Dr Lee V White

public policy, environmental policy, environmental politics, energy policy, climate change policy, sustainable systems, energy transition, climate change mitigation, energy justice, energy insecurity, wellbeing,

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 is focused on climate and energy policy, with emphasis on how institutions and actors shape energy transition and whose interests are met or underserved by these outcomes. She has published in areas including predictors of rooftop solar and electric vehicle adoption, household response to demand management, and policies to govern emerging energy transition resources such as green hydrogen.

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)