Marilyn A. Brown

Marilyn A. Brown is an American geographer on the faculty of the Georgia Institute of Technology and is a member of the Tennessee Valley Authority board of directors. During her prior career at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, she held various leadership positions managing programs focused on energy efficiency, renewable energy, and the electric grid. At ORNL, Dr. Brown co-led the report, Scenarios for a Clean Energy Future, which remains a cornerstone of engineering-economic analysis of low-carbon energy options for the United States. While at ORNL, she and Eric Hirst coined the term "energy efficiency gap" in a 1990 article on "Closing the Efficiency Gap: Barriers to the Efficient Use of Energy." The term refers to the unexploited economic potential for energy efficiency, and it has attracted wide attention among energy analysts.

Marilyn Brown is a national leader in the analysis and interpretation of energy futures in the United States. Her work has had significant visibility in the policy arena as evidenced by her briefings and testimonies before Committees of both the U.S. House of Representatives and the U. S. Senate.

Marilyn Brown co-founded the Southeast Energy Efficiency Alliance and chaired its first Board of Directors for several years. She also served on the boards of directors of the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy and the Alliance to Save Energy, and was a member of the National Commission on Energy Policy for many years. She has served on six National Academies committees including the Board of Energy and Environmental Systems. She currently serves on the editorial board of the Journal of Energy Efficiency and the new journal Energy Research and Social Science. In 2010, Dr. Brown was sworn onto the Board of Directors of the Tennessee Valley Authority, the nation’s largest public power provider, following her nomination by President Barack Obama. She was renominated and began a second term in 2013.

At Georgia Tech, Dr. Brown created and leads the Climate and Energy Policy Laboratory (CEPL) and advises students in the Environment and Energy Policy concentration in the School of Public Policy. CEPL supports this effort by conducting research on global energy security, clean energy employment, policies to promote energy efficiency, renewable energy policies and trends in the U.S. South, smart grid policies, and demand response. We are involved in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and our policy interests span the triad of mitigation, adaptation, and geo-engineering. The CEP Lab analyzes climate change and energy policies using software tools including the National Energy Modeling System (NEMS), hybrid NEMS-Input/Output approaches, and Monte Carlo methods to characterize uncertainties. These models are used to evaluate the speed and market penetration of new and improved energy technologies and the ability of possible future policies to accelerate technology adoption.

Publications

In 2011, Brown wrote "Climate Change and Global Energy Security," with Benjamin Sovacool and published by the MIT Press. In 2007 she co-edited Energy and American Society: Thirteen Myths with Benjamin K. Sovacool.^[1] She has also authored or co-authored numerous journal articles, including:^[2] o Wang, Yu and Marilyn A. Brown. “Policy Drivers for Improving Electricity End-Use Efficiency in the U.S.: An Economic-Engineering Analysis”. Energy Efficiency, in press, DOI 10.1007/s12053-013-9237-3.

o Brown, Marilyn A. “Enhancing Efficiency and Renewables With Smart Grid Technologies and Policies,” Futures: The journal of policy, planning and futures studies. Forthcoming.

o Brown, Marilyn A. “Innovative Energy-Efficiency Policies: An International Review,” Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews (WIREs): Energy and Environment, Forthcoming.

o Cox, Matt, Marilyn A. Brown, and Xiaojing Sun. 2013. “Energy Benchmarking of Commercial Buildings: A Low-cost Pathway for Urban Sustainability,” Environmental Research Letters, Vol. 8, 035018 (12 pp), in press, http://iopscience.iop.org/1748-9326/8/3/035018.

o Lee, Dong-Yeon, Valerie M. Thomas, and Marilyn A. Brown. 2013. “Electric Urban Delivery Trucks: Energy Use, Greenhouse Gas Emissions, and Cost-Effectiveness,” Environmental Science and Technology, 47(14) 8022-2030. http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/es400179w

o Brown, Marilyn A., Paul Baer, Matt Cox, and Yeong Jae Kim. 2013. “Evaluating the Risks of Alternative Energy Policies: A Case Study of Industrial Energy Efficiency,” Energy Efficiency, http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12053-013-9196-8.

o Huibin Du, Linxue Wei, Marilyn A. Brown, Yangyang Wang, Zheng Shi. 2013. "A Bibliometric Analysis of Recent Energy Efficiency Literatures: An Expanding and Shifting Focus." Energy Efficiency, 6:177–190.

o Knox-Hayes, Janelle, Marilyn A. Brown, Benjamin K. Sovacool, and Yu Wang. 2013. “Understanding Attitudes toward Energy Security: Results of a Cross-National Survey,” Global Environmental Change, 23: 609-622.

o Brown, Marilyn A. and Zhou. 2013. "Smart-Grid Policies: An International Review," Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews (WIREs): Energy and Environment, Vol. 2 (March/April): 121-139.

o Marilyn A. Brown, Matt Cox, and Paul Baer. 2013. “Reviving manufacturing with a federal cogeneration policy.” Energy Policy. 52 (2013) 264–276.

o Brown, Marilyn A., Etan Gumerman, Xiaojing Sun, Kenneth Sercy, and Gyungwon Kim. 2012. “Myths and Facts about Clean Electricity in the U.S. South,” Energy Policy 40: 231-241.

o Brown, Marilyn A. and Benjamin K. Sovacool. 2011. “Barriers to the Diffusion of Climate Friendly Technologies,” International Journal of Technology Transfer and Commercialization 10(1), pp. 43-62.

o Brown, M.A. and Y. Baek. 2010. “The Forest Products Industry at an Energy/Climate Crossroads,” Energy Policy 38: 7665–7675.

o Brown, Marilyn A, Matt Cox, and Rodrigo Cortes. 2010. “Transforming Industrial Energy Efficiency,” The Bridge (Washington, DC: National Academy of Engineering), Fall, pp. 22-30.

o Brown, Marilyn A. 2010. “The Multiple Dimensions of Carbon Management: Mitigation, Adaptation, and Geo-engineering,” Carbon Management, 1(1): 27-33.

o Sovacool, Benjamin K. and Marilyn A. Brown. 2010. “Competing Dimensions of Energy Security: An International Perspective,” Annual Review of Environment and Resources, Volume 35: 77-108. www.annualreviews.org/doi/pdf/10.1146/annurev-environ-042509-143035.

o Sovacool, Benjamin K. and Marilyn A. Brown. 2010. “Twelve Metropolitan Carbon Footprints: A Preliminary Comparative Global Assessment,” Energy Policy 38(9): 4856-4869.

o Brown, Marilyn A., Frank Southworth, and Andrea Sarzynski. 2009. “The Geography of Metropolitan Carbon Footprints,” Policy and Society 27: 285-304.

Qualifications

In 1971, Brown received her bachelor of arts from Rutgers University and 1973, her master’s from the University of Massachusetts Amherst. In 1977, she obtained her Ph.D. from The Ohio State University.^[1]

See also

• Amory Lovins
• Renewable energy policy
• Efficient energy use

References