| NSF Org: |
EAR Division Of Earth Sciences |
| Recipient: |
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| Initial Amendment Date: | July 1, 2014 |
| Latest Amendment Date: | July 15, 2015 |
| Award Number: | 1360509 |
| Award Instrument: | Standard Grant |
| Program Manager: |
Thomas Torgersen
EAR Division Of Earth Sciences GEO Directorate For Geosciences |
| Start Date: | July 1, 2014 |
| End Date: | June 30, 2018 (Estimated) |
| Total Intended Award Amount: | $599,946.00 |
| Total Awarded Amount to Date: | $719,934.00 |
| Funds Obligated to Date: |
FY 2015 = $119,988.00 |
| History of Investigator: |
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| Recipient Sponsored Research Office: |
660 S MILL AVENUE STE 204 TEMPE AZ US 85281-3670 (480)965-5479 |
| Sponsor Congressional District: |
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| Primary Place of Performance: |
AZ US 85287-6011 |
| Primary Place of Performance Congressional District: |
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| Unique Entity Identifier (UEI): |
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| Parent UEI: |
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| NSF Program(s): |
CR-Water Sustainability & Clim, Sustainable Energy Pathways |
| Primary Program Source: |
01001516DB NSF RESEARCH & RELATED ACTIVIT |
| Program Reference Code(s): |
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| Program Element Code(s): |
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| Award Agency Code: | 4900 |
| Fund Agency Code: | 4900 |
| Assistance Listing Number(s): | 47.050 |
ABSTRACT
Western US regions are particularly vulnerable to future climate-induced environmental changes, given their scarce water resources and heavy reliance on thermoelectric power generation. As climate-related environmental events become more common, water and electricity managers will face challenges when handling vulnerabilities in the interdependent water-electricity systems. These vulnerabilities may arise because existing infrastructures were designed for a demand profile that was significantly different from what is expected in coming decades, and because the institutions that manage the systems do not yet have anticipatory governance structures that would enable them to proactively address the future. This project will develop a framework for assessing coupled water and electricity infrastructure-institution vulnerability to future climate events.
There is a need to better understand how the governing of water and electricity services from local to regional scales can be coordinated to proactively reduce future vulnerability. This project will develop (1) a cross-scale model of the water and electricity systems in the Southwest, (2) an institutional assessment of infrastructure managers, decision makers, and policies that control or impact each component of the water and electricity infrastructure, and (3) an extreme climate vulnerability assessment that joins physical infrastructure characteristics with the institutional processes that govern them. With this coupled infrastructure-institutional vulnerability assessment (4) a learning game will be developed for infrastructure managers to both teach them about the vulnerabilities and help them understand how their institutional structures can be proactively changed to improve system-wide resilience. Through a series of workshops with infrastructure managers (5) the game will be tested through visioning and scenario analysis exercises. New knowledge and methods will be created for assessing water and electricity systems that acknowledges that failure can propagate through complex systems and can start with vulnerabilities in both physical and institutional infrastructure. The project will explore how game-based learning approaches can provide researchers and managers with knowledge of the complex system and an understanding of the strategies for creating anticipatory governance for a climate-impacted future.
PUBLICATIONS PRODUCED AS A RESULT OF THIS RESEARCH
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PROJECT OUTCOMES REPORT
Disclaimer
This Project Outcomes Report for the General Public is displayed verbatim as submitted by the Principal Investigator (PI) for this award. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this Report are those of the PI and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation; NSF has not approved or endorsed its content.
This research project has advanced the boundaries of our knowledge about how water and electricity infrastructure depend on each other, and how this pair of critical systems is likely to be affected by both heat waves and climate change. In particular, the project has found that (1) power grid generation, transmission, and distribution are degraded by heat, making blackouts more likely during heat waves, (2) public water systems’ pumps and pipes will fail more often, deliver poorer-quality water, and cost more to maintain during warmer weather, and (3) public water systems without reliable backup power generation are likely to fail more often in the future due to power grid blackouts. The intellectual merit of these findings lies in the detailed engineering and modeling studies we have conducted to develop hard numbers and engineering estimates for the increase in the likelihood of failure of system components that operate during warmer weather. We have communicated these findings to the engineers and scientists who build, design, study, and manage our water and power systems by publishing an ongoing series of peer-reviewed journal articles in several different journals. We have presented our work at a number of conferences where these professionals gather regularly. And, we have developed an interactive game that is designed to educate and train water and power professionals on the interactions between water and power systems, so that they can make better-informed decisions about how to plan for the future and respond to heat waves. The broader impact of the project to the U.S. public is that our water and power professionals are now armed with better information, so that our critical water and power systems can be made more reliable and affordable in the future, and so that catastrophic “cascading” failures of the power and water systems in cities can be avoided.
Last Modified: 09/29/2018
Modified by: Mikhail Chester
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