IUCRC Phase I Grant University of Connecticut: Center for Weather Innovation, Smart Energy and Resilience (WISER)

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This Industry-University Cooperative Research Center (IUCRC) for Weather Innovation, Smart Energy, and Resilience is a collaboration between the University of Connecticut and the State University of New York at Albany. Using the innovation that comes from Center university faculty, students, and postdocs, this IUCRC will advance basic research and cutting-edge technologies to improve the energy industry’s power grid efficiency and reliability in the face of the intensification of weather extremes in a changing climate and the nation's transition to clean energy. The Center's research thrusts are: (1) renewable energy generation and power grid integration, (2) weather-caused outage forecasting, management, and restoration, (3) electric grid resilience assessment and economic analysis of resilience improvements, and (4) climate change effects on the current generation and the future distribution of renewable energy resources. The dues paying members of the Center include private sector companies, energy utilities, government entities, and other interested parties. Their membership fees are pooled and used to fund faculty-proposed projects that the Center's industrial advisory board recommends as of highest priority to their sector. Broader impacts of the Center include breakthroughs in weather prediction, grid modernization, integration of renewable energy into the electrical grid, and workforce development. Through the Center, students and postdocs will be trained to work on high-priority projects of industry importance and learn how to work with non-academic parties to deliver much needed innovation in the weather-impacted electrical delivery/grid resilience space. Additional impacts include broadening participation in their research projects. Other impacts include using remote sensing and predictive models to derive supply and demand analytics for the renewable energy industry (Solar, Hydro, etc.) to support decarbonization initiatives across various regions in the US.The coming together of the University of Connecticut and SUNY Albany into an industry-university cooperative research center and its combined involved faculty, instrumentation, and facilities will create an engine to solve problems facing the electricity distribution industry due to the impact of hazards posed by changing weather patterns and climate. Research at the University of Connecticut will produce state-of-the-art electrical grid integration and resilience methodologies and provide much needed information, analysis, and approaches for better vegetation management close to powerlines. The University of Connecticut will also help determine economic impacts and better means of managing and preparing for grid outages. The Center goal will be the integration of total system resilience modeling with dynamic economic and policy analysis and forecasting tools based on electric utility infrastructure systems. The University of Connecticut Site brings both expertise to the table on electrical grid operations and resilience as well as novel, experimentally-derived knowledge about the effects of roadside forest management approaches and disturbance agents on tree biomechanics and stability, given that trees are one of the biggest factors in inclement weather-generated electrical outages. The basic knowledge generated by this Center is essential to dramatically improving approaches required for the integration of renewables into the present electrical grid. It will also use geospatial data on infrastructure and vegetation risk/health as well as socioeconomic and ethnographic data to identify and address barriers to the uptake of new management strategies. The Center will provide significant new insights into state-of-the-art renewable energy management that considers the economic and technological constraints to maintaining the desirable power grid reliability and resilience to extreme weather events and climate change.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.