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

2142421 (Craig)。电力部门脱碳或减少二氧化碳排放是减缓气候变化的基础。短期内，无论脱碳进程如何，气候变化都将加剧。随着气候变化的加剧，它将越来越多地影响我们的天气，包括通过更多的极端事件。极端事件将对电力系统的避免中断或维持系统的可靠性提出新的挑战。保持可靠性对于促进人类和经济健康和福祉至关重要。该项目旨在更好地理解三个问题：(1)在气候变化的情况下，电力系统如何在提供可靠和负担得起的电力的同时脱碳？(2)气候变化将如何影响未来替代电力系统的系统可靠性？(3)在不断变化的气候条件下，有哪些策略可以进一步提高电力系统的脱碳、可负担性和可靠性？该项目的范围横跨美国周边地区。为了促进国民健康、繁荣和福祉，该项目将通过一系列讲习班和其他培训场所将其科学进步转化为电力系统利益相关者。该项目还将通过利益相关者驱动的问题为研究生提供新的教育机会。PI将招募未被充分代表的少数民族和女性本科生和研究生为该项目的研究做出贡献。考虑到现实世界电力系统的规模以及气候的不确定性，现有的电力系统规划方法不适合回答我们的研究问题。稳健决策（RDM）提供了一种新的方法，它具有跨越上述领域及其不确定性的潜力，能够发现对气候变化具有鲁棒性的脱碳、成本效益高且可靠的系统。该项目的总体目标是开发一个变革性框架，将RDM应用于下一代规划、运营和可靠性模型，以实现气候变化下的脱碳、经济高效和可靠的系统。这一目标将在三个主要的美国区域互联（即连续的美国）中实现。上述研究议程将与STEM学生和电力系统利益相关者的教育计划紧密结合。教育将由一个由不同电力系统利益相关者组成的咨询委员会指导。针对STEM本科生和研究生的创新教育计划将把迷你课程的理论与关注现实问题的利益相关者驱动的实验项目的实践相结合。利益相关者计划将利用研讨会、公用事业研究所和其他场所，向利益相关者宣传气候变化的风险和适应战略。该项目将寻求支持合格的代表性不足的少数族裔和女性STEM学者，在研究生和制定本科阶段，增加在一个重要的STEM领域的多元化代表性。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

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.