National Long-Term Investment Planning for Energy and Transportation Systems

The most significant energy consuming infrastructures and the greatest contributors to greenhouse gases in the US today are electric and freight/passenger transportation systems. Technological alternatives for producing, transporting, and converting energy for electric and transportation systems are numerous. Selecting from among them requires long-term assessment since these capital-intensive infrastructures take years to build with lifetimes approaching a century. The advent of electrified transportation creates interdependencies between the two infrastructures that may be both problematic and beneficial. We are developing modeling capability to perform long-term electric/transportation infrastructure design at a national level, accounting for their interdependencies. The approach combines network flow/DC-flow modeling with a multiobjective solution method. We motivate the need for this work by summarizing attributes and issues related to the investment planning problem so as to find minimum-cost, low-emission, resilient infrastructure portfolios for the future. State-of-the-art energy planning models are summarized, and we describe our software design which includes a multiobjective evolutionary algorithm with a network linear programming cost minimization fitness evaluation, together with metrics for evaluating resiliency and sustainability.