Infrastructure Resilience
For utilities, federal agencies, adaptation planners, and institutional investors. Stranded-asset risk, climate-proofing critical infrastructure, and the financial-risk disclosure frameworks that price transition risk. Includes climate-energy nexus work and thought leadership in stranded-asset analytics.
What this frontier is about
Climate change is no longer a future planning input for the electricity sector — it's an active operating condition. Heat waves stress generation and transmission, wildfires force pre-emptive shutoffs, hurricanes harden the case for undergrounding, droughts constrain hydropower and thermal cooling, and the cost of inaction compounds quarter by quarter. At the same time, utilities are under pressure to develop sustainable and cost-effective adaptation strategies, the Paris Agreement has pushed climate decision-making closer to metropolitan regions and cities, and post-2015 UN sustainable-development commitments have made cities critical innovation hubs for policy, investment, and sustainability decisions.
This frontier is where I work on the infrastructure beneath all of it - and the financial frameworks that have to price the risk honestly.
How I work in this area
Three threads run through my research and applied portfolio:
Stranded-asset risk and transition-risk pricing. Meeting the Paris 2°C carbon budget means stranding more than 80% of all proven fossil-fuel reserves and significant amounts of generation and storage infrastructure built around them. My published research uses machine learning and AI to identify, price, and de-risk stranded electricity assets — a cost-effective derisking strategy for utilities, regulators, and institutional investors who can no longer treat transition risk as a tail event.
Smart-grid hardening and climate-resilient adaptation. I research adaptation strategies in which smart-grid deployment and infrastructure hardening lead climate-resilience policy. Designing solutions that integrate a smart-grid policy framework is essential to addressing observed trends and future climate projections — and a collaborative process for disseminating climate data and impact knowledge across utilities, regulators, and state and federal governments is what makes those strategies actually deployable.
Hydrogen energy systems and the emerging energy economy. My work examines the economics of hydrogen energy systems, the policy environment shaping their deployment, and the use cases — industrial decarbonization, long-duration storage, heavy transport, and grid-scale flexibility — where hydrogen earns its place rather than displacing better alternatives.
Polycentric, people-centric resilience planning. Underlying all three threads is a polycentric framework that uses common sustainability indicators to inform urban policy, performance measurement, and planning. The benefits are concrete: stakeholder-driven prioritization, consensus-based decision-making, clearer identification of gaps, faster local action, and better capitalization on existing opportunities. Social equity, economic progress, and environmental integrity remain the goals.
My selected publications and thought leadership in this frontier
Books and chapters
Tackling the Risk of Stranded Electricity Assets with Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence— IntechOpen, 2021
Sustainable Energy Investment: Technical, Market and Policy Innovations to Address Risk— co-edited with Dr. John Byrne, IntechOpen, 2021
Sustainable Business Model Innovation: Using Polycentric and Creative Climate Change Governance— IGI Global, 2017
Entangled Systems at the Energy-Water-Food Nexus: Challenges and Opportunities— IGI Global, 2017
Contested Temporalities of Critical Minerals and Resource Extraction for Electric Vehicles— Edward Elgar Handbook on Inequality and Natural Resources, 2026 (forthcoming)
Recent research and applied work
Book Review: Environmental Finance and Investments— Financial Analysts Journal, 2016
For the full archive, see Publications →
What this means for utilities, federal agencies, and investors
If you're a utility, the question is how to harden assets and modernize the grid on a timeline and budget that actually works - without leaving customers exposed in the meantime. If you're a federal agency or state regulator, the question is how to coordinate adaptation across jurisdictions and disseminate climate data without losing pace with the impacts already arriving. And if you're an institutional investor, the question is how to price transition risk into your portfolio before it prices itself in.
