Sustainable Systems Seminar Lunch Series - ElectriPedia: Mapping Electrification Progress at Scale via LLM-Enabled Building Permit Mining

Stanford, California

About

This week's speaker is:

Sam Bobick, Ph.D. Student, Stanford University
"ElectriPedia: Mapping Electrification Progress at Scale via LLM-Enabled Building Permit Mining"

Abstract:

Electrification shifts heating, cooking, and transportation from fossil fuels to electricity, yielding emissions reductions as the grid decarbonizes and consumers adopt distributed energy resources such as rooftop solar and batteries. In this talk, I will introduce ElectriPedia, a nationwide, address-level electrification dataset derived from unstructured building permit descriptions. Applied nationwide, ElectriPedia identifies 33.3 million technology instances across 12.8 million addresses. By providing spatially and temporally detailed visibility into electrification adoption, ElectriPedia can enable applications that are difficult or impossible with less granular datasets, including more targeted infrastructure planning, improved grid operations, equitable policy design, and tracking of electrification progress.

Bio:

Sam Bobick is a PhD student in Civil and Environmental Engineering advised by Ram Rajagopal. His work applies data-driven methods including machine learning, econometrics, optimization, and control to challenges in energy systems. He received a B.A. in Computer Science from UC Berkeley in 2025 and is an NSF Graduate Research Fellow.

The topics of this seminar are broad but typically fall under technologies’ scaling potential and impact on (the system of) people, the environment and the economy. A particular focus is placed on the interaction potential of technologies with the energy, water, and material systems. Our goal is to create an intimate, collaborative space for students, postdocs, scientists, and PIs within Stanford across micro-level (material and technology) to macro-level (system) interests. These seminars will provide an opportunity to disseminate insights from your studies, connect with fellow researchers, and strengthen bonds across the community.