Renee Obringer, assistant professor of energy and mineral engineering at Penn State, will give the talk "Understanding climate change impacts on renewable energy: Insights from explainable AI" at 2 p.m. on Friday, Oct. 2, in 117 Earth and Engineering Sciences Building on the University Park campus. The talk will also be available via Zoom.
The event is part of a fall seminar series hosted by TRAnscendIng Natural hazards forecasting (TRAIN). The talk is free and open to the public.
Ongoing climate change requires renewable energy technologies to mitigate negative impacts. However, renewable technologies are also impacted by climate change in aways that can affect their systems.
"We are implementing these technologies in an increasingly warmer and more variable climate," said Obringer, who is also a faculty associate in the Earth and Environmental Systems Institute. "This creates a feedback loop wherein the technology we are relying on for clean energy and climate change mitigation is being impacted by climate change itself, possibly leading to lower reliability."
Obringer will present a series of studies aimed at understanding this feedback loop through data-driven modeling.
"Interpretable artificial intelligence can provide critical insights into the climate-energy nexus, which allows for more proactive resilience planning and improved climate change outcomes," Obringer said.
Obringer is a research fellow of urban and interdependent infrastructure systems at the United Nations University Institute for Water, Environment, and Health. Her research interests focus on understanding and evaluating the impact of climate change on urban infrastructure systems, with an emphasis on water and energy. Prior to starting her role at Penn State, Obringer worked as a postdoctoral research fellow at the National Socio-Environmental Synthesis Center at the University of Maryland. She earned her doctorate in environmental and ecological engineering from Purdue University.
About TRAIN
TRAIN is an initiative through the Earth and Environmental Systems Institute (EESI) that aims to transform complex geophysical and atmospheric data and bridge the gap between raw information and community resilience. TRAIN aims to build the community at Penn State to become nationally recognized for research innovation to respond proactively to funding opportunities and coordinate natural hazard responses.
