Research
Job Market Paper
The Effect of Land Fragmentation on Green Infrastructure Development in Rural America
with Sarah Johnston and Dominic Parker
Small American farmers face mounting economic pressures that threaten their survival. Green infrastructure development, such as wind power, solar power, or conservation easements, offers a potential source of supplementary income, but land requirements for such developments often exceed the size of the farms most in need of their revenue. We quantify how farm size and land ownership fragmentation affect the location and intensity of green development across the rural United States using a range of measures of land fragmentation at the county, section, and parcel levels. Fragmentation is most clearly a barrier to wind development, for which larger, less fragmented holdings predict greater development at every scale. Evidence is weaker for solar development, and conservation easements display a more complex pattern, with fragmentation raising the incidence of easements at some scales while consistently reducing the area they cover. The results suggest that the small farms most in need of supplementary income are often those least able to attract it, and that policies promoting income diversification through green development may do little to help them unless the barriers against the assembly of fragmented land are addressed.
Other Research
Earlier Energy Research
Assessing the Potential for Demand-Side Storage to Buffer the Differential Between Real Time Demand and Renewable Energy Supply in Orkney
(MSc dissertation, University of Edinburgh, 2017)
Using household electricity-demand data and Orkney-wide generation and demand data, I examined whether distributed behind-the-meter battery storage could reduce the mismatch between renewable generation and electricity demand on the islands. The project modelled how batteries could shift demand toward periods of high renewable generation and assessed the resulting effects on grid imports and the carbon intensity of electricity consumption. The research was undertaken in collaboration with Solo Energy and subsequently led into my work on distributed battery storage in Orkney.