ON THE JOB
Modeling Efficient Policy
M BY MICHAEL PEARSON
Through his company, The Greenlink Group, and a one-of-a-kind AI modeling platform, Tech alumnus Matt Cox is helping the city of Atlanta and others convert to renewable energy.
MATT COX WANTS NOTHING LESS THAN TO CHANGE THE WORLD. B u t f i r s t , t h e Georgia Tech alumnus is working on changing the city of Atlanta. Cox, MS PP 09, PhD PP 14, is the founder of energy policy consulting firm The Greenlink Group. The company is playing a major role in the city’s ambitious effort to transition the entire city—from the tiniest light bulb to the world’s busiest airport—to 100 percent renewable energy by 2035. It’s an outsized goal, but one Cox has been preparing to take on since he was an undergraduate at the University of Dayton, where an advanced ecology class set him on the path to becoming a data-driven advocate for clean energy. “The whole course was about how humans are screwing everything up,” Cox says. “Here’s soil. Here are all the ways we’re messing that up. Now air. Here’s all the ways that’s a disaster, too.” Most of the students would leave class everyday depressed, he says. But of few of them would leave with their brain on fire with ideas. Cox was one of the latter. Today, Cox runs a company that’s trying to tackle the clean energy problem in its own special way—through ATHENIA, an AI-driven modeling platform that can produce an hour-by-hour simulation of a city’s energy grid with astonishing accuracy. How accurate? While other models routinely run annual errors of 8 to 15 percent, Cox says, ATHENIA clocks in as accurate to within 0.1 percent on average, when compared to historical data. “I think Matt’s modeling is perhaps the only one that I
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know of that can get to that level of accuracy and detail that resonates with local decision makers,” says Kimi Narita, the deputy director of the City Energy Project for the Natural Resources Defense Council. BORN OF FRUSTRATION The Greenlink Group grew out of work Cox and fellow students Caroline Golin, PhD PP 17, and Xiaojing Sun, PhD PP 16, were doing at the School of Public Policy’s Climate and Energy Policy Lab, under the guidance of Professor Marilyn Brown. Cox was interested in energy demand and efficiency, Golin was looking into water use aspects of energy consumption, and Sun was focused on solar energy. Concerned that existing models didn’t accurately characterize the benefits and costs of renewable energy to the power grid, he decided to try building a new model. “It was just really clear these models did not have the resolution required to really understand what it would mean economically to allow more distributed technologies to come online,” Cox says.
“I think Matt’s modeling is perhaps the only one that I know of that can get to that level of accuracy and detail that resonates with local decision makers,” says Kimi Narita, with the City Energy Project for the Natural Resources Defense Council.