Candise Henry is an energy expert whose research has focused on understanding the interactions between climate variability and electricity generation from the power plant scale, up to grid scale. Her recent work also includes energy justice analyses, particularly examining the impacts of power sector policies on disproportionately impacted communities both domestically and internationally. She leverages methods from geosciences, economics, and engineering to develop both statistical and physically based energy and environmental models, including linear optimization-based power sector capacity expansion models and statistical models based on large time series and spatial datasets.
Highlights from Dr. Henry's recent projects include quantifying the jobs created from recent renewable energy investments in Kenya; assessing the impacts of transportation electrification efforts on disproportionately impacted communities living near existing and new fossil fuel power plants in North Carolina; identifying the spatial overlap between least-cost electricity systems and energy poor communities in Guatemala; developing an optimization-based distribution grid model that provides off-grid infrastructure cost estimates for mini-grid developers working in low-data environments; and projecting U.S. and global greenhouse gas emissions from major sectors.
Before joining RTI, Dr. Henry was a postdoctoral research scientist at the Carnegie Institution for Science at Stanford University, where she helped develop an electricity system model to research efforts towards a near-zero emissions electricity sector. She also previously worked at a solar company in sub-Saharan Africa, managing and carrying out environmental impact assessment projects, leading efforts to collect and analyze electricity demand data, and participating in grid planning.
