SAI: Impacts of Economic Incentives, Planning Paradigms, and Conservation Concerns on Electricity Infrastructure Investments

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.

Regulatory agencies and governance structures make significant decisions about which clean energy investments get made, where they are deployed, what costs are incurred, and how those costs are recovered. This project aims to improve the effectiveness and social impact of clean energy investments in the power sector. The research considers interactions between regulatory processes and energy infrastructure investments in three key contexts.

First, an examination of how renewable energy resources are permitted, sited, and deployed across the United States, focusing on the impact of land use restrictions and policy. Second, identification of social and human-centered barriers to expanding transmission capacity and how to address them. Third, an assessment of the affordability and reliability implications of strategies for reducing wildfire risk on the electric grid.

This includes estimating the avoided damages from wildfires and studying how current regulations affect utility investments in wildfire mitigation. Stakeholders are involved throughout the project to help identify and evaluate policy modifications based on the findings.

This project investigates the siting and permitting of wind and solar electricity generation, the deployment of electricity transmission infrastructure, and power sector investments in climate change adaptation and wildfire risk mitigation. It pursues a three-part approach within each of these contexts. First, an assessment of how infrastructure investments are currently being regulated, incentivized, and deployed.

Second, using a convergent research approach, integration of economics and engineering methodologies and analytical tools to develop new metrics and frameworks for evaluating these investments from the perspective of investors, electricity consumers, and society. Third, in collaboration with stakeholders, proposed changes in regulatory frameworks to support more efficient climate transition decisions.

This SAI project unites economists, engineers, and policy experts to tackle critical challenges in overhauling power system infrastructure, utilizing advanced methods that require deep knowledge of technology, regulatory landscapes, power systems engineering, econometrics, and machine learning.

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.