NSF Award
2316399
RII Track-2 FEC: STORM: Data-Driven Approaches for Secure Electric Grids in Communities Disproportionately Impacted by Climate Change involves the jurisdictions of Maine, Alaska, South Dakota and Puerto Rico. The proposed research, education, and workforce development activities will advance the nation’s smart grid technologies to support communities disproportionately impacted by climate change and related severe weather such as hurricanes, blizzards, flooding, and rapid shifts in temperature. STORM will benefit from experts in electrical, computer and civil engineering, economics, community and environmental resilience, climatology, and mathematics and statistics. Faculty and students will co-produce knowledge with community stakeholders, using convergent approaches that are critical to solving complex problems. Research and workforce development objectives are built around three intersecting themes: (1) Engagement of underserved communities in local climate change solutions and knowledge translation for microgrid design; (2) Improvement of power grid resilience in underserved communities through accelerated big data modeling, estimation, and secure control frameworks, and (3) Development of regionally relevant cyber-physical research infrastructure for studying community engaged data-driven operation of power grids. Each theme will involve early career and senior faculty to ensure effective mentoring. Research and workforce development activities are designed to develop pilot programs and research data that will lead to sustainable funding from federal agencies and industry. Project partners include school districts, indigenous tribes, municipalities, electrical utilities/cooperatives, nonprofits, start-up and established companies, and federal laboratories. STORM will encourage diverse and inclusive participation through its work with community members, undergraduate and graduate students, early career faculty, federal laboratories and industry. Efforts to broaden participation in STEM will be enhanced through two institutions in particular. The University of Alaska, Fairbanks (UAF) is an Alaska Native and Native Hawaiian and Native American-Serving Nontribal Institution. The University of Puerto Rico Mayaguez an Hispanic Serving Institution. It is one of the top producers of Hispanic engineers in the United States of America according to the American Society of Engineering Education. <br/><br/>The electric grid, among the most complex human-made systems, is vital to U.S. security and quality of life. More frequent and intense extreme weather events as well as other anthropogenic threats, including physical and cyber-attacks, are testing the resilience of our nation’s critical infrastructure. STORM is built around three interrelated themes in response to this challenge. Theme 1 focuses on engaging underserved communities in local climate change solutions and knowledge translation for microgrid design. Theme 1 approaches are novel in terms of the co-production of research and knowledge among community members geographic and culturally distinct regions; the co-design of solutions with an interdisciplinary team of researchers with social science and engineering backgrounds whose experiences span the study regions, and applications of lessons learned from each of the three study regions, to the others. While Theme 1 focuses on microgrid planning to meet the resiliency goals of communities disproportionately impacted by climate change, Theme 2 seeks to increase the situational awareness of underserved communities and mitigate the impact in the electric grid according to the community resilience goals during and after an extreme weather event. Theme 2’s new multi-microgrid system restoration strategy will prioritize critical loads at the community and individual levels based on a new multi-timescale predictive control and estimation framework that utilizes GFM inverters to provide optimal dynamic support during the process. Novel hardware Trojan prevention, detection, and mitigation techniques will advance cyber-attack resilience of the entire system during severe weather. Theme 3 seeks to develop regionally-relevant cyber-physical research infrastructure for studying community-engaged, data-driven operation of power grids. The new, regionally relevant synthetic power systems, climate, and socioeconomic data will be immensely valuable to the advancement of data science, machine learning, and artificial intelligence applied to the electric industry in these underserved jurisdictions. STORM will benefit from strong existing partnerships including a successful Department of Energy EPSCoR project on modeling converter dominated power systems. STORM also builds upon senior personnel’s partnerships with Sandia National Laboratory, National Renewable Energy Laboratory, and Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. In addition, the project will leverage relationships with key industry/community partners (Kartorium, Kotzebue Electric Association, East River Electric Co-op, Missouri River Energy Services, National Rural Electric Cooperative Association, Siemens, Sioux Valley Energy, Sustainable Energy for Galena, and Versant Power).<br/><br/>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.
