EAGER: SAI: Socio-Technological Guided Enhancement of Power Infrastructure Resilience

Strengthening American Infrastructure (SAI) is an NSF Program seeking to stimulate human-centered fundamental and potentially transformative research that strengthens America’s infrastructure. Effective infrastructure provides a strong foundation for socioeconomic vitality and broad quality of life improvement. Strong, reliable, and effective infrastructure spurs private-sector innovation, grows the economy, creates jobs, makes public-sector service provision more efficient, strengthens communities, promotes equal opportunity, protects the natural environment, enhances national security, and fuels American leadership.

To achieve these goals requires expertise from across the science and engineering disciplines. SAI focuses on how knowledge of human reasoning and decision making, governance, and social and cultural processes enables the building and maintenance of effective infrastructure that improves lives and society and builds on advances in technology and engineering.

This study looks at failure of the electric grid, aiming to improve understanding of how the electric grid can be designed to ensure that the most vulnerable people in the U.S. are not also the most likely to experience and to be harmed by grid failure. Severe weather is the leading cause of power outages in the United States. Outages created by grid failure, when the electric grid fails to provide reliable service, can cause serious adverse impacts ranging from economic damage to possible loss of life.

Grid failure and the impacts of grid failure are not distributed equally across all geographies and social settings, meaning that outages are more likely to occur in places where the grid is not prepared to respond to grid failure and the impacts of grid failure are more likely to harm already vulnerable communities and groups. This project provides new knowledge for strengthening American critical infrastructure, including the electrical grid infrastructure as well as other built infrastructures and social infrastructures that shape the vulnerabilities involved in disaster response management.

This study creates a data-enabled decision-making framework integrating socioeconomic and engineering factors to understand the outcomes and impacts of potential grid failure. This involves first aggregating community-level power resilience metrics for weather-related power outages and quantifying key socioeconomic factors that are relevant to understanding the impacts of grid outages.

Subsequently, a social-economic-engineering framework is developed to enable examination of different proactive disaster response plans through an integrated simulation platform. This platform allows for consideration of the technologies, policies, and planning mechanisms that would provide for an approach to preparing for grid failure and response resilience that is more robust and resilient and less harmful to vulnerable communities.

The platform is tested using case studies. Expected project outcomes include a comprehensive power infrastructure resilience analysis framework, which can unveil plans to substantially improve for community resilience by assessing grid failure as a socio-technological issue.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.