Paulina Jaramillo

Professor Carnegie Mellon University

  • Pittsburgh PA

Paulina Jaramillo is currently involved in research to understand the social, economic and environmental implications of energy consumption.

Contact

Carnegie Mellon University

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Biography

Dr. Paulina Jaramillo's past research has focused on life cycle assessment of energy systems with an emphasis on climate change impacts and mitigation research. As a professor at Carnegie Mellon University, she is involved in key multi-disciplinary research projects to better understand the social, economic and environmental implications of energy consumption and the public policy tools that can be used to support sustainable energy development and consumption. She is now the Co-Director of the Green Design Institute and has started pursuing research about infrastructure systems for global development.

Areas of Expertise

Sustainable Engineering
Engineering and Public Policy
Electric Power Systems
Green Design
Energy
Climate and Energy Decision Making
Energy Systems
Resilient Systems
Energy Policy
Life Cycle Analysis

Media Appearances

Switch to EVs could save state and local governments up to $360 million, study says

StateImpact  online

2023-07-28

Paulina Jaramillo, a professor of engineering and public policy at Carnegie Mellon University and wasn’t involved in the report, said the strategy of transitioning government fleets to EVs is reasonable. However, she pointed out the cost-savings could be reduced where more infrastructure for these vehicles is needed to be built.

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Why the carbon capture subsidies in the climate bill are good news for emissions

MIT Technology Review  online

2022-08-25

Finally, the subsidies should spur the development of carbon dioxide pipelines and storage facilities that will be necessary to move and reliably sequester growing volumes of carbon dioxide in the coming decades, says Paulina Jaramillo, a professor of engineering and public policy at Carnegie Mellon University.

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Why hasn’t Henry Ford’s ideal power grid become a reality?

Popular Science  online

2022-07-27

“What Ford described,” notes Paulina Jaramillo, codirector of the Green Design Institute at Carnegie Mellon University, “became the suburbs we developed in the middle of the last century, except the suburbs developed close to cities, not farms, and have massive negative externalities.” This is otherwise known as the sprawl–paving and building over open spaces like forests and fields, and driving up carbon emissions with more road transportation.

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Media

Social

Industry Expertise

Energy
Public Policy
Education/Learning

Education

Carnegie Mellon University

Ph.D.

Civil and Environmental Engineering

2007

Carnegie Mellon University

M.S.

Civil and Environmental Engineering

2004

Florida International University

B.S.

Civil and Environmental Engineering

2003

Articles

Macro energy systems modeling for the least developed and developing countries—a call for action

Environmental Research Letters

2022

Since the start of the Industrial Revolution, improvements in energy conversion and use have transformed the world. Unfortunately, expanded energy use, and the economic growth it enabled after the Industrial Revolution, have not benefited everyone equally. Similarly, the contribution of different countries to greenhouse gas emissions, and therefore, climate change, has differed among regions worldwide. Unsurprisingly, countries with lower energy consumption have had lower annual and cumulative emissions of greenhouse gases since the 19th century than those with high energy consumption.

Policy spillovers, technological lock-in, and efficiency gains from regional pollution taxes in the US

Energy and Climate Change

2022

We used the US-TIMES energy-system model in conjunction with integrated assessment models for air pollution (AP3, EASIUR, InMAP) to estimate the consequences of local air pollutant (LAP) and carbon dioxide (CO2) policy on technology-choice, energy-system costs, emissions, and pollution damages in the United States. We report substantial policy spillover: Both LAP and CO2 taxes cause similar levels of decarbonization. Under LAP taxes, decarbonization was a result of an increase in natural gas generation and a near-complete phaseout of coal generation in the electric sector.

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Corrigendum: Estimating global demand for land-based transportation services using the shared socioeconomic pathways scenario framework

Environmental Research: Infrastructure and Sustainability

2022

Original content from this work may be used under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. Any further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author (s) and the title of the work, journal citation and DOI.

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