Professor Inês Azevedo and Dr. Edgar Virgüez Receive Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Support

Professor Inês Azevedo and Dr. Edgar Virgüez have received support from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation for a new research project focused on advancing how reliability and resilience are defined and evaluated in the North American electric power system.

As electricity systems face rising demand, growing deployment of renewable energy and storage, increasing weather-related risks, and the emergence of large new loads such as data centers, longstanding reliability metrics may no longer fully capture the challenges of a rapidly changing grid. This new effort will examine those gaps and develop an integrated framework to help planners, regulators, researchers, and system operators better assess modern grid performance.

The project brings together a distinguished interdisciplinary team including Professor David Victor of the University of California, San Diego. Together, the researchers will examine how electricity systems can better anticipate, absorb, recover from, and adapt to future disruptions.

“We are entering a period of profound transformation in electricity systems. To navigate that transition successfully, we need better ways to understand reliability, resilience, and the tradeoffs involved in building a grid that is secure, affordable, and sustainable. We are grateful to the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation for supporting this important work.” Inês Azevedo

"Many longstanding frameworks for evaluating grid reliability simply are not equipped to capture the challenges facing today’s energy system,” said Evan Michelson, director of the Sloan Foundation’s Energy and Environment program. “Developing a unified framework for understanding resilience and reliability will help planners, policymakers, operators, and researchers assess risks to the energy supply and prepare the grid for an uncertain future.”