CIVIC-PG Track A: Electric Network Disaster Mitigation for Utilities Serving Rural Communities (ENDURE)

Iowa State University, Ames IA

Investigators

Abstract

The changing climate is leading to increased extreme weather events that cause excessive damage to the electric power network (EPN). This creates prolonged outages with serious social and economic consequences, especially to rural utilities with limited resources. To alleviate such adverse impacts, this project will introduce a new digital infrastructure that transforms the resilience of the EPNs that serve rural communities, allowing appropriate preventive and corrective actions with a focus on climate adaptation. There is currently a high priority among underserved utilities to address the absence of high-fidelity platforms capable of representing real power system performance during natural hazards and connecting current and future hazard data to the measures of risk and resilience at the community level. Thus, the overarching goal of the project’s tasks and activities is to introduce, test, and establish a novel digital infrastructure that will enable utilities in rural communities to plan for changing climate, minimize the consequences of natural disasters, and recover from them as fast as possible. This project will generate new knowledge with three major advancements in the field of EPN resiliency: (1) Linking physical assets and power network models. Specifically, this project will use a multi-source data-based approach to create the key physical properties of EPN infrastructure assets based on the climatic factors that capture extreme weather events. (2) Improving the data sources required for the risk assessment of EPNs under weather-related events. For this purpose, this project will generate the data and supporting models for the types of hazard observed in the study region (e.g., tornados, derechos, blizzards, and floods). (3) Establishing a dynamic simulation platform to account for climate change effects and climate adaptation strategies. The outcome will open new frontiers in quantitative decision-support tools enabled through efficient data-enabled analyses. This will pave the way for effective short- and long-term resilience investment strategies based on the needs and priorities of the stakeholders. his project is part of the CIVIC Innovation Challenge which is a collaboration of NSF, the Department of Energy's Vehicle Technology Office, and the Department of Homeland Security's Science and Technology Directorate and Federal Emergency Management Agency. 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.