 Stanford University. Okay, good afternoon everyone. My name is Venkat, I lead the integrated group team at NRECA, what JP mentioned before. For those who don't know NRECA, we are the National Rural Electric Cooperatives Association. We're a trade association that represents 900 plus electric cooperatives across the country. You heard JP talked about one of the efforts that we are engaged in, and also you heard earlier in the morning chat talk about, from Kotsibu, he's also from a cooperative, a director of a cooperative. So we're happy to be involved in multiple ways in the earnest project. So after this is the break, so we have that, but the good news is I noticed that the first technical session had four projects, the previous one had three and this one has two. So we're on the right progression down, right? So that's good. So we're going to hear about challenges and solutions for cities. You heard about remote and isolated grids in the first one. The next one you heard about interconnected systems. And now we're going to hear about two projects that focus on cities to achieve the goals of earnest. The first one, let me introduce the panelists first. We have Dr. Ilu Liu, who's the professor and governor's chair for power electronics at University of Tennessee at Knoxville. And we have Dr. Pat Vaishnau, who's the assistant professor of sustainable systems at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. That's the one near Detroit, so sorry, Pat, about the lines if you're a fan. But we are in San Francisco, what else can I say? But anyway, so the first project would be, Dr. Liu would be talking about it and it has to do with landfills, how to create resilient micro grids and landfills. And as you all know, landfills are across the country, a potential for wide application of that project through this program. The other one, Pat is going to talk about resilient strategies for low income communities using community in the city of Ann Arbor as an example. And one of the things I like about this project is that it goes bottom up. Looking at the needs of that community first, the resilience needs and then creating solutions to solve those needs. So again, potential for a wide application across the country. So we're going to talk about these two projects and then of course any questions that you all have. So Ilu, would you like to go first? Thank you. All right, looks like I skipped the first page, which is fine. I work at University of Tennessee. I also work at Oak Ridge National Lab. Today I'm representing the University of Tennessee team for this about our work. So I think it's a good start. Just look at this map. And this is where the landfills are in Tennessee. And most of them are actually closed. The 94 are actually currently closed landfill. And as we, you know, the population, as we civilization moves on, we continue to increase those dots. If you look at the nation, and we're talking about thousands of landfills, and what we would like to do is those landfills are usually close to disadvantaged communities. Usually they're tucked in somewhere, a poor community. We find that being true, that there's always some very dense, you know, living quarters near the landfill. We feel that there may be a great opportunity. The first, this land is very difficult to build on and to do other things. And they're also approximate to the city, you know, not that far from the city, and they're in a great location to tie in to the grid if we can make use of them. And what we like to achieve is to come up with some standard way to do this. You know, what are the steps if you want to consider this process and be able to make use of the land also serve our disadvantaged communities. So we start with Tennessee. We picked EPB, and many of you heard this is a quite progressive municipal in Chattanooga. We also picked KUB, which is actually very... also getting into a very advanced municipal city. The way you can tell is because they start on fiber and they serve the community fiber internet as well as the media. And that comes with a tremendous advantage in terms of revenue and the triadventures. So one thing we like to think about is there's some special things about those microgrids. They're usually not huge size and they're not extremely strong ties. So another thing is we wanted to... there's not a huge amount of resources in terms of adding battery storage. So one option is by adding a few switches, maybe sometimes just one, that you can make this microgrid adaptive or dynamic. And this is coming back from our Alper E project. We were able to make the EPB microgrid near the airport dynamic. And that gave us the advantage of serving the largest possible boundary when the sun is very shining and when we experience cloud and other things we can actually shrink it so that we can focus on certain communities, certain critical loans. So that's the key point. And we like to see if we can make tools and guidelines so that other part of the country not just South East, which we start with, but other part of the country or Mexico or Canada could benefit our tools and our procedures. So that's... So what I'm showing here is the... in the circled area is one boundary and the next one you can actually have it a different boundary system. So it's quite straightforward but it does take some effort to optimize and to be able to make it economically. The other aspect that the Tennessee team will study is the weather impact. We did down earlier work with the NTR work that Kevin Ling was leading is to look at the weather impact and we look at here is the drought. You know, we notice that the temperature go up and the hydro facilities start to reduce power and even if it's not hydro, other generation we can see that it's affected by the temperature as well. And we also notice that the load does not just linearly it could go much faster. When the temperature go up you have a very large pickup of the load which is actually quite a challenging. And also, you know, your generation basically your generation also degrade and your transmission also degrade because of the high temperature and the drought. So that's