Shuchen Cong: Identifying Energy Limiting Behavior and Its Implications

This talk introduces the ‘energy equity gap’ — a data-driven framework that quantifies when low-income households delay turning on heating or cooling compared to higher-income neighbors.

Title

Shuchen Cong: Identifying Energy Limiting Behavior and Its Implications

Time

November 3, 2025

6:00PM - 7:00PM ET

Venue

Online via Zoom. Please register to participate.

About

Traditional energy poverty metrics like energy burden miss a critical vulnerability: households that reduce energy consumption to save money, often sacrificing comfort and health. This talk introduces the “energy equity gap” — a data-driven framework that quantifies when low-income households delay turning on heating or cooling compared to higher-income neighbors. Drawing from research across multiple climate zones and a pandemic-era survey of 2,000 households, we’ll explore how energy limiting behavior manifests differently across regions, who gets left behind by current metrics, and how behavior-based approaches can inform more equitable energy assistance policies and climate adaptation strategies.

Speaker

Bio

Shuchen Cong is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Dartmouth’s Irving Institute for Energy and Society and a Lecturer at the Guarini School of Graduate and Advanced Studies. Her research focuses on modeling the system-level impacts of residential and commercial energy behaviors, bridging micro-level decision-making with macro-level planning to inform energy system design and policy. At Dartmouth, she develops tools and frameworks that integrate household- and firm-level energy use patterns into broader models of grid resilience, reliability, and decarbonization.

Readings

• Cong, Shuchen, Destenie Nock, Yueming Lucy Qiu, and Bo Xing. 2022. “Unveiling Hidden Energy Poverty Using the Energy Equity Gap.” Nature Communications 13 (1): 2456. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-022-30146-5.