Who We Are
Lei Duan
Senior Scientist, Conceptual Investigations Unit
Lei Duan is a Senior Scientist at the Conceptual Investigations Unit. He is also a Senior Scientist at Orca Sciences.
Background
Lei Duan is a Senior Scientist at the Conceptual Investigations Unit, and also at Orca Sciences. His research addresses questions at the intersection of climate, energy, and economics — including the design of reliable, deeply decarbonized electricity systems, the economics of climate mitigation and adaptation, solar geoengineering, and climate modeling. He collaborates closely with the Sustainable Solutions Lab at Stanford University.
Selected scientific contributions
Electricity-system decarbonization
- An analysis of how uncertainty in future technology-cost projections precludes confident assessment of technology mixes in future least-cost decarbonized electricity systems (Duan and Caldeira, 2024).
- A global least-cost analysis identifying where and when flexible nuclear power is most valuable in deeply decarbonized electricity systems dominated by wind and solar (Duan et al., 2022).
- An assessment of the geophysical constraints on the reliability of solar and wind power across the world's regions (Tong et al., 2021).
Climate and economics
- Evidence that investments in climate adaptation deliver near-term economic returns that complement the long-term returns from emissions reduction (Duan et al., 2025).
- A projection that the rate of global warming is set to decline under current policy trajectories (Duan and Caldeira, 2024).
Solar geoengineering
- An examination of how the climate response to stratospheric sulfate aerosols depends on the altitude of the aerosol layer (Krishnamohan et al., 2019).
- A comparison of the fast and slow components of the climate response across three different radiation-management geoengineering schemes (Duan et al., 2018).
- A demonstration that combining multiple approaches — "cocktail geoengineering" — could stabilize global temperature and precipitation simultaneously (Cao et al., 2017).
Climate modeling and Earth-system dynamics
- Evidence that historical model biases in monthly high-temperature anomalies imply an under-estimation of future temperature extremes (Duan et al., 2025).
- A community effort assembling a large collection of millennial-length climate-model simulations to study the long-term response of the climate system (Rugenstein et al., 2019).