Tiemeng Ma, a doctoral candidate in energy, environmental and food economics at Penn State, will lead a seminar on the impacts of precautionary power shutoffs in California.
Her free talk - "From Local Shocks to Regional Impacts: Economic Consequences of Public Safety Power Shutoffs in California on Western U.S. Residents and Sectors" - will begin at noon on Wednesday, Sept. 24, in 157 Hosler Building on the University Park campus. The talk is part of the fall seminar series hosted by the Initiative for Energy and Environmental Economics and Policy (EEEPI).
Ma will discuss her study on widespread electricity shutoffs in California, designed to mitigate the risk of wildfire ignitions, and a framework that captured direct costs of power interruptions and indirect effects on the economy under different shock scenarios.
"The study further evaluates the cost-benefit trade-offs of infrastructure strategies such as sectionalizing devices, line undergrounding and backup microgrids, assessing their role in balancing wildfire mitigation and economic resilience," Ma said.
This research earned Ma the runner-up award for Best Student Paper in 2024 at the 41st North American Conference of the United States Association of Energy Economists. She is an author of "Local Favoritism and Regulation," honored last year by the Environmental Politics and Governance network as best poster.
Ma's research fields are energy and environmental economics, with a focus on impacts of extreme climate events on power and energy systems, infrastructure resilience and adaptation by households and industries. She analyzes policy trade-offs, distributional impacts and system resilience, especially in contexts such as wildfires and power disruptions.
About EEEPI
Established in 2011, EEEPI operates as a University-wide initiative at Penn State with support from the Earth and Environmental Systems Institute and the Institute of Energy and the Environment. EEEPI seeks to catalyze research in energy and environmental systems economics across the university and to build a world-class group of economists with interests in interdisciplinary collaboration.
