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Introduction
The Committee on the Future of Electric Power in the U.S., convened at the request of Congress and the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Electricity Delivery and Energy Reliability, is undertaking a comprehensive evaluation of strategies for adopting new technologies, operating and planning approaches, business models, and grid architectures in the U.S. electric power system. To support its information gathering, the committee convened a workshop on February 3, 2020, titled “Models to Inform Planning for the Future of Electric Power in the United States.” More than 370 participants registered for the workshop to discuss available models for long-range, transmission, and distribution planning, as well as the broader context of how these models are used and future opportunities and needs.
The workshop was the second of two events organized by the committee. The first workshop, focusing on cyber resilience, was held in November 2019.
Granger Morgan, Carnegie Mellon University, committee chair, welcomed participants to the workshop and outlined the committee’s goals and information needs. The workshop featured experts from industry, government, and academia and was organized into two keynotes, three sessions on modeling for electric system planning, and one case study. Participants explored strengths and weaknesses of available models and modeling approaches, discussed how they have been used to guide utility planning and policy, and considered how they may be improved to account for a rapidly changing landscape of technologies, policies, and consumer needs and behavior in the coming decades.
The workshop was unclassified and open to the public. This publication is a factual summary of what occurred at the workshop. The planning committee’s role was limited to organizing and convening the workshop. The views contained in this proceedings are those of the individual workshop participants and do not necessarily represent the views of the participants as a whole, the planning committee, or the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. In addition to the summary of the workshop provided here, materials related to the workshop including speaker presentations and archived webcasts of presentation and discussion sessions can be accessed at www.nas.edu/gridmod.