Travel Grant: Joint US-European Workshop "Flexible Electric Grid Critical Infrastructure for Resilient Society

The electric grid critical infrastructure is undergoing a major transformation from concentrated carbon-intensive legacy generation options to renewables in the form of distributed energy resources. The goal of this NSF workshop is to bring together a wide-spread collaboration among researchers from different scientific disciplines, such as data analytics, computational sciences, atmospheric sciences, and social and behavioral sciences – addressing the engineering of complex systems will enable the convergent science needed to address these emerging challenges.

The objective is to continue the discussion from the prior NSF-sponsored Workshops held in the USA in 2020 and 2021, and jointly with the European partners in Europe in 2022, attended by over 100 researchers from well over 50 US/European academic, government and industry organizations to further grid resilience discoveries and strategies through the proposed workshop with the participation of a wider scientific community.

The workshop will engage researchers from different scientific disciplines and a variety of application domains to address scientific, engineering, social, and economic challenges of interdependencies among critical infrastructures and how to inform the policy and regulatory process of the needed changes. The scientific merit is in the convergent scientific discussion among researchers and practitioners that will explore five scientific areas: (1) Data and physics-based modeling discovering new fundamentals in deep-learning approaches, (2) Transformational electric grid distributed control strategies laying the foundation for a resilient net-zero grid of the future, (3) Synergies between social and behavioral sciences to assess a human aspect of grid modernization leading to new models for electricity markets and incentives, and (4) Scalability of cybersecurity and privacy requirements across millions of internet-of-things consumers, and (5) Cross-dependency between electric grid infrastructure and other critical infrastructures.

The workshop will also address how to develop partnerships that will work closely on informing and engaging the public and enhancing the STEM education and training of K-12 students and early-carrier professionals. The international experience of interacting with peers from 15 universities from a dozen leading European countries will be invaluable for the USA participants in forming a broader social, cultural, and political understanding of grid modernization.

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.