This award is an outcome of the competition as part of the Emerging Frontiers in Research and Innovation (NSF 07-579) program solicitation under the subtopic Resilient and Sustainable Infrastructures (RESIN). Most U.S. energy usage is for electricity production and vehicle transportation, two interdependent, critical, national infrastructures. The strength and number of these interdependencies will increase rapidly as hybrid electric transportation systems, including plug-in hybrid electric vehicles and hybrid electric trains, become more widely used. The proposed research is motivated by a recognition that tools, knowledge, and perspective are lacking to design a national system integrating energy and transportation infrastructures while accounting for interdependencies between them, new energy supply technologies, sustainability, and resiliency. Hence, the goal of this research is to formulate optimal infrastructure designs in terms of future power generation technologies, energy transport and storage, and hybrid-electric transportation systems, with balance in sustainability, costs, and resiliency. The research will characterize interdependencies between energy resource portfolio and energy/vehicular transportation systems, and will consider both conventional and non-conventional energy supply options, including wind, solar, hydro, nuclear, coal, hydrogen, geothermal, biofuels, biomass, and gasification, together with hybrid electric vehicle and train systems. The national energy system and the national transportation system targeted in this research are uniquely large, geographically expansive, and capital intensive, consisting of multiple, diverse technologies interfaced with complex human organizations that manage them. The intellectual effort to model and characterize these systems and understand interdependencies among resource mix and wind, transportation patterns, and right-of-way; among gasification, carbon, and transportation; and among prices of petroleum, natural gas, and electricity, will join power system engineering, thermal design, power electronics, transportation engineering, communications and computing, environmental science, sociology, operations research, and macroeconomics. The underlying need is systems-based: identify the extent to which each technology should be deployed, when, and where, accounting for interdependencies while optimizing for sustainability, cost, and resiliency. The proposed research will have long-term impact on national economy and security, while revolutionizing engineering science via integrating knowledge of economics, sociology, and human behavior with systems engineering, interlaced with the full spectrum of energy technologies. The research outcomes have the potential to contribute to a national blueprint, together with a modeling process, that drive federal and state energy policy, research, and investment for the next four decades. This time frame is motivated by a desire to exceed the traditional 20-30 year planning horizon required by most federal and state regulatory bodies today. The project involves a multidisciplinary coalition that includes faculty and students from Iowa State University and Iowa Lakes Community College, including several Iowa State University programs and centers: Information Infrastructure Institute, Office of Biorenewables Programs, Center for Sustainable Environmental Technologies, multi-institutional Power Systems Engineering Research Center, Electric Power Research Center, and Center for Transportation Research and Education. The research will be integrated into new engineering education programs at Iowa State University that address the energy and transportation infrastructures and that can serve as model curricula for other universities and colleges.
Final Project Summary PI: J. McCalley (EE) Co-PIs: D. Aliprantis (EE), K. Gkritza (CE), A. Somani (CprE), L. Wang (IE), and R. Brown (ME) Iowa State University In 2013, approximately 80% of US energy came from fossil-fuels, dominated by coal and natural gas in the electric sector and petroleum in the transportation sector. In order to reach the U.S. objective of cutting net greenhouse gas emissions 26-28 percent below 2005 levels by 2025, and to produce 80% of electricity from "clean" energy sources by 2035, today’s infrastructure must change. Given that over 65% of all energy used in the U.S. supports electricity generation and freight/passenger transportation, the infrastructure on which to focus, to achieve these objectives, is that of the electric and transportation sectors. Yet, such infrastructure is capital-intensive, and once developed, its multi-decade lifetimes make it very difficult to de-commit. Therefore, look-ahead analysis and design is essential. To this end, we have developed computational models and corresponding software, called NETPLAN, to enable exploration of energy and transportation investment strategies, at the national level, over the next 40 years. NETPLAN identifies economic, sustainable, and resilient solutions in terms of future power generation technologies, energy transport and storage, and hybrid-electric transportation systems, while accounting for interdependencies between electric systems, natural gas systems, and freight/passenger transportation systems (see accompanying figure). These interdependencies become more prominent as our transportation sector transitions from almost total petroleum-dependence to increasing penetrations of hybrid electric transportation systems, including light-duty vehicles and rail systems that utilize electricity, natural gas, and biofuels. Using NETPLAN and related software, we designed long-term national infrastructure investment strategies including a national inter-regional high-capacity transmission overlay and a high-speed coast-to-coast rail system. In both cases, we showed that the investment cost was offset by long-term cost savings and related benefits in environmental impacts and infrastructure system resilience. We also used NETPLAN to assess the long-term effects of the US Environmental Protection Agency ruling on Mercury and Air Toxic Standards, the potential for using hydrogen as a significant US energy carrier, the benefits that bio-renewables offer when the nation pursues carbon emission reduction targets, and the impact on resilience of flex-fuel polygeneration power plants. Intellectual impact: This work has made substantive contributions to engineering science and to applied optimization and decision science. Contributions to engineering science include multi-sector modeling capability for energy and transportation systems; development of planning optimization models that explicitly include both the energy subsystems (electric, coal, gas) and the transportation subsystems (commodity and passenger); the development of co-optimization models enabling the simultaneous planning of electric generation, electric transmission, and natural gas pipelines; and the development of computable metrics for quantifying resilience and sustainability for the national energy and transportation systems. Contributions to applied optimization and decision science include algorithms and efficient computational implementations for high-dimensional decomposable linear programs; a bi-level optimization model to determine the minimal incentive policies to stimulate a renewable portfolio policy goal; two approaches to account for uncertainty within long-term planning software applications based on adjustable robust optimization and adaptation, respectively; and the combined use of network linear programming together with evolutionary programming to provide Pareto-optimal solutions in the space of multiple objectives. Broader impacts: The project facilitated interaction between a large and diverse educational coalition, consisting of 6 faculty, 2 post-doctoral researchers, 9 PhD students,10 MS students, 24 undergraduates, 1 McNair scholar, 1 high-school student, and several instructors and students from a local community college. Work was widely disseminated through the publication of 41 peer-reviewed journal papers, 2 magazine articles, 30 conference papers, 4 book chapters, 9 MS theses, and 9 Ph.D. dissertations. Two highly successful symposia were organized, one in 2008 and another in 2013, that greatly contributed to communicating the need for and the potential of using computational models for long-term national infrastructure design to achieve economic, sustainable, and resilient solutions for our nation.
