Harrison Fell

The responsibilities of Emergency Management agencies are extensive and constant, through four generally recognized phases: Mitigation, Preparedness, Response and Recovery. Energy assurance is only one of many key emergency support functions, and the availability of electricity during and after a disaster is a very important metric for community resilience. In this project a Playbook for Community Energy Resilience is proposed to guide Emergency Managers and their community to assess and implement enhanced energy resilience to mitigate the effects of energy loss during a disaster. The core of the playbook will be a framework for integrating enhanced community energy resilience in the planning and execution for each phase of emergency management. A primary focus will be the use of distributed energy resilience resources, such as solar photovoltaics (PV) and energy storage at several points levels of local disaster response – local critical infrastructure facilities, community outposts and low income housing. The team will develop and test a process for selecting facilities, assessing for economic feasibility, determining resilience benefits and developing the resilience resources. Finally, metrics for community energy resilience that are appropriate for use by emergency management at the local and state level will be developed. The NCCETC in collaboration with the State of NC Emergency Management, the NC State Energy Office, North Carolina Central University (NCCU) and the Smart Electric Power Alliance (SEPA), will support several local government emergency management stakeholders and their communities including: - City of Asheville/Buncombe County: Urban center in mountainous area - City of Wilmington/New Hanover County: Urban center in coastal area - Outer Banks - Rural island area - Town of Red Spring - Rural, inland, low-lying area - Halifax County - Rural, inland

This project will develop new methods to mitigate adverse human health impacts from power sector emissions through the targeted use of grid-connected energy storage. Energy storage devices, such as batteries or pumped storage hydropower, can shift both the time and location of power sector emissions based on their charging and discharging strategies. The overall human health impacts of criteria pollutants such as SO2 and NOx are closely related to the both temporal and spatial distribution of emissions. The overarching research question that will be answered is: Can operational strategies for grid-connected energy storage yield cost-effective reductions in the human health impacts associated with power sector emissions? To answer this question, the research team will develop a unit commitment and economic dispatch model with energy storage to determine optimal power system operations and provide unit-level SO2 and NOx emissions. A reduced-form air pollution transport model will provide spatially- and temporally-resolved PM2.5 and O3 concentrations stemming from power plant and energy storage dispatch decisions. Human health damage cost estimates will determine the health response from changes in exposure to these secondary pollutants, coupling those results with the value of a statistical life and determine the unit-level marginal health damage costs associated with the primary emissions. Those costs then serve as inputs into the power system model to allow real-time decision making, effectively internalizing the externality costs of the emissions and yielding the optimal charge/discharge behavior of the energy storage to cost-effectively reduce human health impacts.