one of the challenging we can tie eventually to the micro grid and go into micro levels rather than what we did at the, you know, broad transmission level. And, okay. So one other, the last item I wanted to mention is we were in the TVA service territory and a few days ago TVA just experienced a record high of load and that's because we are getting into very single digits and negative weather. And what we, this means, you know, we are changing from a summer peak in our general area now become a winter peak. So another critical area we are needing to, we do need to look into, you know, how do we make sure this community who experienced code like in the case of taxes, especially disadvantaged communities, how do we make sure they are being kept warm and not neglected. So that's overall structure of our work and there are more tasks to be added and more details. We look forward to continue on this adventure. Thanks for your time. All right. Good afternoon, everyone. So this project is about enhancing the resilience of a low-income neighborhood in Ann Arbor as that neighborhood transitions to using electricity where it currently uses natural gas, but also in the context of a changing climate and the effect of the changing climate on the loads within that neighborhood and also the context of a changing electricity system with changes because the climate is changing, because it's trying to incorporate a larger proportion of variable and uncertain energy resources. So the idea is, given all these changes, how do you ensure that the neighborhood stays resilient and does so in a way that's equitable? My collaborators on this project are Michael Craig, who's an expert in grid modeling in the context of a changing climate. Aaron Agrawal, who's a distinguished political scientist and who's interested in understanding how technology deployment changes equity. Malika Kotari, who's a doctoral student who's working on this, and the author on all of this is the Office of Sustainability and Innovation in the City of Ann Arbor, who are actually spearheading the effort to decarbonize a Bryant neighborhood. So I'll start with a bit of context. That's a sort of map of the Bryant neighborhood. It's around 250 homes, mostly low-income. The labels on those charts have been left off, but if you look at the horizontal bar diagram, the first label corresponds to the income of black residents in the Bryant neighborhood. The second one is white residents. The third is Hispanic residents. And the fourth one is Asian residents. And as you can see across communities, the median household income is much lower than Washtenaw County as a whole. And that sort of disadvantage is reflected in the employment statistics also. So the goals of the project really closely match the goals of earnest as a whole. So the first thing is we want to go to these communities and actually understand how they approach resilience right now. We sort of have the dubious good fortune of being in a part of a country, of the country where long-duration outages are not exactly a rare occurrence. It's dubious for obvious reasons, but it's good fortune because we can actually ask people how they deal with these events without them having to use their imagination. They remember the last time they had to cope with it. And then the idea is to co-develop with them tools that allow them to design a system that can provide resilience as they electrify and as the climate changes and as the reliability of the electricity system changes. And we want to work with the community to test whether they can actually use these tools, whether it generates meaningful insights and then to help them deploy this tool. And this is not entirely an academic exercise. The city of Annaba is trying to stand up what they call a sustainable energy utility, which is effectively a large microgrid which is meant to operate in parallel with the existing investor-owned utility. Some of these homes will eventually have two meters. The plan is to have these two utilities. And one of the reasons Annaba is doing this is to decarbonize faster than the investor-owned utility is able to, but the other reason is explicitly to provide resilience to these communities. And finally, the idea is to try and develop metrics to characterize how all of these efforts play out for different households, whether there are differences in the preferences that people indicate and what it will cost to provide resilience to different households based on their socio-demographic characteristics. So that last point really relates to metric development. This is a sort of schematic of what we're trying to do. As Venkat said, we're sort of going to start bottom up by developing an understanding of what people's actual loads are and how those loads might change as you electrify. We're going to use a combination of their utility build data, building energy models to arrive at that. We'll do some power system modeling, which I'll describe in a minute. And the purpose of the power system modeling is to predict the rate at which you get adequacy-driven failures in the future as the grid changes in the ways that I described. And we also want to do qualitative work where we try to understand how people cope with resilience now and similar to several of the projects here to understand what loads people value, what services do they actually want, both in their homes but also in the community. So if the power goes out, you know, I may want my fridge to continue to work. Maybe if I have some medical equipment, I want that to continue to work. If it's the winter, I want the furnace or heat pump to work. But maybe I also want my grocery store to work. Maybe I want the gas station to have power. So how do we elicit those preferences? And finally, the idea is to use that to design a system which works adequately for these people. And the idea is to do that iteratively to try and understand what you can get at what price and then to understand what trade-offs people are willing to accept between what this will cost and how much resilience they can get. So as you can see, there's a lot of moving parts in this. There's lots of