With the world’s population exploding – 2050 will see the addition of some 2 billion inhabitants, primarily in cities in low and middle income countries – decision-makers are pressed to meet basic infrastructural needs (transportation, water and sanitation, public space, electricity, social service facilities and others) while responding to such large global issues as climate change. Further, the COVID-19 pandemic revealed additional weaknesses in national and subnational infrastructure. No global estimate of urban infrastructure needs exists. However, the G-20’s infrastructure hub illustrates the gaps by country and region. Examples of the current and needed investment by 2040 reveal significant gaps: Brazil $1.2 trillion, $India 526 billion, Nigeria $221 billion. This course will review the history, theory, and current practice of financing with special attention to urban places. It will examine the challenges of the planning and financing projects, explore innovation and best practices in the field and suggest needed regulatory and governance reforms, as well as new and disruptive financial tools for cities. Student research undertaken in the course will contribute to the “Cities Climate-Resilient Infrastructure Financing Initiative (C2IFI)” under the direction of Penn IUR and in collaboration with Perry World House and the Kleinman Center. C2IFI is an important project being incubated at the University of Pennsylvania in partnership with the Cities Climate Finance Leadership Alliance (https://www.citiesclimatefinance.org/), the World Economic Forum (WEF), the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, and others.
Climate change, aging infrastructure, pollution, and institutional barriers are all contributing to urban water management crises around the globe. This course examines the systems and policies that comprise urban water, while looking for integrative, flexible solutions. First, we review water system fundamentals, ensuring everyone has a basic understanding of hydrology and traditional infrastructure. Next, we examine key challenges, concepts, and arguments in water management today. Then, we develop solutions, emphasizing integrated water resource management, demand-side management strategies, water portfolios, and decentralized systems. Through the course, you apply the lessons learned from readings, lectures, and class discussions in one city that you select. Final projects are published on urbanwateratlas.com.
Energy technologies are unusual economic goods: they are capital intensive, infrastructure dependent, politically salient, and deeply embedded in market rules. Understanding why some clean technologies scale rapidly (solar PV, batteries) while others struggle (nuclear, CCS, hydrogen) requires tools from microeconomics, industrial organization, and innovation economics. This course provides graduate students with a rigorous, applied microeconomic framework for analyzing clean energy technologies and markets. The course emphasizes how firms, investors, and consumers respond to incentives, risks, market design, and institutional constraints. Students will develop the ability to diagnose market failures, such as risk mispricing, coordination problems, missing markets, credibility issues, and non-price constraints that shape technology adoption and investment outcomes. The course will use structured case analysis and moderated “Market Failures Clinics,” to delve into the microeconomic foundations necessary to understand how clean energy markets function in practice—including with guest practitioners—and why policy intervention is sometimes required.
The energy transition presents a career-defining challenge in many disciplines and professions. Because of the breadth of this challenge, the very expertise across sectors needed to achieve the transition can present barriers to collaboration and progress. This course will prototype an effort to better understand these barriers in the classroom in ways that might overcome them in practice. Both instructors and students are drawn from technology and policy disciplines and a seminar format will emphasize discussion across these backgrounds.
The course uses case studies of grand challenges in the energy transition to identify repeatable, process- oriented best practices for solving complex, systemic problems. This course is intended for graduate students with a background in social sciences and humanities (economics, political science, law, planning, design, etc.) and students with a background in STEM programs (science and engineering).
Energy technologies are unusual economic goods: they are capital intensive, infrastructure dependent, politically salient, and deeply embedded in market rules. Understanding why some clean technologies scale rapidly (solar PV, batteries) while others struggle (nuclear, CCS, hydrogen) requires tools from microeconomics, industrial organization, and innovation economics. This course provides graduate students with a rigorous, applied microeconomic framework for analyzing clean energy technologies and markets. The course emphasizes how firms, investors, and consumers respond to incentives, risks, market design, and institutional constraints. Students will develop the ability to diagnose market failures, such as risk mispricing, coordination problems, missing markets, credibility issues, and non-price constraints that shape technology adoption and investment outcomes. The course will use structured case analysis and moderated “Market Failures Clinics,” to delve into the microeconomic foundations necessary to understand how clean energy markets function in practice—including with guest practitioners—and why policy intervention is sometimes required.
