Disaster Recovery and Response Innovation through Fuel Cell Deployment

In the past decade, natural disasters (e.g., wildfires and hurricanes) have been exacerbated by climate change, yet the methods for improving community resilience to electricity power outages resulting from these disasters have remained largely unchanged. At the household and community levels, most resilience efforts related to electricity supply focus on deploying rooftop solar or diesel generators.

While these resources can provide backup power, there are barriers to ownership (e.g., roof space for solar photovoltaics and proper ventilation for diesel generators) and they are not always attainable for low-income populations. This Disaster Resilience Research Grants (DRRG) project investigates the degree to which modular micro-grids built on novel technologies (e.g., solid-oxide fuel cells) can supply constant electrical power during disaster response and humanitarian relief efforts.

This work will benefit communities by allowing more residents to remain in place after disasters, enabling healthcare responders to maintain more facilities, and reducing the area impacted by power outages.

The research investigates and crafts disaster mitigation strategies for an emerging technology (fuel-cell-based microgrids) by combining economic analysis, electricity planning, and operations research methods. This novel approach will facilitate new energy transition analyses that can assess the degree to which decentralized infrastructure will reduce the electrical outage time, and provides a framework for better deployment of initial humanitarian relief efforts immediately following disasters.

The work will combine a microgrid optimization model with a multi-criteria decision analysis model to evaluate 1) the capability of these emerging technologies to supply uninterruptible power during disasters, and 2) the trade-offs between cost, resilience, and equity objectives.

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.