Halimi, Mohammad

Fellow at IAS-STS: 2017/2018

Mohammad Halimi is a lecturer and researcher at Virginia Tech, United States. He has taught courses in Public Policy Analysis, Comparative Political Economy, Engineering Cultures, and Research Methods in Political Sciences. With an undergraduate degree in engineering from his home country (Iran) and after gaining some years of work experiences in policy-oriented research institutes, he did most of his graduate studies (PhD and Masters) in the US and the UK, where he graduated with degrees in science and technology policy focusing on energy and environmental systems. He has been awarded professional certificates in his field of interest from Harvard University, Kennedy School of Government, Vanderbilt University, United Nations University, Manchester Business School, Columbia University, George Washington University, Arizona State University, Cambridge-MIT Institute, and the University of Texas at Austin among others. He is the recipient of several research grants and awards including those from AAAS, National Science Foundation, National Academy of Sciences, Google, Microsoft, Stanford’s Energy Efficiency Center, UCLA, State University of New York, Delft University, Maastricht University, Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation, Economic Research Forum, United Nations Industrial Development Organization, and New York Energy Policy Institute. His research at IAS-STS focuses on investigating the impediments of enhancing sustainability in data centers.

Tech companies love to tout how sustainable their data centers are. The good news is that progress is being made toward sustainability in big cloud computing and other tech companies on their use of renewable power. In recent years, Facebook, Apple, Microsoft, and Google pledged to go to 100% renewable energy in their operations. Data centers, among other operations in giant corporations, suck out 3% of electricity from the US grid and emit almost 2.5% of carbon emissions. They are planned, engineered, and built out up-front to conservatively meet the high side of any reasonable demand scenario; therefore underutilization and oversizing has always been one of the main sources of inefficiency. As a solution, integrating supply-side constraints such as renewable availability and low electricity prices with demand-side such as workload management and jobs scheduling has recently introduced as a technical and practical policy option towards sustainable data centers with the goal of saving money and reducing emissions. Deferring noncritical works also provide additional virtual capacity for other applications that arrives in the peak demand and avoids adding new capacity servers and high electricity prices at the peak. This research investigates successful case studies in implementing such technology policy and the impediments of achieving the full potential of its goal in cases of failure in a few public and private organizations.

Selected Publications

Halimi, M., “Social Space of Energy Efficiency in Transition Studies”, Proceeding of Society for Social Studies of Science, 2015, Denver, CO.

Halimi, M., “A System Approach to Energy Transitions in Virginia”, Gordon Research on Sciemce & Technology Policy, 2014, Waterville Valley, NH.

Halimi, M., “How does Diffusion of Innovations explain the Energy Efficiency Gap in a home retrofit program?”, Proceedings of Atlanta Conference on Science & Innovation Policy, 2013, Atlanta, GA.

Halimi, M., “Property Assessed Clean Energy Programs in Long Island: Lessons from a Local Success Story”, Proceeding of AAAS Conference on Science and Technology Policy, 2012.