West receives EPA grant for research to improve air quality
| August 30, 2012 | |
Dr. Jason West
Jason West, PhD, assistant professor of environmental sciences and engineering at UNC Gillings School of Global Public Health, has received a $250,000 U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) grant to examine innovative ways to improve air quality. Collaborators on West’s project, “Dynamic electricity generation for addressing daily air quality exceedances in the U.S,” are UNC’s William Vizuete, PhD, associate professor of environmental sciences and engineering, and Seth Blumsack, PhD, assistant professor of energy policy and economics at Penn State University.
In the United States, cases of high air pollution have important health effects, and industry spends billions of dollars each year trying not to exceed air quality standards.
However, scientists now have the ability to forecast air pollution episodes a day or two in advance, West says.
“Given that advance knowledge of air pollution, we wondered if it would be possible and beneficial to take actions on a daily basis to avoid those episodes,” West said. “In this project, we focus on the electric power sector, with the idea that power plants located within the area of an air pollution episode could be turned off for a day or two, while other plants, located where pollution levels were not so high, could generate the needed power. Since decisions about which plants would be generating power are made on a minute-by-minute basis, it should be possible to implement such a system without electricity users noticing the difference.”The project aims to design such a management system and to evaluate its costs and potential effectiveness in avoiding air pollution episodes.
“We’re trying to design a smarter electrical grid that takes air pollution into account in how it operates, potentially decreasing the costs of achieving air pollution standards,” West said.
About 4 million people around the world die prematurely each year due to exposure to outdoor air pollution, making it one of the most significant environmental risks to human health.
UNC Gillings School of Global Public Health contact: Linda Kastleman, communications editor, (919) 966-8317 or linda_kastleman@unc.edu.
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