Global Centers Track 2: Equitable and User-Centric Energy Market for Resilient Grid-interactive Communities

Distributed energy resources (DERs) have tremendous potential to transform operators and users toward more clean and resilient energy supplies by harvesting and distributing various renewable energies tailored to the profiles of distinctive local communities. An equitable and user-centric market is essential in this transformation. New designs, mechanisms, and technologies are needed to establish a DER-based, self-sustaining clean energy ecosystem at the edge of power grids for a diverse spectrum of communities and stakeholders. This Global Centers Design award to Santa Clara University (SCU) supports U.S. participation in the planning phase of a center to tackle these challenges. The planned Center, co-led by SCU in the US and Concordia University (CU) in Canada, aims to create a global research and training platform with a critical mass for collaborative investigation, innovation, and education toward a user-centric energy economy for grid-interactive communities. The goal is to advance scientific knowledge and engineering solutions for more equitable, affordable, flexible, and reliable access to clean energy supplies for a broader range of local communities. It will investigate enabling mechanisms and technologies to increase community acceptance, stakeholder benefits, and provider/consumer interaction of clean energy in a global context. The Center will follow its use-inspired nature to design research and education activities that address the practical challenges of key stakeholders in grid-interactive communities. The education and outreach components will prepare the next-generation workforce for academia, industry, and communities. During the Design Phase, the Center will focus on two critical components: grid-interactive communities and user-centric markets. It will foster conversations and collaborations among diversified research experts and community users. Its projects will investigate: i) Critical applications and use cases from key stakeholders that call for use-inspired, multi-disciplinary, and international collaborations; ii) New theories, frameworks, and models for grid-interactive communities, user profiling, device-driven energy management, machina economicus, and energy fairness; iii) New architectures for clean energy markets, community-based energy interactions, and scalable co-simulation, and iv) Innovative grid edge technologies for efficient, flexible, trustworthy, and resilient distributed energy management against disturbances, adversaries, and disasters for grid-interactive communities. The Center will release its co-simulation tools, testing cases, and datasets to grow the research community and the ecosystem. The international collaborations between the two leading institutions will leverage the distinctive geographical, technological, regulatory, and cultural context in their local communities to provide enriched and diversified opportunities for research and education activities benefiting the general public in the global context. Special programs will be offered to minority researchers, professionals, students, and other users for diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility among multi-sector stakeholders in the ecosystem. This award is funded by the Global Centers program, an innovative program that supports use-inspired research addressing global challenges related to climate change and/or clean energy. Track 2 design awards support U.S.-based researchers to bring together international teams to develop research questions and partnerships, conduct landscape analyses, synthesize data, and/or build multi-stakeholder networks to advance their use-inspired research at larger scale in the future. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.