Planning Grant: Engineering Research Center for Integrated Systems Operations and Planning of a Carbon Neutral Electric Grid

The Planning Grants for Engineering Research Centers competition was run as a pilot solicitation within the ERC program. Planning grants are not required as part of the full ERC competition, but intended to build capacity among teams to plan for convergent, center-scale engineering research.

The pathway to a sustainable carbon neutral electricity ecosystem requires a paradigm shift. While the new operational paradigm is not yet fully known, the new paradigm must cultivate an ecosystem that optimizes for stability, reliability, affordability, and carbon neutrality, while also accommodating a relentless list of needs: new stakeholders, industry models, and regulatory policies, the ever more rapid and numerous digital and technical advances, the increasing pervasiveness of the digital and technical (i.e., IoT), the variability and uncertainty in human behavior, the expected and unexpected transitions to more sustainable energy solutions, the need for flexibility and agility, and the anticipated climate variability. To achieve this, there must be a recognition of the significance of the value of the services enabled by energy rather than the energy itself. If successful, the planned ERC will be the first of its kind to bring convergence to power systems modeling and simulation with human centered modeling and simulation. The approach is critical, transformative, sustainable, and realistic, which not only leads us to a carbon-neutral energy grid, but also provides full human interaction and customer participation on a highly automated, large scale planning and operational framework.

This ERC planning grant will further identify gaps, potential stakeholders including team expansion, key personnel and evaluate the goal and overarching objectives for the future center. Additionally, the potential ERC will have a broad set of university researchers and key industrial stakeholders across a broad range of disciplines and backgrounds including (1) power systems; (2) optimization and control; (3) high performance computing; (3) software engineering; (4) computational social science; (5) data science; (6) policy and government; (7) economics; (8) behavioral science, (9) environmental economics; (10) building architecture and design; (11) transportation planning; (12) cybersecurity. There is no base of modeling and simulation tools, methods, or experience to support such an unprecedented effort. Forecasting has been a science that has evolved slowly, relying heavily on experience from past data. But new science, enabling technology, and systems integration based on revolutionary improvements in predicting interactions by prosumers, a new blend of consumer and producer who responds to the available energy supply in complex ways governed by a system of transactional energy. The proposed center liberates the proposed team from the fundamental problems existing within the scope of current funding which achieve incremental improvements; this ERC aims to achieve a quantum leap by utilizing a digital twin that simultaneously manages complex scale and complex interdependencies. The PIs' direct involvement in cutting-edge digital-twin development provides them the perspective to note that effectively addressing the challenges of integrating technologies at scale in an uncertain political, financial, and socio-economic landscape requires the type of transformative and convergent work that can only be performed through an ERC.

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.