Originally published in our December 2022 newsletter (Issue 18)
David McCollum co-chairs the newly launched ‘Connecting MSD Research to Operations’ (MSD-R2O2R) Working Group within the MultiSector Dynamics Community of Practice. It is a fitting role, given the many years David has spent at the nexus between science and society. He has led activities within the context of several international, multi-stakeholder processes, including IPCC (WG III AR5 and AR6; SR1.5) and the Global Energy Assessment, as well as for the World Bank and International Science Council.
David L. McCollum is a Senior R&D Staff in the Mobility and Energy Transitions Analysis (META) Group at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL). His expertise spans economics, engineering, policy analysis, and natural systems. Before joining ORNL in September 2021, David was a Senior Research Scholar with the Energy Program at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) in Laxenburg, Austria, and subsequently a Principal Technical Leader at the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI) in Palo Alto, California. David received a PhD and MS in Transportation Technology & Policy from the University of California, Davis, Institute of Transportation Studies; an MS in Agricultural & Resource Economics from the same institution; and a BS in Chemical Engineering from the University of Tennessee.
David’s research attempts to inform state, national, and global energy and environmental issues on matters related to, among others, deep decarbonization, energy-transport-climate policies, electric sector planning, end-use sector electrification (transport, buildings, industry), consumer behavior, Sustainable Development Goals (including inter-dependencies), and financing needs for the energy system transformation. He frequently employs energy-economic systems, integrated assessment, and multisector dynamics models in support of this work (e.g., MESSAGEix-GLOBIOM, TIMES-MARKAL, REGEN, GCAM). Such tools are powerful in their capacity to bridge sectors, scales, and disciplines, shedding light on, for example, the human dimensions of global change and the costs, potentials, and consequences of different energy, climate, and human development futures over the medium-to-long term.
Currently, at ORNL, David is engaged in building programs spanning basic science to applied R&D to implementation. For example, David is working to bridge human and earth systems modeling in a project that combines the Global Change Analysis Model (GCAM) and the Energy Exascale Earth System Model (E3SM) to explore the effectiveness of land-based carbon dioxide removal in mitigation pathways with temperature overshoot and CO2 drawdown. Separately, he spearheads DecisionScience@ORNL, an internal effort at the lab to pair cutting-edge modeling and analysis with novel, early-stage technology development. Then, on the applied side, David serves on the management team of the multi-lab, inter-agency Net Zero World Initiative, the US government’s flagship international effort to support decarbonization of global energy systems in partnership with several national governments and multiple philanthropies. In past work, David has researched, among others, the energy investment needs for fulfilling the Paris Agreement and achieving the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) as well as the energy interlinkages between the SDGs
Highlighted Articles:
Andrijevic, M., C.F. Schleussner, M.J. Gidden, D.L. McCollum, and J. Rogelj (2020). “COVID-19 recovery funds dwarf clean energy investment needs”. Science, Vol. 370, Issue 6514, 298-300.
McCollum, D., A. Gambhir, J. Rogelj, and C. Wilson (2020). “Energy modellers should explore extremes more systematically in scenarios”. Nature Energy.
McCollum, D.L., W. Zhou, C. Bertram, H.-S. de Boer, V. Bosetti, S. Busch, J. Després, L. Drouet, J. Emmerling, M. Fay, O. Fricko, S. Fujimori, M. Gidden, M. Harmsen, D. Huppmann, G. Iyer, V. Krey, E. Kriegler, C. Nicolas, S. Pachauri, S. Parkinson, M. Poblete-Cazenave, P. Rafaj, N. Rao, J. Rozenberg, A. Schmitz, W. Schoepp, D. van Vuuren, and K. Riahi (2018). “Energy investment needs for fulfilling the Paris Agreement and achieving the Sustainable Development Goals”. Nature Energy, Vol. 3, 589-599.
McCollum, D.L., L. Gomez Echeverri, S. Busch, S. Pachauri, S. Parkinson, J. Rogelj, V. Krey, J. Minx, M. Nilsson, A.S. Stevance, and K. Riahi (2018). “Connecting the Sustainable Development Goals by their energy inter-linkages”. Environmental Research Letters, Vol. 1, Number 3