SPEAKER: Noah Kittner PhD Student, Energy and Resources Group UC Berkeley DATE: Wednesday, April 18, 2018 TIME: 4:00-5:30pm PLACE: 126 Barrows TITLE: The Future of Coal: Kosovo and The Clean Energy Transition DESCRIPTION: Globally, energy systems are experiencing rapid changes and the landscape of energy no longer favors coal. In 2013, the World Bank pledged to stop loaning money for new coal energy projects, unless no financially feasible alternatives exist. However, in Kosovo a proposed coal-fired power plant has been under discussion for more than a decade. In this talk, Noah Kittner will discuss the changing cost of alternative energy options available in Kosovo for new energy infrastructure. He will then highlight the public health challenges and myth of “clean” coal technologies touted by major development banks and private corporations seeking to finance new coal systems abroad. Finally, Kittner will examine emerging energy storage technologies that enable rapid transitions toward clean energy systems with a two-factor model of innovation and deployment used to forecast the future cost of and performance of battery storage technologies. He uses this opportunity to discuss the plans, designs, and future management of cost-effective, sustainable, and healthy electricity systems in Kosovo and for other economies in transition. BIO: Noah Kittner is a PhD candidate in the Energy and Resources Group at UC Berkeley and researcher in the Renewable and Appropriate Energy Laboratory. After graduating with a BS in Environmental Science from UNC-Chapel Hill (highest honors), Noah was a Fulbright Fellow at the Joint Graduate School for Energy and Environment in Bangkok, Thailand researching technical and policy aspects of solar electricity and sustainability assessment. He co-authored a Thai Solar PV Roadmap with colleagues at Chulalongkorn University for the Thai Ministry of Energy. He has worked on renewable energy issues in a variety of contexts, including measuring land use change and biomass fuel uses in western Uganda, installing solar panels in Mexico, and electricity grid modeling in Kosovo. He is supported through the Berkeley Center for Green Chemistry as a SAGE-IGERT felow, National Science Foundation as a Graduate Research Fellow, USAID, and has won an award from the National Go Solar Foundation for his work on solar photovoltaics.