Multi-objective Grid Planning for Equity, Resilience, and Decarbonization

Overview

The electric grid Multi-objective Grid Planning helps grid planning frameworks better account for—and indicate tradeoffs between—emerging  objectives for energy justice and equity, resilience, and decarbonization alongside traditional grid planning objectives.

Traditionally, electric grid planning strives to maintain safe, reliable, efficient, and affordable service for current and future customers. As social expectations and policies evolve, additional considerations for grid planning are emerging, such as energy justice and equity, resilience, and decarbonization. Clean energy goals—including decarbonization—are changing the mix of resources on the electric grid and creating new requirements for its function and structure. The increased frequency and severity of natural disasters over the last two decades and cybersecurity concerns have elevated resilience as a key planning objective. More recently, energy justice and energy equity has emerged as an important consideration to ensure that disadvantaged communities are not adversely affected by grid modernization and have equal access to its benefits.

Traditional planning frameworks must address these new planning goals of energy justice and equity, resilience, and decarbonization. To do so, planning frameworks require new methods to be incorporated into current practices. In addition, a practical approach is needed to form balanced strategies that address the full set of grid planning goals.

Sandia National Laboratories and Pacific Northwest National Laboratory support DOE objectives through applied research on Multi-Objective Decision Planning focused on advancing traditional grid planning methodologies to incorporate energy justice and equity, decarbonization, and resilience goals.

In our work, we:

• Develop modeling frameworks that can apply multiple, emerging objectives in electric grid planning processes,
• Advance practical methods for grid planning for objective formulation, data utilization, and tradeoff assessments for decarbonization, resilience, and energy justice and equity objectives, and
• Develop and report metrics and associated methods to measure and evaluate electric grid performance with respect to decarbonization, resilience, and energy justice and equity objectives.

Research Areas

Partnerships

The U.S. Department of Energy, Sandia National Laboratories, and Pacific Northwest National Laboratory are working together as partners on this joint program. Sandia and PNNL are engaged with stakeholders around the country to guide and give new perspectives for the ongoing research.