The instructions from the conference organizers were “say something of interest to the engineers and mathematical scientists (mathematicians, statisticians, data scientists, computer scientists) who will be in the audience.” That turned out to be a difficult task. Like any good economist who discounts the value of future payments, I vastly underestimated the time needed to prepare the speech a year and a half in advance.

The title of my talk was “Engineering: What are we doing?” I walked through how engineers are creative individuals who who solve problems for others using technical knowledge. But there are also problems! And, at our best we point in redemptive directions. I’m grateful it went well.

I’ll post later with the contents of the talk. For now, here are a few photos.

A gallery of photos from the twin conferences can be found at https://photos.pruim.co/Calvin/ACMSCES-2026.

“High Stakes Teaching” is a term coined by Jeremy for the ENGR333 projects I have developed and assigned in the previous decades. Our paper

• explains the educational theory behind the projects,
• discusses the process I use to develop the projects each semester,
• describes some outcomes of the projects, and
• identifies virtue formation in students as a benefit this pedagogy.

To open the presentation, we played this video from the Fall 2021 ENGR333 class.

Until the proceedings are posted at the archive of the Christian Engineering Society Conference Proceedings, I’m posting a draft of our paper here.

This is not merely a solar PV installation.

In the Fall 2024 ENGR333 course, I asked my students “What should be the design of a Calvin solar farm?” The customer for their work was the university CFO. Together, the students, the customer, two other professors, and I did a deep re-thinking of long-held assumptions about the way some financial and university systems work.

First, we had to realize that every investment has financial and physical benefits. All investors, including university endowments, participate in “the market” to accrue financial benefits. But all investments find their way to investees who accrue physical benefits, say in the form of a new factory.

Second, Calvin had to re-envision the purpose of university endowments and how they operate. We asked ourselves the question “What if instead of investing in the market, we invest in ourselves by using endowment money to purchase and install solar panels?” We could get the financial benefits, sure, in the form of reduced electricity bills. But we could also accrue the physical benefits of reduced reliance on the grid and reduced CO₂ emissions.

At the end of the semester, the students presented their findings for an engineering department seminar.

After the semester, several students made additional presentations to the board of trustees, challenging them, in the friendliest possible way, to use endowment money to invest in ourselves rather than the market. They were persuasive!

Calvin University will use electricity cost savings from the new solar panels to pay back the endowment with interest. Financial returns to the endowment will be less than a roaring year for the stock market but more consistent and never negative.

My hope is that Van Noord Arena is the first of several roofs to be covered with new panels in the coming years.

Description

The Fall 2025 ENGR333 project focused on development of a green revolving fund for the City of Grand Rapids.

Thank you, Dr. Dietsche. I am humbled and honored to receive this award tonight. And I want to thank ABET and the Lemelson Foundation for developing the award, as it highlights the important goal of preparing future engineers for today’s sustainability grand challenges through curricular innovation in higher education. I’m especially grateful for the work of the selection committee chaired by Dr. Ramesh and for my friend and colleague Jeremy Van Antwerp who nominated me for the award.

When Jeremy returned from the ABET Symposium in San Diego insisting that he nominate me, it was clear he wouldn’t take no for an answer. In contrast, I was hesitant and conflicted, because this honor highlights something that should normally be a background activity. I believe the role of a professor and the curriculum is to facilitate the relationship between the student and the material they are meant to learn. When it all goes well, the professor and the curriculum fade into the background, much like an excellent referee in a soccer match or the best umpires in baseball and softball. Thus, it’s a deep irony that tonight’s honor and tribute video thrust me very much into the foreground.

And I should say, I barely recognized the guy in that video. The world I come from has long waits, hard slogs, small victories, and quiet successes. There are few coherent plans, big wins, or grand triumphs. The tribute video didn’t show the 8-year bureaucratic wait to teach the first section of The Economics of Energy and Sustainability. Or the 2-year COVID delay to publish a book with Jeremy. Or the 7 years between the idea for a pair of papers on the rebound effect and their publication. … Or the 4-year joy of watching a student mature.

Rather, uneven progress is made with directions set, goals agreed, and colleagues willing to roll up their sleeves to do good sustainability work together in community. I have no sole-authored papers, and I have never been a committee of one. Any success I’ve enjoyed is due to productive collaborations with allies, co-workers, and friends. So, it is to my wonderful and supportive colleagues both at Calvin University and around the world that I dedicate this award!

Of course, none of my work in educating for sustainability is possible without the encouragement, love, and support of family and friends. So huge thanks are also due to my wife Tracy, children Mark and Catherine, and parents Alice and Loren.

Finally, I want to thank all of my students past and present. Their willingness to learn and their ability to rise to the challenges set before them provides hope for the future and gives meaning to my days.

Thank you!

We found that efficiency gains (which would serve to reduce CO₂ emissions) are insufficient to overcome rising demand (from economic growth). Furthermore, maintaining emissions at 2020 levels through 2029 would require electricity to supply 52% of transport energy.

