Do tariffs on Chinese solar panels work? Could Europe come to blows over water? Will EVs help decarbonize the grid?

These are some of the questions posed by the graduating seniors who have submitted senior theses for the Environmental Science and Public Policy (ESPP) concentration. Earlier this month they presented their findings at a poster session for curious faculty and students.

We spoke with three of the 17 thesis authors:

• Alice Goyer: Vehicle-to-grid charging
  Data from Harvard’s own EVs show incentives for rethinking when to charge.
• Cara Yu: When protectionism backfires
  A decade of tariffs on Chinese solar panels have cost American jobs and competitiveness.
• Éamon Ó Cearúil: European tensions bubble without water policy
  Precipitation patterns are changing. Europe is not prepared.

The ESPP concentration “gives students a way of looking at the world that is truly integrative. At Harvard we talk a lot about integrating ideas about disciplines, but few of our programs go this far,” said Michele Holbrook, the ESPP Chair and Head Tutor, and Bullard Professor of Forestry. “These particular theses nicely demonstrate the sophistication of understanding in both science and policy that we challenge our students to develop, and that is critical for confronting complex, real-world environmental problems.”

Alice Goyer: Vehicle-to-grid charging
Advisor: George Baker

Most vehicles sit idle most of the time. When those vehicles are electric, they could be earning their owners a bit of money and greening the grid.

Using data from Harvard’s own electric vehicles and charging patterns, Alice Goyer measured those incentives. She found “university fleets are especially suited” to serving as distributed energy resources: charging when prices are low and selling that power back to the grid when prices are higher.

But that is not only an arbitrage opportunity. During hours of peak demand – such as evening, when people get home from work and cook dinner, electric utilities tend to raise the share of fossil fuels supplying the grid. By providing power back to the grid at those dirtier periods, the EV batteries are lowering the share of fossil fuels burned – transferring cleaner electrons from, say, solar power captured in midday.

The University normally charges its electric vehicles in the late afternoon, around 3 p.m. “At that time, their batteries are at around 40% and are charged straight to 100%, which is bad for the battery. Then they just sit there,” said Goyer, who received one of 10 inaugural Banga Social Innovation Thesis Awards. “I found that the university’s idle periods align with periods of peak strain in the grid, such as winter, when there’s higher natural gas use, and summer, when AC use peaks.”

By charging at periods of lower demand, her model showed the carbon content of a typical overnight charge fell by 42%.

Goyer, who has presented her findings to Harvard’s transportation office, notes that the same opportunities extend to residential vehicles in states with dynamic electricity rates: “You can make significant profit just by arbitraging.”

Cara Yu: When protectionism backfires
Advisor: Michael McElroy

Even before Donald Trump returned to office, American tariffs on Chinese solar panels were not working as intended: They were not reshoring jobs, they were not improving energy security, and they were not addressing unfair trade practices. In fact, they have cost tens of thousands of American jobs and hurt the country’s economic competitiveness, Cara Yu found.

Yu started by looking back to 2012, when the Obama administration first imposed anti-dumping duties on Chinese solar panels to protect American manufacturers, and studied the period through Trump 2.0’s first 100 days. Whereas the U.S. was once the global leader in solar manufacturing, she found that over the last 13 years, American goals have slipped further out of reach.

“We tariff the panels, but there are related jobs in sales and installation,” said Yu, who received a travel grant from the Salata Institute to visit Asia and interview industry players there. “Because we have suppressed the solar industry in the U.S., we’re missing out on all these great jobs. I estimate we’d have around 62,000 more jobs here if we had never implemented these tariffs – and the solar industry would be booming.”

Yu acknowledges China’s subsidies and that it has used Southeast Asian countries – which Trump has recently targeted with tariffs as high as 3,521% – to dodge tariffs. But the collateral damage is vast. Not only are solar costs higher for U.S. consumers. As a whole, the weakened U.S. industry means fewer ancillary supply chains that would boost other American technology manufacturing: “We’re not actually innovating within the U.S. to prepare ourselves for any solar manufacturing here.”

Éamon Ó Cearúil: European tensions bubble without water policy
Advisor: Sheila Jasanoff

The European Union is often seen as a place with a progressive environmental policy. But when it comes to water, “it is very much ripe for conflict,” found Éamon Ó Cearúil in his research examining if existing environmental policy in the EU is poised to meet the challenges of water scarcity under future climate change scenarios.

“Climate change is disrupting precipitation patterns and water cycles. We very much need to reform our practices around the management and governance of water as a result,” Ó Cearúil said, pointing to projected deficits. “It is about attempting to rethink our relationship with water entirely.”

Interstate tensions in Europe could rise very quickly, fears Ó Cearúil, who received support from the Salata Institute to travel to Europe for interviews.

One reason: Current policy overlooks the use, and waste, of water. When the European Commission reduced farmer subsidies in the 2000s, it changed the incentive structure for smallholders, encouraging them to plant thirstier cash crops. Farmers were no longer paid by their amount of production, but by their land holdings, which created a major increase in water demand.

A faith in technology to solve problems is Ó Cearúil’s second cause for concern. For example, Almería, in southern Spain, uses four times more water than it has. It’s solution “is to pipe in water from other regions to make up the deficit. That’s a short-term fix, but not sustainable in the long run.”

Finally, he sees water policy becoming captive to partisan politics. Water cannot just become the domain of the center or the left, because then it will be doomed – witness how the right in Europe is pushing back against the energy transition. A comprehensive water policy must “center industry, not just agriculture, because oftentimes farmers get fingers pointed at them unfairly, I think.”