National Science Foundation Expeditions in Computing for Computational Decarbonization of Societal Infrastructures at Mesoscales

Our society stands at a critical inflection point with its rapidly accelerating demand for energy due to growth in domestic manufacturing, datacenters, artificial intelligence (AI), electric vehicles, and electric heat pumps. Sustaining this growth while also reducing society’s carbon emissions will require us to undertake a rapid, large-scale transition to low- and zero-carbon energy sources.

Enabling this change will necessitate a shift beyond our long-standing focus on improving energy-efficiency to optimizing carbon-efficiency. The goal of this Expedition is to develop new computational techniques to unify, transform, and accelerate societal decarbonization across multiple use domains. To this end, the Expedition will develop the new field of Computational Decarbonization (CoDec), which focuses on optimizing and reducing the lifecycle carbon emissions of complex computing and societal infrastructure systems.

Specifically, the CoDec Expedition will address an important class of decarbonization problems that arise from interdependencies across multiple infrastructure domains, including computing, transportation, the built environment, and the electric power grid. Over five years, the Expedition will develop novel computational techniques, algorithms, systems, and AI methods that sense, optimize, and reduce the operational, embodied, and lifecycle greenhouse gas emissions of societal infrastructure over long temporal and spatial scales.

This work will enable new scientific discoveries in addressing decarbonization challenges while ensuring the sustainable growth of our energy consumption that is necessary for advancing technology, growing our economy, and strengthening national security. To prepare our nation’s workforce in this emerging field, the Expedition will develop new educational programs and design new teaching curricula that elevates computational decarbonization to a core topic in computing.

CoDec will establish an industry consortium to share its research results and transition them to practice. It will also undertake a range of activities to broaden participation in computing through undergraduate research and K-12 outreach.

Since the decarbonization of complex systems can be viewed as a sense-optimize-reduce problem that operates over long times scales of years or decades and over large geographical scales, it will require new types of optimization techniques and algorithms that are designed for these mesoscales. To address the problem, CoDec will develop novel (i) sensing approaches to provide visibility into systems' operational and embodied carbon over their lifetime, (ii) optimization methods grounded in theory and AI to exploit new dimensions of energy flexibility, which are emerging in modern infrastructure, for optimizing carbon-efficiency, and (iii) software-defined interfaces and systems for programmatically deploying these optimizations to reduce carbon emissions.

These techniques will be verifiable, robust to uncertainties in energy's supply and demand, and transferable across multiple domains and economic sectors through intuitive interfaces, while also resolving human-in-the-loop concerns of privacy, fairness, equity, incentives, and user preference. In addressing these issues, CoDec will leverage the unique role computing can play in decarbonizing society both as a means to automate and coordinate carbon-efficiency optimizations across time, space, and sectors and as an essential activity that consumes increasingly significant amounts of energy but also has substantial temporal, spatial, and performance flexibility.

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.