Bernardo made many awesome figures for the paper, which illustrate the evolution of energy consumption by transport over more than 1.5 centuries. Check it out!

The paper evaluates the potential for digitalisation to drive structural transformations towards a sustainable economy. The paper finds that, left ungoverned, digitalisation risks intensifying economic–ecological tensions. However, if steered towards socio-ecological priorities, while addressing the environmental costs of economic growth, digitalisation holds potential to deliver benefits.

Jérôme used the the CL-PFU database for this work, demonstrating the value of collaboration among members of the Exergy Economics community. It is gratifying and humbling to see the database used in this way. And its use represents the realization of our yearslong vision to enable other scholars to explore aspects of a sustainable energy transition.

We (well, mostly Bernardo!) developed a model of transport-related energy consumption from 1800 to (nearly) today. We demonstrate how increasing efficiency has not, in the past, led to reduced energy consumption. Furthermore, we find that the quality of energy services was an important driver of past transitions, a factor to be explored when adopting new technologies.

The paper is published as open access and is available to anyone by clicking the link above.

Part II demonstrates application of our rebound framework. The main finding of Part II is that energy efficiency upgrades to a car and an electric lamp can lead to high rebound. Specifically, we find that 52.6% of energy savings from an upgraded car and 67.0% of the energy savings from an upgraded electric lamp can be taken back by consumer-sided rebound effects. Furthermore, if an energy price effect is included, rebound from a high-efficiency lamp can grow to 127.9%. Backfire!

Introduction

With colleagues and friends Gregor Semieniuk (economist) and Paul Brockway (energy analyst), I developed a mathematical framework to describe the rebound effect. More than six years in the making, Part I of our two-part paper was published today at https://doi.org/10.1177/01956574251331969. The paper speaks for itself (with more than 200 equations!). In this blog post, I want to recount the process that led to its publication. Such stories are too rarely told.

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The Fall 2024 ENGR333 project focused on solar PV electricity generation for Calvin University.

But it was not only the ENGR333 students who participated in the project. PHYS131 (Matter, Light, and Energy) and ENGR327 (Structural Design) joined forces with ENGR333 for a larger, campus-wide project in the Fall 2024 semester.

This project followed the 2023 project which found that renewable electricity generation would be key to achieving an earlier carbon neutrality date. I asked the students “What should be the design of a Calvin Solar Farm?”

Click here to listen to the interview.

We describe a new database of primary, final, and useful energy for nearly every country in the world from 1960 to 2020. Paul, Zeke, Emmanuel, and I poured our hearts into this paper for many years, and it is great to see it available! We hope that this article will be resource for the energy community for years to come. I’m particularly proud of the fact that the paper has several student co-authors from the University of Leeds and Calvin University.

The paper is published as open access and is available to anyone by clicking the link above.

We found that the Energy Return on Investment (EROI) of renewable energy carriers is higher than the EROI of fossil fuels when accounting for the useful stage.

The paper is published as open access and is available to anyone by clicking the link above.

The paper used a novel machine learning method to address partial data coverage issues. I especially like Figure 10 which shows the rise and fall of final energy consumption for railways.

The paper is published as open access and is available to anyone by clicking the link above.

I was once responsible for each of these blogs, and they represent important, fun, and formative experiences with family and students. Each of these blogs had been lost to the internet, due to server changes, cessation of IT support, software that no longer works, etc.

The first blog I brought back to life is from the South Africa interim in January 2005, which Tracy and I led for several students. We gave students the assignment to write daily blog posts to both (a) provide a record of the class and (b) inform family and friends of our experiences. Blogging was still relatively new at the time. (In my opinion, the first real blog was Scripting News, begun in 1997.) I always wondered how many friends and family were introduced to blogging by our efforts.

To bring the blog back to life, I relied on

• the Internet Archive for site source code and 400-pixel wide images,
• my photo library for full-resolution images, and
• my “know enough to be dangerous” knowledge of html, javascript, and css.

Over the course of several weeks, I was able to piece things back together in nearly original form. Some things, like comments, have been irretrievably lost. But all student writing and photos have been preserved. And nearly all photos have been upscaled from 400 pixels wide to 1200 pixels wide, providing excellent detail even on today’s retina screens.

Reading the entries 19 years later brings back memories and a flood of thoughts and emotions I had long forgotten. Maybe the same will happen for you, if you were one of the lucky few who joined us on the adventure.

I’m pleased that this writing now lives again on the internet. I hope readers enjoy it, too!

The paper describes a suite of open-source R packages and the metapackage CLPFUDatabase that assist Societal Exergy Analysis (SEA) practitioners to analyze Energy Conversion Chains. The new packages enable analysis of any country in the world across timespans of decades or longer. In short, the new packages enable, for the first time, scalable SEA.

The paper is published as open access and is available to anyone by clicking the link above.