EARNEST Consortium

The United States' electric power is on the cusp of a massive transition driven by growth in demand for electricity, policy, concerns about current economic conditions, and employment, and the environment. This massive transition requires planning as the grid begins to operate in novel ways, perform investment planning, and reforming public and private incentives for innovation, and an understanding of reliability, resiliency, economic, and social outcomes of different grid solutions. Detailed modeling tools to explore the economic, social, and/or reliability impacts of the electricity sector are currently insufficient to inform opportunities for economically enhancing reliability, resilience, affordability, and reducing negative environmental outcomes. EARNEST aims to provide solutions across these complex system-level issues.

The goals for EARNEST are:

1) To understand the current state of the U.S. electricity sector regarding reliability, resiliency, affordability, distributional and environmental consequences; 2) To develop generalizable open-source data products, tools, and models that will support grid decisions; 3) To test the suitability of these tools in real-world settings under a decision under uncertainty framework; 4) To equip an interdisciplinary highly skilled workforce that can tackle the emerging challenges of the grid of the future; and 5) To work with, and learn from, stakeholders as to provide realistic solutions for the electric grid of the future.