Experience with large outages of long duration and public preferences for grid resilience against extreme weather events

该奖项是作为NSF社会、行为和经济学博士后研究奖学金(SPRF)计划的一部分提供的。SPRF计划的目标是为学术界、工业界或私营部门和政府的科学职业生涯培养有前途的、早期职业博士水平的科学家。SPRF奖项包括在知名科学家的赞助下进行两年的培训，并鼓励博士后研究员进行独立研究。国家科学基金会致力于促进科学界所有阶层的科学家参与其研究方案和活动，包括那些来自代表性不足的群体的科学家；博士后阶段被认为是实现这一目标的专业发展的一个重要水平。每个博士后研究员都必须解决推动各自学科领域向前发展的重要科学问题。在劳伦斯伯克利国家实验室的Peter H.Larsen博士和卡内基梅隆大学的Alexander L.Davis博士的赞助下，这项博士后奖学金奖支持一位早期职业科学家探索人类决策的基础科学和电网弹性的偏好诱导，并帮助高风险地区的决策者做出更知情、更集体和更具社会责任感的政策投资决策。美国社会的许多个人、家庭和商业活动都依赖电力，这使得我们个人和集体在电力中断时的脆弱性成为一个关键的公共政策问题。虽然大多数停电都是短期的局部停电，但持续时间较长的大型停电(LLD停电)发生的频率比预期更高，并导致相当大的中断、经济损失和社会危害。采用诸如孤岛微电网等新技术可以提供有限的紧急私人和社会后备服务，并减轻LLD停电的影响，但实施这类技术需要增加投资，其效益是不确定和难以量化的。评估这种增量投资是否合理的一个关键因素是了解个人和组织对满足这些关键需求的少量电力的重视程度。对社会支付意愿的稳健估计，以确保在LLD停电期间仍有一些电力可用，是这些输入之一。本研究主要由两部分组成。第一部分集中于收集有关在LLD停电期间维持关键电力依赖需求的经济和社会价值的数据，并创建基于心理的偏好启发方法，以缩小那些经历过LLD停电的人与没有经历过LLD停电的人之间的偏好差距。本研究以飓风桑迪、佛罗伦萨和迈克尔为自然实验对象，探讨了极端事件暴露程度对受访者偏好的影响是否存在显著差异，在不同严重程度和时间框架下暴露于LLD中断的受访者之间在预期和回忆的准确性上是否存在差异，以及向受访者提供信息和锻炼是否有助于他们更好地表达自己的价值观并缩小因现实生活经验而产生的差距。第二部分侧重于确定技术上可行的策略，有效和高效地减轻LLD故障的后果，提供决策过程的更完整的图景以及行为、经济和技术考虑，并帮助高风险地区的决策者促进其围绕其区域电网弹性的分析-审议过程。总体而言，这项研究整合了决策科学、经济学和工程分析，以证明并更好地理解增强电网对LLD停电的弹性的价值，以及对地方和国家层面的预期政策影响。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力优势和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

This award was provided as part of NSF's Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences Postdoctoral Research Fellowships (SPRF) program. The goal of the SPRF program is to prepare promising, early career doctoral-level scientists for scientific careers in academia, industry or private sector, and government. SPRF awards involve two years of training under the sponsorship of established scientists and encourage Postdoctoral Fellows to perform independent research. NSF seeks to promote the participation of scientists from all segments of the scientific community, including those from underrepresented groups, in its research programs and activities; the postdoctoral period is considered to be an important level of professional development in attaining this goal. Each Postdoctoral Fellow must address important scientific questions that advance their respective disciplinary fields. Under the sponsorship of Dr. Peter H. Larsen at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and Dr. Alexander L. Davis at Carnegie Mellon University, this postdoctoral fellowship award supports an early career scientist exploring the fundamental science of human decision-making and preference elicitation for grid resilience and helping decision-makers in high-risk regions make more informed, collective, and socially-responsible policy investment decisions. American society depends on electric power for many individual, household, and commercial activities, making our individual and collective vulnerability to power disruption a key public policy concern. While most power outages are short and local, large outages of long duration (LLD-outages) occur more often than expected and result in considerable disruption, economic cost, and social harm. Introducing new technologies such as islanded microgrids could make it possible to provide limited emergency private and social backup services and mitigate the impacts of LLD-outages, implementing such technologies require incremental investments and have benefits that are uncertain and difficult to quantify. A key input to assessing whether such incremental investments are justified is understanding how much individuals and organizations value small amount of electricity to meet those critical demands. Robust estimates of society's willingness-to-pay to assure that some power remains available during LLD-outages are one of those inputs.This research is mainly consisted of two parts. The first part focuses on collecting data on the economic and social value of sustaining critical electricity-dependent demands during LLD-outages and creating psychologically grounded preference elicitation approach that can close the preference gap between those who have vs. have not experienced LLD-outages. Using Hurricane Sandy, Florence, and Michael as natural experiments, this study explores whether there is a significant gap in respondents' preferences resulting from the levels of exposure to extreme events, whether there is a difference in accuracy of expectations and recollections between respondents who were exposed to LLD-outages under different levels of severity and time frame, and whether present respondents with information and exercise help them better articulate their values and decreases the gap resulting from real-life experiences. The second part focuses on identifying technically feasible strategies that effectively and efficiently mitigate the consequences of LLD-outages, providing a more complete picture of the decision-making processes along with behavioral, economic, and technical consideration, and helping decision-makers in high-risk regions facilitate their analytic-deliberative processes around grid resilience in their regions. Overall, this study integrates decision science, economics, and engineering analyses to demonstrate and develop an improved understanding of the value of enhanced grid resilience against LLD-outages with expected policy impacts at the local and national level.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.