Marco Miotti

Bio

Marco Miotti received his B.S. in Environmental Science and M.S. in Environmental Engineering from ETH Zurich, and his PhD in Engineering Systems from MIT. During his doctoral training, he evaluated the emissions and costs of different vehicle technologies depending on vehicle characteristics, the built environment, individual driving patterns, and local climate. He also developed Carboncounter.com, a tool that lets consumers explore the emissions and costs of different car models and compare them against climate targets.

A coupled urban mobility and building energy model to inform emission reduction strategies of cities

Personal mobility and buildings account for more than 80% of total urban energy consumption and a substantial fraction of air pollution. Despite their coupled nature, buildings and mobility systems are often studied separately. This separate treatment can lead to urban design strategies that promise to lower transportation energy consumption but may raise the energy consumption of buildings, and vice-versa. For instance, making urban cores denser can reduce demand for motorized travel, but increase the energy consumption of air conditioning units due to urban heat island effects. The goal of Marco’s work is to develop a coupled urban mobility and building energy model that allows to jointly assess the impact of urban design strategies on energy use and emissions of the building sector and the transportation sector. Using Sacramento CA as a case study, the land use and transportation policy insights derived from this work aim to support planners and policymakers across the world in lowering the environmental impacts of urban activity.