Dr Lee V White

Energy policy, environmental decision-making, sustainable systems, sustainable cities

Dr Lee White is a Fellow with the Zero Carbon Energy in the Asia Pacific Grand Challenge program. She earned her PhD at the University of Southern California’s Sol Price School of Public Policy, examining the impact of particular policy designs in terms of equity and the role that urban policy can play in supporting energy transition

Her research relates to understanding how systems can be changed to increase clean technology adoption, including policies that can make distributed generation more accessible to individuals. She has published in areas including drivers of residential solar adoption, predictors of intent to adopt electric vehicles, and household response to demand management rates to shift timing of electricity use. Her research examines design, implementation, and multifaceted impacts of policies to support clean technology adoption, in areas ranging from design of green hydrogen certification schemes to understanding varying impacts of electricity rate and regulatory design across sociodemographic groups.

Current research includes:

Embedded emissions accounting: frameworks for trade in a net-zero world. Dr White is co-investigator on this ARC-Linkage project led by Associate Professor Emma Aisbett. This project will help establish a global knowledge base on best-practice public embedded emissions accounting frameworks for traded products.

Bringing to light the regulatory disparities for electricity access and services in remote Australia. Dr White is leading this project in collaboration with Brad Riley, Sally Wilson, Francis Markham, Lily O’Neill, Michael Klerck, and Vanessa Napaltjari Davis. This work received funding from Energy Consumers Australia, and aims to provide a critical overarching view by building an original data set of electricity regulations and rules to support geographic mapping and statistical analysis of differences in electricity regulatory environments across Australia. This builds on prior work by team members, Energy insecurity during temperature extremes in remote Australia (Nature Energy, 2022)