In this project, the University of Central Florida (UCF) and key stakeholders will create a transdisciplinary 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 (as shown in the NASA nighttime imagery shown below for Hurricane Michael), 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.
NASA nighttime imagery before and after Hurrincane Michael hit the Northwest Florida Panhandle in 2018.
Image source: Joshua Stevens/NASA Earth Observatory. Data: Miguel Román and Ranjay Shrestha, NASA/GSFC.
Using nighttime satellite imagery to locate specific communities that have experienced power outages with high spatial resolution
Identifying what locations within Florida are most susceptible to power outages caused by extreme weather events by developing models linking weather and outages
PV + Storage Technoeconomic Analysis
Understanding the costs and benefits of incorporating technologies like photovoltaics (PV) and energy storage (e.g., batteries) as a means of mitigating power loss
Power Systems Analysis and Optimization
Understanding the costs and benefits of incorporating technologies like photovoltaics (PV) and energy storage (e.g., batteries) as a means of mitigating power loss
WeCARE Dashboard
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This material is based upon work supported by the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy (EERE) under the Solar Energy Technology Office (SETO) Renewables Advancing Community Energy Resilience (RACER) Award Number DE-EE0010418.