In this project, the university of central florida (UCF) and key stakeholders will create an interdisciplinary geospatial framework that can quantify the risk of grid outages due to extreme weather…

In this project, the university of central florida (UCF) and key stakeholders will create an interdisciplinary geospatial framework that can quantify the risk of grid outages due to extreme weather events and the social vulnerability of communities on a location-by-location basis. This approach will be applied to two regions in florida: (1) central florida, including the coastal tampa BAY area and fast-growing orlando metropolitan area; and (2) the northwest (NW) florida panhandle, including a number of coastal cities often devastated by hurricanes (e.g., tallahassee, panama city). This project targets to address two major challenges: 1) extreme weather often leads to grid outages, and vulnerable communities tend to suffer the most in these situations; (2) often, those same vulnerable communities also tend to face a much higher financial burden for energy consumption. Expanding the use of PV energy production coupled with energy storage in local communities has been recognized as one of the most promising solutions to not only increase energy resilience, but also lower electricity costs and thereby reduce the energy burden of socially vulnerable communities. However, various challenges remain to be addressed, such as identifying the most vulnerable communities, creating polices to encourage the investment of these resources, and establishing optimal placement strategies considering the physical network constraints. This is a truly interdisciplinary challenge that requires inputs from various scientific fields as well as stakeholders for effective optimization. These critical challenges will be addressed in this project by connecting various lines of research: extreme weather and climate science; hazards geography, through the lens of energy equity; social vulnerability; electric power systems modeling and simulation; techno-economic analysis of PV systems; and policy analysis. The overarching goal will be to convert diverse datasets spanning these various disciplines into actionable information to help prioritize investments in clean, affordable, and resilient energy systems (cares) for those communities that are the most vulnerable and at-risk.