Energy Efficiency/Conservation & Grid Vulnerability
Transforming the energy economy to achieve a sustainable supply of clean energy will require transforming people's relationship with power consumption. Over the past 120 years, energy consumption has become increasingly invisible to people in residential settings through the evolution of technology, from wood stoves to coal furnaces, finally to oil and natural gas. Similarly, electrical power is generally an "always on" capability. In order to address the more frequent supply limitations that are anticipated in the future, and to incorporate network intelligence in the dispatch of "clean" power to areas of high need, the federal government is implementing a nationwide "smart grid" architecture. An important element of the smart grid is the provision of energy use feedback to end users, through intelligent metering systems. The purpose of this project is to better define the characteristics of energy feedback so to achieve optimal effectiveness in reducing energy consumption and improving efficiency, and assessing the ensuing impact on grid security and infrastructure integrity in combination with climate change factors.
Energy Efficiency/Conservation and Behavior
The relationship of human end use energy consumption to smart grid efficiencies involves numerous technical and social-behavioral variables. On the technical side, there are issues related to supply and generating capacity, the emissions characteristics of various types of power plants, variations in supply continuity due to the intermittent nature of wind and solar power, and the relative cost of generating power during peak demand periods. Social-behavioral variables include factors such as attitudes, information, incentives, comfort and convenience. While there have these social-behavioral factors have been shown to reduce energy consumption under specific circumstances, there is little understanding of how behavior and technology may combine on a large-scale to transform the existing energy system.
By developing a behavioral-economic-technical model, this project will permit evaluation of alternative smart grid implementation approaches, and provide key criteria for the design and assessment of diverse demonstration projects throughout the nation.
Climate Change and Grid Vulnerability
Our research addresses the problem of predicting the impact of global climate change on the U.S. power grids and its implications on society and national security. An example of climate change is increased atmospheric temperature, which in turn increases electricity consumption when people turn to fans and air conditioning to find relief from the heat. The increased temperature also affects precipitation, which changes the natural hydrological process and thus hydroelectric generation; it also influences wind electricity generation. Together, these supply and demand changes could adversely affect the U.S. power grids and cause a widespread outage.
Our work involves an interdisciplinary team of scientists from atmospheric physics, electrical engineering, building engineering, social sciences, economics, public policy, and national security. The scope of our work could be significant because the underlying problem involves a large number of technical and social factors, uncertainties, and contingencies that could simultaneously and synergistically affect future actions or results.
To reduce project risk, we have chosen a more focused scope that models future scenarios primarily triggered by global climate change that impacts society and its demand on electric power, which ultimately gives rise to a number of infrastructure protection issues for our nation. Collaborative visual analytics, which fosters model transparency through interactive visualization and allows scientists to unravel the complexity, sophistication, and predictive capabilities of different domain models in concert, has proven to be the ideal solution for us to meet the project's challenges.