Addressing Global Challenges to a Canadian Low-Carbon Energy Transition (Principal Investigator 2021-. This project is focused on exploring and understanding the drivers of the right-wing populist turn in the politics of the global north, particularly its relationship to climate change and low-carbon energy transition strategies. The major outputs of the project would be two books. An edited volume on low-carbon sustainable energy transitions in the age of populism and pandemic for UBC Press brings together an interdisciplinary team of leading researchers on climate change policy and low-carbon energy system transitions. The second volume would examine wider long-term sustainability transition challenges for Ontario in the context of populism and COVID-19. 

A Blueprint for Energy Efficiency and Conservation in a Low Carbon Sustainable Energy Transition in Canada.  Principal Investigator 2018-2020. Project explores governance models for energy efficiency in context of populist challenges to climate change policy. Outputs included a technical report for governmental and institutional sponsors, a public report, paper presented at the June 2019 International Sustainability Transitions conference (Gaede, Haley, Harbinson, Love, Winfield 2019) and a formal paper in the Energy Research and Social Science (Haley, Gaede, Love and Winfield 2020).

Community Energy Knowledge and Action Partnership (www.CEKAP.org) – Co-Investigator 2017-2020) CEKAP is an SSHRC-funded partnership that has been established to facilitate collaboration between researchers, practitioners and community groups across Canada in the area of community energy planning (CEP). Core partners have included five universities and seven municipalities across three Canadian provinces, QUEST Canada, a number of governmental, non-government and community partners. Major research outputs include several research reports, and a forthcoming special edition of the Canadian Planning and Policy Journal featuring papers contributions from CEKAP researchers, including Prof. Winfield and FES students affiliated with the project.  Prof Winfield has also led development and delivery of a professional development course on CEP for planners in conjunction with QUEST Canada.

NSERC Energy Storage Technology Network (NESTNet)  Co-Investigator 2015-2020) NEST collaboratively explores many different types of energy storage, including flywheels, lithium-ion batteries and compressed air, while determining how best to integrate these technologies into electricity grids. In addition, researchers consider the implications arising from the increasing adoption of energy storage and how consumers will perceive, adopt and interact with these technologies. Research outputs have included two formal articles (Winfield, Shokrzadeh and Jones 2018; Winfield and Gelfant 2020), along with five technical working papers (for example Gross 2019), one policy white paper (Winfield 2020) with two more formal papers in development. One BES (Jones 2015) and five MES theses/major papers have also been completed through the project (Zeeman 2016, Gelfant 2017, Hurtado 2019, Lev 2019, Sooch 2020).

Joint Climate Change Transportation Research Partnership (JCCTRP) Co-Investigator 2017-2020)   The JCCTRP is a coordinated, integrative research effort that explores the various technical, economic and political dimensions of efforts to reduce emissions in the transport sector, in Quebec, California, Ontario and Vermont. The ultimate goal of the JCCTRP is to identify technical, economic and political factors shaping the potential for effective, cost-efficient, and politically viable low-carbon transport and climate policy in each jurisdiction, and understand their implications for emissions trading. The project has led to the completion of an FES Ph.D. dissertation (Kaiser 2020), and working papers on transportation and climate change issues in Ontario.

Prof. Winfield has also undertaken research related to Ontario-Quebec energy and climate change policy linkages (Gaede 2016), and smart grids (Winfield and Weiler 2018) as well as a variety of related articles and book chapters dealing with energy and climate change policy (Winfield; 2015; Winfield 2016; Winfield 2019; MacWhirter and Winfield 2019; Winfield and Macdonald 2020), principally in Ontario and at the national level.