Toward Equitable Power Infrastructure Resilience

This Disaster Resilience Research Grant (DRRG) project models power grid resilience equity by considering the hardships faced by different communities and integrating these hardships into the protection of power infrastructure against flood-induced hazards. The project focuses on proactively safeguarding power substations against flooding, taking into account the social consequences of power outages.

By doing so, this project brings transformative change for approaches to solving policy-making problems in power systems. The intellectual merits of the project include advancing the understanding of power outages in diverse communities and developing equity-aware optimization approaches for planning actions conducted by utility companies. The broader impacts of the project include contributing to the definition and integration of equity considerations in power grid planning, benefiting the nation as a whole, but with a focus on New Orleans, a region on the front lines of climate change with diverse populations and disparities in wealth and infrastructure distribution.

Additionally, the project includes multiple educational and outreach activities aimed at promoting equity and encouraging the participation of underserved and Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCU) students in STEM fields.

This project makes valuable contributions to the fields of power grid and disaster resilience. It integrates the hardships experienced across all communities, including the disadvantaged, into the assessment of power outage impacts and incorporates equity considerations into power grid hardening policies. By adopting an equity-risk-aware optimization approach, the project aims to minimize inequitable socio-economic impacts of extreme weather events.

This Disaster Resilience Research grant project provides a better understanding of differential community hardships resulting from power outages and develop innovative concepts such as equity value at risk to mitigate the impact of power grid failures. Computationally efficient solution approaches can facilitate the adoption of equity-risk-aware optimization by decision-makers, ensuring the practicality and applicability of the research findings.

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.