CAREER: Coordinating climate change mitigation and adaptation strategies across the energy-water nexus: An integrated research and education framework

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This research will develop conceptual models (1) to quantify how climate influences the operational and environmental performance of electric power generation resources within the power sector; (2) to evaluate the opportunities and challenges associated with emerging consumer demand, and (3) to develop quantitative metrics to compare tradeoffs across these diverse supply and demand resources, particularly as they relate to climate mitigation, adaptation, and environmental sustainability priorities. Each objective leverages insights and methods established through past energy-water nexus work by the Principal Investigator (PI). The project will build a foundation for the PI's long-term goal of creating more robust, adaptive, and sustainable power systems by coordinating the behavior of power suppliers and power consumers through market structures and automation to maximize the power sector's environmental sustainability, resilience to disruption, and efficiency.This CAREER project utilizes physics-based modeling techniques to build a statistical framework that offers probabilistic insight into how climate change might affect the operation and environmental externalities of the power sector across a continuum of historical through extreme climate change projections. Frameworks are designed to compare conventional and emerging supply-side and demand-side resources through the lens of the challenges imposed by future warming. In the energy sector, the knowledge developed through this CAREER project promises to be an important step to enable new methodologies to inform and assess tradeoffs for electric infrastructure build-outs, DSM interventions, future electricity market structures, and real-time pricing strategies that consider regional and environmental conditions (rather than reliability and cost alone). The project's generalized statistical framework could also be applied to assess how other critical infrastructures, such as water, agricultural and transportation systems, vary in terms of their climate vulnerability, mitigation, and adaptation tradeoffs. This framework also allows analysts to present stakeholders with anticipated performance tradeoffs across a probabilistic distribution of climate conditions, rather than a single projection that might be contentious in some stakeholder groups. Annual outreach events leveraging the PI's role as a Resident Faculty at USC will connect underserved K-12 groups with freshmen in the PI's dormitory, creating a spirit of mentorship, while empowering underserved minorities with the knowledge to advocate for their own environmental justice. These events will utilize the Parkside Interactive Sustainability Laboratory, a community gardening space built by the PI to introduce students to sustainability through activity-based environmental programming. The themes, data, and models generated through this project will be incorporated into the PI's existing undergraduate and graduate classes, where students will be challenged to create web-based educational content for younger students to facilitate knowledge sharing. In the broader context, drought and heatwaves have already prompted significant power curtailments across the world. Considering that installed generation capacity is projected to grow by 140% globally by 2040, generalized frameworks to improve and protect the performance of the power grid within the context of regional climate will be critical for making wise investment decisions. By connecting K-12, undergraduate, graduate students and their broader social and policy-making communities, progress will be made in educating a diverse workforce, prepared to address society's critical challenges.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.