The vulnerability of energy system infrastructure to extreme weather events—such as wildfires, floods, severe storms, and freezes—has been highly salient in recent years, with the impacts of climate change on energy system operations only likely to be exacerbated going forward. Complicating such challenges is the interdependence of these systems, with failures in one component of the system’s architecture cascading and propagating throughout the network, often in unexpected ways. This grant funds a collaborative effort led by Timon McPhearson (New York University), Mikhail Chester (Arizona State University) and David Iwaniec (Georgia State University) to investigate linkages associated with power systems, transportation networks, and water facility operations. Looking first at urban systems and then extending their analysis to the regional level, the team will examine how cascading network failures might occur at key connection points across these infrastructure systems. Cities to be modeled include New York City, Phoenix, and Atlanta. Grant funds will support the creation or extension of infrastructure models for each city that combine real world and simulated data to represent municipal power, transit, and water systems. The team will then interview and survey city stakeholders to inform the design of their planned disaster simulations, probing such topics as where flooding might occur, how extended heat waves might impact different parts of a city’s power and transportation infrastructure, or where storms could do the most damage. These inputs will then be used in the design of a series of simulations of likely future extreme weather events that will aim to identify potential cascading impacts in each city and to highlight potential points of failure propagation. Extending beyond this urban analysis, the team will examine the risks associated with interconnected cascading infrastructure failures across the Southeast United States. At the project’s conclusion, the team will hold a day-long, in-person workshop that will bring together key academics, local officials, disaster preparedness planners, utility representatives, and transportation organizations to discuss findings and disseminate results. 

The Resilient Energy Economies (REE) initiative, headquartered at Resources for the Future (RFF), is a research effort focused on the critically important topic of better understanding how fossil fuel-dependent communities—those that are largely reliant on coal, oil, or natural gas production—are experiencing, and impacted by, the transition to low-carbon energy systems. REE is led by an excellent group of early career scholars, drawn from different disciplines, institutions, and research backgrounds. The current team of co-organizers includes Daniel Raimi, Director of the Equity in the Energy Transition Initiative at RFF; Noah Kaufman, Senior Research Scholar at the Center on Global Energy Policy at Columbia University; Julia Haggerty, Associate Professor of Resource Geography at Montana State University; and Emily Grubert, Associate Professor of Sustainable Energy Policy at the University of Notre Dame. This grant supports REE as it continues and expands its research agenda. REE will hold an open Request for Proposals (RFP) to support a series of place-based research projects that examine the economic and social dimensions associated with how fossil fuel-dependent communities are experiencing energy transitions, allocating a total of $450,000 across 6-11 small research projects. Research topics to be emphasized in the open RFP include issues like how employment opportunities are changing in fossil fuel communities, examining the distributional impacts on households with different demographic features, evaluating the effects of state-level policies, and exploring the relationship between state and federal policy impacts. Grant funds will also support the organization of two researcher convenings per year as well the expansion of REE’s project management capacity by hiring a new program manager.