methods and data. And so I'll highlight a couple of them. This is work done by former colleagues at Carnegie Mellon where they used a card-stacking exercise to try and understand what loads people valued. And then to put a limit on how much power was available in some kind of backup system to understand what they valued. We want to extend this work first by asking what loads they value within their house but also in the community. This work showed that people will actually pay to provide some resilience to the community but not exactly what they want in that community to be resilient. We also want to, if possible, try and trace some kind of demand curve for resilience where you actually tell people how much resilience they can get at a particular price and then as you vary the price, how does the amount of resilience that they want change. In a cold climate like ours, this was run in the context of a summer outage. I think it would be interesting to run this in the context of the winter as well. And finally, we want to use technoeconomic modeling to try and understand what the supply curve for resilience is. What does it cost to design a system that provides different levels of resilience? So that's one set of methods. Another set of methods deals with predicting resource adequacy. This is work that was recently published by Michael Craig and we plan to build upon this work. And what this does is that climate scenarios are fed into a capacity expansion model and a dispatch model or resource adequacy model and demand is calculated based on the climate and then you identify the hours of the year when demand is projected to exceed supply. And this model allows you to predict how the output of both thermal and renewable energy changes as the climate changes and also stochastically. So the idea is to use this approach to try and predict the future of resource adequacy failures in this region. But one of the things that we want to try and do is also to find a way of predicting or at least incorporating distribution system failures because distribution system failures are actually a larger driver of outages. One of the things that we're really excited about is the ability to go into communities and gather fine-grained data for a lot of the things that we're interested in like energy burdens and equity. There is data publicly available. For example, I can go to the census tract in Wayne County and it would tell me that the average energy burden in that county is 8% which is very high. But by going to the households in that community I learned that there are, there's a non-trivial number of households that face 10, 20, 30% energy burdens annually. And by looking at their energy bills I know that in the winter and summer those burdens are even higher. And I understand what actually drives those burdens in terms of behavior and infrastructure. It also allows me to do some technical modeling by a detailed analysis of their bills. I can tell what it would cost that household to switch to a heat pump, how the load profile of that household would change if they shifted to heat pumps and that allows us to actually understand what resilient solutions would work for them and not just in the aggregate. In terms of stakeholder engagement we're meeting with our colleagues at the city of Ann Arbor on a weekly basis. We've been doing this for quite some time for six months or so. So we have a good understanding of what they're trying to do and of their community partners, the Washtenaw Community Action Network and also Elevate Energy. We will start to do direct community engagement in the spring and summer. In terms of how we're supporting Ernest's goals I don't want to repeat all of this. I've kind of highlighted as I went along how the project supports the goal. But the last point is important also. We will train a student to not only design for example a microgrid, which is something that the student knows how to do. They've come from an environmental engineering background but also to engage with the community and thoughtfully think about how, what they learn from the community influences how they use the technical tool and how they interpret the results from the technical tool. Anticipated findings, methods to sort of quantify the community level need for resilience, developing supply and demand curves for resilience, understanding how the supply and demand curves vary based on people's socio-economic circumstances. Again, this is a sort of metric for equity and resilience. And ultimately the goal really is to design tools that communities find useful and that we go develop with them. So obviously we're extremely grateful to DOE that we get to do this work. Our partners at the city of Ann Arbor and a lot of this work builds on a foundation of prior work that was supported by the DOE Building Technology Office and by the University of Michigan's Gram Institute of Sustainability. Thank you very much. Great. Thanks again Ilu and Parth for the project descriptions and just listening to them, I think that the approach is applicable not just for communities within cities but communities nationwide really. So I think those are fundamental approaches and I look forward to kind of seeing them evolve. First, any questions from the audience for this? I have a couple of my own. There you go. There's questions. Hi, I'm Shane from Pasadena. It sounds like the kind of analysis, my question is directed to Parth, the kind of analysis that you're doing, you kind of wish that your own utility was doing. I mean you're doing a lot of really advanced stuff in modeling and resiliency, kind of resource adequacy, understanding, all that kind of stuff. Can you provide just a little bit more political color on what's going on? I'm kind of aware that, and you alluded to it, the city of Ann Arbor is looking to try and take more ownership of its local infrastructure and I think I read that the city of Ann Arbor was trying to buy its infrastructure back from DTE which is I think your local provider. Can you just provide a little bit more background on what's going on there and what your goals are? Yeah, so there's two schools of