CAREER: CAS- Climate: Making Decarbonization of the Electric Power Sector Robust to Climate Change

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2142421 (Craig). Decarbonizing, or reducing carbon dioxide emissions from, the electric power sector underpins climate change mitigation. In the near-term, regardless of decarbonization progress, climate change will intensify. As climate change intensifies, it will increasingly affect our weather, including through more extreme events. Extreme events will pose new challenges to avoiding power system outages, or to maintaining system reliability. Maintaining reliability is essential to promote human and economic health and wellbeing. This project seeks to better understand three questions: (1) How can power systems decarbonize while delivering reliable and affordable electricity under a changing climate? (2) How will climate change impact system reliability of alternative future power systems? (3) What strategies exist that further decarbonization, affordability, and reliability of power systems under a changing climate? The project’s scope spans the conterminous United States. To promote national health, prosperity, and wellbeing, this project will translate its scientific advances for power system stakeholders through a series of workshops and other training venues. This project will also provide graduate students new educational opportunities through stakeholder-driven problems. The PI will recruit underrepresented minorities and female undergraduate and graduate students to contribute to research on this project. Given the scale of real-world power systems coupled with deep climate uncertainty, existing power system planning methods are ill-suited to answer our research questions. Robust decision-making (RDM) offers a new approach that has promising capabilities to bridge the above domains and their uncertainties, enabling discovery of decarbonized, cost-effective, and reliable systems that are robust to climate change. This project’s overarching goal is to develop a transformative framework that applies RDM to next-generation planning, operational, and reliability models to achieve decarbonized, cost-effective, and reliable systems under climate change. This goal will be achieved for each of the three main US regional Interconnects (i.e., conterminous US). The above research agenda will be tightly integrated with an educational plan for STEM students and power system stakeholders. Education will be guided by an advisory board of diverse power system stakeholders. Innovative educational programming for STEM undergraduate and graduate students will combine theory from mini-courses with practice from stakeholder-driven experimental projects focused on real-world problems. Stakeholder programming will leverage workshops, the Institute for Public Utilities, and other venues to educate stakeholders on risks of and adaptation strategies to climate change. The project will seek to support qualified under-represented minority and female STEM scholars, at both the graduate and formulative undergraduate stages, increasing diverse representation in an important STEM field.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.