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

Baik, Sunhee, Pittsburgh PA

Investigators

Abstract

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.