thought, one of which is that the city actually ought to buy out the utilities assets. Another school of thought is that the city ought to create its own assets that operate and parallel with the utilities assets because the process of acquiring the utilities assets might be slow, litigous and basically expensive for the city. Also, the city kind of standing up its own utility does not preclude its eventually buying the utilities assets if it comes to that. The utility doesn't want its assets bought, wants to reassure the community that it is committed to both decarbonization and to improving resilience. And within the city of Ann Arbor, this debate remains unresolved as to what we should do. There's kind of proponents, there are city hall boards about both of them, but there's a mandate to explore both those options and to sort of technically analyze them. Does that help? Thank you. Any other questions? Thank you both for your presentations. I'm curious for both of you, especially to Paath, so these communities which are traditionally low income and I've already had a lot of disadvantages thrown at them and now also serving as frontier communities where you're trying to build an electrification effort which is quite commendable. I'm curious what keeps you both up at night in terms of how this research could progress and if there are kind of failures on how resilient those communities can be in the face of power outages, you might see that play out long term. Yeah, so I'll give you actually a recent example that kind of describes what keeps me up at night. One of my students who studies electrification and actually produced some of the charts that you saw there kind of bought into her own research and completely electrified her home. And we had a bit of a cold snap, a fairly vicious cold snap a couple of weeks ago. There's no gas in this house and for three days she did not have power. So that kind of a failure in a low income home where there's not the ability to leave and stay in a hotel, that is what does worry me. What do people do? And another aspect of that is what do people do when you also electrify transport and that actually diminishes their ability to even get away when you have these kind of events? So that does worry me and to some extent both Ann Arbor and the purpose of this project is to put in place strategies to mitigate those kinds of scenarios. Well, nothing keeps me from having a good night's sleep. So I don't worry. Well, actually in our case there was quite excitement so not a concern that you couldn't go to sleep because when we first proposed this to EPP we actually thought about it. We even have the land which was already targeted being the first few that wanted to build the land and build the solar in those sites. So they provided sites to us just for this project. And when we approach KOB which is a Knoxville utility board here, yes, we also have the site. We also think about it and what to do. So there's quite excitement. We anticipate this trend will go forward if we start to approach other locations. So our strategy basically is we want to pick different scenarios. So we don't have to repeat very similar scenarios. We like to select a variety of scenarios so we can cover very different community setup in order to provide a more general approach that is achievable to other part as well. So it's actually quite excitement that we are getting a very positive response so it's very encouraging. Great. Great. I have one question on the community engagement portion. Parth and Tillu to the extent you all made community. You have been making community engagement for some time through the city and otherwise. How did you set expectations for the community in terms of cost and also in terms of like if we do this you're not going to get outage. What were the metrics that you were talking about to the community to get there by? So in the case of the Bryant project it's starting with things that are sort of no regret. Things like home audits, home insulation and a lot of these things are paid for out of grant so they're often at no expense to the household in which they're being implemented. So the buying really comes from starting with things where we are reasonably sure that there will be no regret. Okay. In our case many of them are starting as a pilot project and they want to start some solar and they like to put it in a very meaningful location and this turned out to be quite meaningful location and they also quite aware of serving the disadvantaged community in a sense. So it's kind of a win-win situation but by the time if you go into additional several more I think that's going to be a good question to find out throughout the project but the pilot people jump on it. Jump on it, perfect. Any other questions from anywhere? This is a question for Park but I think you answered some of my questions already. So are you doing mainly single family homes? What is the composition of buildings that you have in your community? Yeah, so in the study that we've done so far they're mostly single family homes. Bryant is mostly single family homes but there are some multi-family homes. Okay. So there's some multi-family, okay. The other thing we are interested in is looking at resilience as a more holistic picture. So when you go from, if you're thinking about a neighborhood or a community, right, how do you actually going from three fuels to one, what does it mean for resilience, community resilience? Are there ways to mitigate or improve community resilience? But also looking at, I think you mentioned insulation and other base because ultimately when you think about customer resilience it's not just the grid, it's about the building itself. So it would be very interesting seeing how you look at metrics for customer resilience as being different from the metrics for grid resilience. So something to follow up on. Thank you. Great. Thanks Ram. And with that I think we come to the end of this panel session and of course we are going to the break which means if you have any more questions you can write here just outside. So please help me thank all the panelists. Appreciate it.