additional P ge 13490.2 program components that build upon this exposure to energy and environmental economics are seminars on energy and environmental economic topics and inclusion in the dissertation of some economic analysis of the technology that has been researched. During the three years in which the courses have been taught, two different instructors have been utilized. The instructor for the first offering of the courses was a part-time adjunct faculty member who had recently retired after more than thirty years working with the Research Triangle Institute (RTI), his last position being Director of RTI’s Public Utility Economics program. His educational background was a B.S. in Nuclear Engineering and a Ph.D. in Economics with a minor in Nuclear Engineering. He coauthored the book Electric Utility Load Management, served on the Board of Directors of North Carolina Green Power, and had previous microeconomics and macroeconomics teaching experience. This instructor had many personal experiences working on energy and environmental economics projects that he was able to share with the students. As the benefit of these courses to the EES students was demonstrated, the decision was made to hire a full time instructor to teach these courses. The faculty member hired has a B.S. and M.S. in Applied Mathematics and a Ph.D. in Agricultural Economics. Her research experience is in production economics, econometrics, design of carbon sequestration policies, and economic and environmental trade-offs of expanded ethanol production. She had previously taught an undergraduate Economics of Energy Resources and Policy course. Challenge of Teaching to Students with Diverse Backgrounds A big challenge in teaching the courses as doctoral level courses is that the economics backgrounds of the students are highly variable and some students have had little previous exposure to economics. Another source of diversity in the courses is the presence of international students from a number of different countries. To aid with overcoming these challenges, a concise economics primer has been developed that students are required to go through and answer questions about before the first meeting of EES 810. Since some students have had some economics coursework previously while others have not, the primer is intended to help “level the playing field” in terms of economics background among these students. To this point the accountability for going through the primer has only been in terms of the questions in it being the first homework assignment in the course. In the future, we plan to provide a course pre-test to provide a quantitative indication of the success of the primer approach and to direct future revisions of it. The primer focuses primarily on microeconomics. It also presents some key concepts in macroeconomics, environmental economics, and engineering economics that are useful in the energy area. The outline of the primer is as follows: