publications

2025

1. Dynamic Incentive Allocation for City-Scale Deep Decarbonization

   Anupama Sitaraman, Adam Lechowicz, Noman Bashir, and 3 more authors

   ACM J. Comput. Sustain. Soc., May 2025

   Just Accepted

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   Greenhouse gas emissions from the residential sector represent a large fraction of global emissions and must be significantly curtailed to achieve ambitious climate goals. To stimulate the adoption of relevant technologies such as rooftop PV and heat pumps, governments and utilities have designed incentives that encourage adoption of decarbonization technologies. However, studies have shown that many of these incentives are inefficient since a substantial fraction of spending does not actually promote adoption. Further, these incentives are not equitably distributed across socioeconomic groups. In this paper, we present a novel data-driven approach that adopts a holistic, emissions-based, and city-scale perspective on decarbonization. We propose an optimization model that dynamically allocates a total incentive budget to households to directly maximize the resultant carbon emissions reduction – this is in contrast to prior work, which focuses on metrics such as the number of new installations. We leverage techniques from the multi-armed bandits problem to estimate human factors, such as a household’s willingness to adopt new technologies given a certain incentive. We apply our proposed dynamic incentive framework to a city in the Northeast U.S., using real household energy data, grid carbon intensity data, and future price scenarios. We compare our learning-based technique to two baselines, one “status-quo” baseline using incentives offered by a state and utility, and one simple heuristic baseline. With these baselines, we show that our learning-based technique significantly outperforms both the status-quo baseline and the heuristic baseline, achieving up to 37.88% higher carbon reductions than the status-quo baseline and up to 28.76% higher carbon reductions compared to the heuristic baseline. Additionally, our incentive allocation approach is able to achieve significant carbon reduction even in a broad set of environments, with varying values for electricity and gas prices, and for carbon intensity of the grid. Finally, we show that our framework can accommodate equity-aware constraints to preserve an equitable allocation of incentives across socioeconomic groups while achieving 83.34% of the carbon reductions of the optimal solution on average.

2023

1. No Free Lunch: Analyzing the Cost of Deep Decarbonizing Residential Heating Systems

   Anupama Sitaraman, Noman Bashir, David Irwin, and 1 more author

   In , May 2023

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   Recent studies have analyzed the carbon footprint of residential heating and proposed transitioning to electric heat pumps as an important step towards decarbonization. Electric heat pumps are more energy-efficient than gas furnaces and use electric grid power, which is generally less carbon-intensive than directly burning fossil fuels. The transition to electric heat pumps only solves half of the problem. Electric grids, in most parts of the world, are primarily powered by carbon-intensive fossil fuels and may never be completely carbon-free. Furthermore, the added electricity demand of heat pumps may trigger expensive upgrades in the electric grid. A deep decarbonization of residential heating can be achieved by using co-located solar photovoltaic (PV) systems with battery storage alongside heat pump retrofits. However, there is no free lunch and a deeper decarbonization comes at a significant cost. In this paper, we use data from 4,413 real-world homes to analyze the additional electricity demand due to heat pumps. We investigate the problem of sizing solar panels and storage to completely offset the added demand and investigate the tradeoff between cost and carbon emission reduction benefits. Our analysis suggests that co-located solar PV systems are an effective and carbon-free alternative to the power grid, and can reduce carbon emissions by at least 58%. Index Terms—decarbonization, residential heating, solar PV and storage, air-source electric heat pumps.

2. Leveraging Solar PV and Storage for Deep Decarbonization of Residential Heating Systems

   Anupama Sitaraman, Noman Bashir, David Irwin, and 1 more author

   In Companion Proceedings of the 14th ACM International Conference on Future Energy Systems, May 2023

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   Recent studies analyze the carbon footprint of residential heating and propose transitioning to electric heat pumps as an important step towards decarbonization. Electric heat pumps are more energy-efficient than gas furnaces and use electric grid power. However, electric grids in most parts of the world are primarily powered by carbon-intensive fossil fuels and may never be completely carbon-free, and widespread usage of heat pumps may trigger expensive upgrades in the electric grid. A low-cost, deep decarbonization of residential heating can be achieved by using co-located solar photovoltaic (PV) systems alongside heat pump retrofits. In this poster, we investigate the problem of sizing solar panels and storage to completely offset the added demand and investigate the tradeoff between cost and carbon emission reduction benefits. Our analysis suggests that co-located solar PV systems can reduce carbon emissions by at least 57.7%.

2021

1. Leveraging Machine Learning for Equitable Transition of Energy Systems

   Enea Dodi, Anupama A Sitaraman, Mohammad Hajiesmaili, and 1 more author

   In ICML 2021 Workshop on Tackling Climate Change with Machine Learning, May 2021

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