This new collaborative course — co-taught by faculty from the Kleinman Center for Energy Policy, Weitzman School of Design and School of Engineering and Applied Science — uses societal grand challenges as scenarios for identifying repeatable, process-oriented best practices for solving complex, systemic problems in the energy transition. This course is intended for Graduateuate students with a background in either the social sciences (economics, political science, law, or policy) or who are in STEM programs (science and engineering). This course will complement the material covered in the Kleinman Center Introduction to Energy Policy course (ENMG 5020) taught in the fall. It will be an opportunity to learn from one another and build a holistic understanding of the technical and policy dimensions of the energy transition and the global response to climate change and environmental deGraduateation. The course will be broken into three chapters. For the first third of the semester, we will focus on basics of policy and engineering literacy, with each student bringing their own expertise to the table. The best way to truly understand a topic is to teach it, and this chapter of the course will focus on learning how to talk across disciplines and approach challenges in new and unfamiliar ways. The middle third of this course will be built around case studies of grand societal challenges; some of which have seen considerable progress towards being solved, others which are still the subject of great uncertainty and disagreement. Among other topics, this course will explore: The impact of sweeping standards on building and appliance efficiency; the rapid development and mutual reinforcement of renewable energy technologies and policy; the ability of policy to facilitate healthy competition between technologies (hydrogen vs batteries, for example); The allocation of scarce CCUS resources to abate difficult to decarbonize products like cement, steel, and plastics; the importance of grid regulation and market design in ensuring future energy reliability and affordability; and the need for transition-ready environmental policies that protect ecosystems and communities without hindering access to critical resources (metals, minerals, land, etc.) The final third of the semester will be structured largely around group projects for which students with diverse expertise will work together to identify a grand societal challenge and isolate the technical and policy barriers to solving this challenge. These groups will give regular updates to the rest of the class and will work towards making a meaningful contribution to solving their challenge through collaborative problem solving, design, and research. This course will deliver content learning outcomes about technical, societal, and policy aspects of focal grand challenges, while providing all participants (including instructors) experience and skills to address community-derived problems in teams composed of members from disciplines that rarely collaborate. Over time, this course will serve as a working, iterative “laboratory” on parameters that affect the success of convergence style research and problem solving.
These elective courses explore relevant topics in ecological design and new technologies as they relate to contemporary landscape architecture. The courses explore topics such as ecology, sustainability, habitat restoration, hydrology, green roof and green architecture technology, soil technology, and other techniques pertinent to the construction of ecologically dynamic, functioning landscapes. The teaching faculty are leading practitioners and researchers in the field. These courses are open to all interested Weitzman students. Recent topics have been: Large-Scale Land Reclamation Projects (annually since 2005), instructor: William Young; Green Roof Systems (spring 2010-2014), instructor: Susan Weiler
This seminar will explore a collection of ideas influencing energy policy development in the U.S. and around the world. Our platform for this exploration will be seven recent books to be discussed during the semester. These books each contribute important insights to seven ideas that influence energy policy: Narrative, Transition, Measurement, Systems, Subsidiarity, Disruption, Attachment. Books for 2018 will be chosen over the summer; the 2017 books are listed here as examples: Policy Paradox (2011) by Stone, Climate Shock (2015) by Wagner and Weitzman, Power Density (2015) by Smil, Connectography (2016) by Khanna, Climate of Hope (2017) by Bloomberg and Pope, Utility of the Future (2016) by MIT Energy Initiative, Retreat from a Rising Sea (2016) by Pilkey, Pilkey-Jarvis, Pilkey.
This course provides an advanced introduction to the design and delivery of energy policy at various levels of government in the U.S. and beyond. Energy presents theoretical and practical challenges across many disciplines and professions, especially in the context of economic development and environmental sustainability at scales ranging from local to global. This course is intended to provide a broad overview of the institutions, legal frameworks, technologies, and markets involved in energy policy by exploring theories and case studies across these topics, with an emphasis on the energy transition necessitated by climate change. That said, a full introduction to energy policy requires multiple courses and Penn offers many salient ones across several schools including Law, Wharton, Weitzman, SAS, and SEAS. The primary goal of this course is to teach students how to think—rather than what to know—about energy policy. As such, this course provides both (a) a foundation for students who want to take additional courses on energy law, markets, technology, or policy and (b) a synthesis for students who have taken such courses and want to connect ideas and issues across disciplines and professions. Our seminar sessions will be largely discussion and exercise based to allow students to develop skills as energy policy analysts and to collectively theorize connections between laws, institutions, policy design, and outcomes.
This class is a survey of methods, concepts, and technologies used by planners to model urban and environmental systems in order to support decision-making and design. The student will learn how to use spatial data and computational models to analyze patterns, identify trends, and visualize alternate futures. The course includes three modules. Module one deals with urban-natural interfaces and includes site suitability analysis; landscape fragmentation analysis, hydrological modeling, and spatial interpolation. Module two introduces agent-based simulation of urban and environmental systems. The final module focuses on land-use applications including handling of remotely sensed data, and urban growth modeling. Students will learn basics of geo-spatial machine learning using the statistical software language R. No experience with R is required, however, basic familiarity with ArcGIS is required.