SAI-R: Strengthening American Electricity Infrastructure for an Electric Vehicle Future: An Energy Justice Approach

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.

Widespread adoption of electric vehicles (EVs) is seen as one key strategy to curb carbon emissions, reduce air pollution, and improve public health. However, EVs also generate high demand and exert additional pressure on current and future electricity infrastructure. Past research on EVs has not sufficiently attended to how EV deployment and the needed infrastructure upgrades may contribute to energy injustice and widen existing equity gaps.

This SAI research project develops an energy justice approach to assessing and reducing the negative effects of EV deployment on non-users. It focuses on the costs of infrastructure upgrades and electricity consumption. Equity interventions are developed and policy guidance is suggested in ways that produce benefits for all segments of society during the electrification transition.

A multidisciplinary project team uses innovative data analytics and advanced computational modeling methods to measure various forms of energy justice. Collaboration with stakeholders helps to facilitate policy design and implementation. By strengthening American electric infrastructure, the nation is better positioned to move toward a sustainable and just EV future.

This project integrates social and techno-engineering approaches to holistically assess and mitigate potential injustice introduced by the EV transition. On the social dimension, the project develops an energy justice framework mapped to an EV future. It also formulates metrics to guide qualitative and quantitative assessments of potential injustices stemming from the transition.

The framework specifically aims to protect non-EV users, particularly those in low- and moderate-income communities that may otherwise bear disproportionate costs for electric infrastructure upgrades and electricity consumption surges. On the techno-engineering dimension, new socioeconomic and spatiotemporal methods are created to analyze multimodal datasets and to provide accurate predictions of EV electricity demand and electricity generation growth.

New computational optimization and analytics tools are developed to apply agent-based models to study the future electric grid, EV, and stakeholder interactions at fine resolutions. A policy guide is developed to provide socially and technically feasible solutions to reduce injustice in the EV transition, thereby facilitating a just EV future inclusive of all.

This award is supported by the Directorate for Social, Behavioral, and Economic (SBE) Sciences and the Directorate for Engineering.

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.