Veronica Jacome
Temple University, PA·Social Science·Early-career
Electricity reaches people through grids of wildly different ages and sizes, and the experience of using them varies just as much: some households expect flawless service, others plan their days around outages and rising bills. This project studies that variation directly, treating people's everyday encounters with power supply not as a side effect of engineering decisions but as something that shapes how electrical infrastructure gets built and rebuilt.
- Fields
Social Science
Engineering
Earth & Environmental Science
- Topics
electric power grids
electrification
energy infrastructure
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Jul 2029
What they work on
- Document how communities navigate changing electricity service conditions, including outages and rising costs, across both newly electrified and long-established grid systems.
- Build theoretical and empirical understanding of how particular standards of infrastructure service come to be treated as normal, and what happens when those standards shift.
- Examine how assumptions embedded in energy studies influence which electrification technologies are chosen and pursued.
- Compare the evolution of small and large grid systems and responses to electrical disruption during network expansion, producing pedagogical materials on how large-scale technological systems change over time.
More about the research
The work evaluates both new and long-established electrification systems to understand why outages happen and why the cost of producing and maintaining electricity is climbing. Three lines run through it. The first examines how communities navigate changing service conditions — what people do when supply becomes less reliable or more expensive. The second develops theory and evidence on the normalization of infrastructure services: how a given standard of service comes to be treated as normal and what happens when it shifts. The third turns the lens on researchers themselves, asking how the assumptions embedded in energy studies steer which technologies get chosen. Comparing small and large grid systems and tracking responses to electrical disruptions during periods of network expansion, the project aims to produce new conceptual ground for energy infrastructure studies, along with teaching materials on how large-scale technological systems change over time. Findings will be circulated through public forums, books, websites, visual arts and film.
Why it matters
Decisions about grid expansion and upgrades are made with assumptions about what reliable service means and what users will tolerate. Documenting how communities actually respond to outages and rising costs, and showing how researchers' own assumptions shape technology choices, could give utilities, planners and policymakers better grounds for infrastructure investment — particularly where service is uneven.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Jorge Gonzalez-Cruz
University at Albany, NY·Engineering
Assess the commercial translation potential of a physics-based, AI-supported load forecasting platform through I-Corps customer discovery with utilities, independent system operators, and planners.
Jennifer Schmidt
University of Alaska Anchorage, AK·Earth & Environmental Science
Improve urban snow prediction in Anchorage using an enhanced WRF-Urban atmosphere–urban–land-surface model, so that rooftop snow-load warnings reflect conditions in the city rather than in distant mountain stations.
Di Shi
New Mexico State University, NM·Engineering
Model multi-scale climate dynamics, including flooding, drought and temperature extremes, and link them to sociodemographic energy maps of three rural communities.
The school
Temple University: 22 labs on PI Pages, $315M a year on research, 238 research doctorates a year.
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