Systems Thinking in Energy: Navigating Costs, Emissions, and Impact
Learn how to conduct systems-level energy analysis using a novel modeling tool developed by MIT that will help you explore pathways to decarbonization and climate change mitigation.
Course Information
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About this Course
The energy transition involves navigating complex tradeoffs between reducing carbon emissions, lowering costs, ensuring reliability, and scaling renewable energy solutions. Making smart decisions requires more than technical knowledge – it demands a systems thinking mindset.
This online course teaches you how to think critically and systematically about energy problems and solutions. You’ll learn how to identify the right questions, frame meaningful comparisons, and analyze tradeoffs to guide decision-making in high-impact topics like electrifying transport, maintaining grid reliability with increasing renewable energy, and hydrogen’s evolving role in low-carbon systems.
To bring these concepts to life, you’ll use Sesame, a system-scale modeling tool developed at MIT, to quantify tradeoffs and make apples-to-apples comparisons across technologies, policies, and energy pathways.
Whether you’re a student, engineer, or policymaker, this course equips you with a decision-making framework to tackle today’s energy challenges and tomorrow’s opportunities.
What you'll learn
- How to apply systems thinking to complex energy problems
- A structured approach to comparing energy technologies and policies
- Methods to perform cost, emissions, and tradeoff analysis
- How to make consistent “apples-to-apples” comparisons across energy technologies and pathways
- How to use Sesame to model and quantify real-world energy decisions
Prerequisites
- Strong English language skills recommended
- Ability to perform college-level mathematical operations
- Study of physics, engineering, and/or environment science helpful
Meet your instructors
Christopher Knittel
Professor of Applied Economics
Christopher R. Knittel is the George P. Shultz Professor of Applied Economics at the Sloan School of Management, Director of the Center for Energy and Environmental Policy Research, and Deputy Director of Policy of the Energy Initiative at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
He joined the faculty at MIT in 2011, having taught previously at UC Davis and Boston University. Professor Knittel received his B.A. in economics and political science from the California State University, Stanislaus in 1994 ( summa cum laude ), an M.A. in economics from UC Davis in 1996, and a Ph.D. in economics from UC Berkeley in 1999. His research focuses on environmental economics, industrial organization, and applied econometrics. He is a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research in the Productivity, Industrial Organization, and Energy and Environmental Economics groups.
Professor Knittel is an associate editor of the American Economic Journal: Economic Policy , the Journal of Industrial Economic s and Journal of Energy Markets. His research has appeared in the American Economic Review, the American Economic Journal, the Review of Economics and Statistics, the Journal of Industrial Economics, the Energy Journal and other academic journals.
