Collaborative Research: SAI-P: Institutional Design Innovation for Power System Reliability as the Grid Decarbonizes

加强美国基础设施（SAI）是NSF的一项计划，旨在促进以人为本的基础和潜在的变革性研究，以加强美国的基础设施。有效的基础设施为社会经济活力和广泛改善生活质量奠定了坚实的基础。强大、可靠和有效的基础设施刺激私营部门创新，促进经济增长，创造就业机会，提高公共部门服务提供的效率，加强社区建设，促进机会平等，保护自然环境，增强国家安全，并推动美国的领导地位。为了实现这些目标，需要来自科学和工程学科的专业知识。SAI专注于人类推理和决策，治理以及社会和文化过程的知识如何使建设和维护有效的基础设施，改善生活和社会，并建立在技术和工程的进步之上。它正在采用更高水平的风能和太阳能，以应对更多变的需求，并为大的气候和天气不确定性做好准备。然而，有关资源采购，投资和应急计划的决策往往是在资源成本和可靠性风险之间的权衡或电网可靠性对社区和社会环境的不平等影响的信息有限的情况下做出的。SAI规划项目研究了如何向可靠的未来电网过渡，使其更加高效，可持续和公平。它考虑了如何将资源充足性的工程度量和模型嵌入决策实践和组织之间的关系。该项目的重点是共同设计资源充足性方法，与该国一个地区的行业行为者、监管机构和电网利益攸关方建立伙伴关系，在该地区，电力可靠性、可负担性和可持续性之间的关系处于立法和监管议程的前列。该SAI规划项目建立了一个综合框架，一套变革性概念和分析工具，以及一个跨学科的协作团队，以进一步从根本上重新思考电网可靠性的方法。该项目通过关注两个长期研究问题，开发了一个新的电网资源充足性评估框架。一个是考虑体制设计选择和规则结构治理安排如何促进或限制学习和创新。另一个重点是资源充足性和停电应急的定量和预测建模如何更好地将空间和社会环境中的差异纳入对风险，成本，公平性，环境影响和气候变化缓解的假设和态度。规划活动结合了参与者参与的概念化和数据收集，半结构化访谈，分析工具的试点测试和耦合的人-技术系统中的不确定性方法，以及团队建设活动。这些努力为资源充足性研究提供了基础，这些研究使用了新概念来理解电力系统治理中的制度设计选择，使用了新的分析工具来描述快速技术和气候变化带来的风险和不确定性，使用了新的指标和建模工具来评估决策的可负担性，可靠性，可持续性和公平性。该奖项反映了NSF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。

Strengthening American Infrastructure (SAI) is an NSF Program seeking to stimulate human-centered fundamental and potentially transformative research that strengthens America’s infrastructure. Effective infrastructure provides a strong foundation for socioeconomic vitality and broad quality of life improvement. Strong, reliable, and effective infrastructure spurs private-sector innovation, grows the economy, creates jobs, makes public-sector service provision more efficient, strengthens communities, promotes equal opportunity, protects the natural environment, enhances national security, and fuels American leadership. To achieve these goals requires expertise from across the science and engineering disciplines. SAI focuses on how knowledge of human reasoning and decision-making, governance, and social and cultural processes enables the building and maintenance of effective infrastructure that improves lives and society and builds on advances in technology and engineering.The electricity system within the U.S. is undergoing rapid changes. It is incorporating higher levels of wind and solar energy sources, responding to more variable demand, and preparing for large climate and weather uncertainties. Yet, decisions about resource procurement, investment, and contingency planning are often made with limited information about tradeoffs between resource costs and reliability risks or the unequal impacts of power grid reliability across communities and social settings. This SAI planning project examines how the transition to a reliable future electric grid can be made more efficient, sustainable, and equitable. It considers how the engineering metrics and models for resource adequacy are embedded in decision-making practices and relationships between organizations. The project focuses on the co-design of resource adequacy approaches, with partnerships involving industry actors, regulators and electric grid stakeholders in a region of the country where the relationships between power reliability, affordability, and sustainability are at the forefront of legislative and regulatory agendas. This SAI planning project establishes an integrated framework, a set of transformative concepts and analytical tools, and an interdisciplinary collaborative team to further a fundamental rethinking of approaches for power grid reliability. The project develops a new framework for power-grid resource adequacy assessment by focusing on two long-term research questions. One is a consideration of how institutional design choices and rules structuring governance arrangements enable or constrain learning and innovation. The other focuses on how quantitative and predictive modeling of resource adequacy and power shutoff contingencies can better incorporate differences across spatial and social settings in assumptions and attitudes about risks, costs, fairness, environmental impacts, and climate change mitigation. The planning activity combines stakeholder-engaged conceptualization and data collection, semi-structured interviews, pilot testing of analytical tools and approaches to uncertainty in coupled human-technical systems, and team building activities. These efforts provide a foundation for research on resource adequacy using new concepts for understanding institutional design choices in electricity system governance, novel analytical tools for characterizing the risks and uncertainties posed by rapid technological and climate change, and new metrics and modeling tools for assessing the affordability, reliability, sustainability, and equity of decisions.This award is supported by the Directorate for Social, Behavioral, and Economic (SBE) Sciences and the Directorate for Engineering.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.