Global Centers Track 1: U.S.-Canada Center on Climate-Resilient Western Interconnected Grid

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Extreme climate events, such as heat waves or wildfires, often disrupt the power grid. These disturbances affect the lives of many and impede enterprise productivity. It is thus critical to modernize the Grid and ensure that it can withstand or recover quickly from the intensifying effects of climate disturbances.

Engineering a climate-resilient Grid is, however, challenging. It requires better understanding and forecasting of climate-driven disturbance risks. Grid stability also depends on end-user energy demand.

Furthermore, grids in the western U.S. and Canada are interconnected which adds to the complexity and requires international collaboration. The U.S.-Canada Center on Climate-Resilient Western Interconnected Grid brings together an international team of researchers to assess the risk of extreme event for power grids using state-of-the-art modeling tools.

The Center develops new technologies and design adaptation and mitigation solutions to overcome disturbances. The Center leverages multi-faceted partnerships across academia, industry, government, and communities and expertise and resources in both the U.S. and Canada. It engages stakeholders beyond academia to ensure foreseeable applications of the research outcomes.

By leveraging cross-border collaboration, it creates knowledge and technologies that can be applied beyond the context of the western U.S. and Canada region, globally. This award also provides support for undergraduate and graduate students at the Universities of Utah and New Mexico and other professionals in California and Nevada, as well as outreach and educational activities to local communities in the western U.S.

The Center pursues four major use-inspired research priorities: (a) create customized models for risk quantification and forecasting of regional extreme disturbances to better prepare for potential disruptions to power grids; (b) establish a comprehensive understanding of community needs, capacities, and adaptation processes towards climate-driven extreme disturbances, in order to develop effective climate-resilience strategies; (c) build a federated cyberinfrastructure for collecting, governing, and sharing climate and grid data, in order to facilitate collaboration and information exchange among stakeholders; (d) develop new models for short-term operation and long-term planning of power systems that are informed by the aforementioned data and insights.

This award is funded by the Global Centers program, an innovative partnership with funding agencies in Australia, Canada and the United Kingdom, to jointly support use-inspired research addressing global challenges in climate change and clean energy. Partnerships with the Commonwealth Science and Innovation Research Organisation (CSIRO), Natural Science and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC), Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC), and UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) leverage resources to tackle challenges at a larger scale than would be possible for one funding agency alone. This Center is jointly supported by NSF and NSERC.

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.