EFRI-RESIN: 21st Century National Energy and Transportation Infrastructures: Balancing Sustainability, Costs, and Resiliency (NETSCORE-21)

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PI name: James McCalleyInstitution: Iowa State UniversityProposal Number: 0835989Title: EFRI-RESIN Proposal, 21st Century National Energy and Transportation Infrastructures: Balancing Sustainability, Costs, and Resiliency (NETSCORE-21)This award is an outcome of the competition as part of the Emerging Frontiers in Research and Innovation (NSF 07-579) program solicitation under the subtopic Resilient and Sustainable Infrastructures (RESIN). Most U.S. energy usage is for electricity production and vehicle transportation, two interdependent, critical, national infrastructures. The strength and number of these interdependencies will increase rapidly as hybrid electric transportation systems, including plug-in hybrid electric vehicles and hybrid electric trains, become more widely used. The proposed research is motivated by a recognition that tools, knowledge, and perspective are lacking to design a national system integrating energy and transportation infrastructures while accounting for interdependencies between them, new energy supply technologies, sustainability, and resiliency. Hence, the goal of this research is to formulate optimal infrastructure designs in terms of future power generation technologies, energy transport and storage, and hybrid-electric transportation systems, with balance in sustainability, costs, and resiliency. The research will characterize interdependencies between energy resource portfolio and energy/vehicular transportation systems, and will consider both conventional and non-conventional energy supply options, including wind, solar, hydro, nuclear, coal, hydrogen, geothermal, biofuels, biomass, and gasification, together with hybrid electric vehicle and train systems. The national energy system and the national transportation system targeted in this research are uniquely large, geographically expansive, and capital intensive, consisting of multiple, diverse technologies interfaced with complex human organizations that manage them. The intellectual effort to model and characterize these systems and understand interdependencies among resource mix and wind, transportation patterns, and right-of-way; among gasification, carbon, and transportation; and among prices of petroleum, natural gas, and electricity, will join power system engineering, thermal design, power electronics, transportation engineering, communications and computing, environmental science, sociology, operations research, and macroeconomics. The underlying need is systems-based: identify the extent to which each technology should be deployed, when, and where, accounting for interdependencies while optimizing for sustainability, cost, and resiliency. The proposed research will have long-term impact on national economy and security, while revolutionizing engineering science via integrating knowledge of economics, sociology, and human behavior with systems engineering, interlaced with the full spectrum of energy technologies. The research outcomes have the potential to contribute to a national blueprint, together with a modeling process, that drive federal and state energy policy, research, and investment for the next four decades. This time frame is motivated by a desire to exceed the traditional 20-30 year planning horizon required by most federal and state regulatory bodies today. The project involves a multidisciplinary coalition that includes faculty and students from Iowa State University and Iowa Lakes Community College, including several Iowa State University programs and centers: Information Infrastructure Institute, Office of Biorenewables Programs, Center for Sustainable Environmental Technologies, multi-institutional Power Systems Engineering Research Center, Electric Power Research Center, and Center for Transportation Research and Education. The research will be integrated into new engineering education programs at Iowa State University that address the energy and transportation infrastructures and that can serve as model curricula for other universities and colleges.