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Livewire Data Platform: A Catalog of Transportation and Mobility Data

A two-page fact sheet on the capabilities and core services of the Livewire Data Platform, a growing catalog of transportation and mobility-related data that empowers researchers and community planners to easily and securely share and preserve data that support projects and decision making.

47 OTHER INSTRUMENTATION↗

Livewire Data Platform: A Catalog of Transportation and Mobility Data

A two-page fact sheet on the capabilities and core services of the Livewire Data Platform, a growing catalog of transportation and mobility-related data that empowers researchers and community planners to easily and securely share and preserve data that support projects and decision making.

Livewire, EEMS, energy-efficient mobility systems,↗

Packages of Distributed Energy Technologies Demonstrating Demand Flexibility at Community Scale

The combination of increased electric load growth across all sectors, deferred electrical infrastructure investment, and other factors resulting in variable electric power supply, has created technical challenges to maintaining a resilient and reliable grid. Many federal, regional, and local efforts are in play to modernize the electric grid, including advancing building technologies and distributed energy resources (DERs) that are utilizing smarter controls to become responsive to both occupant and grid needs. This report reviews ten pilot projects demonstrating how groups of buildings combined with behind-the-meter (BTM) DERs such as electric vehicle (EV) charging, battery storage, flexible HVAC and domestic hot water systems, and photovoltaic systems can reliably and cost effectively provide grid services. Each of the ten pilot projects aim to deliver both energy efficiency and demand flexibility (DF) while supporting load growth. The ten demonstration teams are piloting flexible DER packages across diverse communities of residential and commercial buildings to address a variety of regional grid needs. The outcomes of these pilot projects will be used to inform future scaling through utility program development. This paper characterizes the ten teams, showcasing the decision-making process used by each group to develop their packages (Section 2), the grid services they plan to deliver (Section 3), the types of DER packages selected for deployment within building sectors (Section 4) and trends between building sector, DER types, and grid services In order to achieve community scale benefits, the pilot projects must utilize aggregated control mechanisms for coordinating buildings and DERs together. Several types of coordinated control architectures have evolved amongst the teams, influenced by use type, existing market conditions, and integration type. Three coordinated controls architectures have been characterized, highlighting their use cases, benefits, challenges, and tradeoffs in their design. These insights can aid utilities, control vendors, and developers in scaling community-level energy systems (Paul, 2024). Ultimately, the technology packages selected by the ten teams will be coordinated to provide power system services, also known as grid services. Insights from these demonstrations will be useful for grid operators, regulators, aggregators and other stakeholders as they look to deploy demand flexible resources as grid services in the future. The grid services that each team is targeting for demonstration are described in Section 3 and Section 4. Methods for evaluating the grid services have been described in the paper Metrics for Evaluating Grid Service Provision from Communities of Grid-interactive and Efficient Buildings and other DER (MacDonald, 2023). To identify technology packages for demonstration, Section 2 shows that project teams used a range of analysis approaches, including building energy modeling, AMI data analysis, cost-benefit frameworks, and utility pilot data. Some teams emphasized technical modeling to quantify grid impacts and demand reduction potential, while others prioritized economic evaluations, stakeholder input, or exploratory pilots to inform deployment decisions. This diversity reflects the need to tailor selection methods to project goals, available data, and organizational context. Section 5 discusses trends between the DER technologies deployed and the grid service provisions from each team. Residential buildings (multifamily and single family) lean towards technologies that enhance energy efficiency (e.g. weatherization upgrades, smart thermostats) and onsite power generation integration (e.g. solar PV). Commercial building demonstrations prioritize technologies that ensure operational reliability (e.g. battery storage) and centralized energy management systems and optimization solutions. Teams that are deploying controllable storage-based technologies are more likely to provide grid services that require a near real-time response. Teams incorporating load shifting technologies like smart thermostats with HEMs are likely to include energy markets participation and customer bill management offerings. Campus demonstrations are adopting diverse sets of DERs to emphasize renewable generation, paired with centralized control. This section also describes technologies that were considered during project planning but ultimately excluded from final deployment. These demonstrations reveal that effective DER package design should be tailored to building type, customer segment, and construction vintage. Multifamily buildings benefit from centralized HVAC upgrades and supervisory controls, while single-family homes are well-suited for individualized technologies like solar, storage, and smart home energy monitors. Commercial and campus settings prioritize EMIS integration and load optimization. New construction enables cost-effective integration of DER-ready infrastructure, whereas retrofits require deployments aligned with owner and tenant value streams. For utility program planners, early coordination with developers and building owners, paired with segmented and modular program offerings, can improve adoption, scalability, and grid impact.

24 POWER TRANSMISSION AND DISTRIBUTION↗

Risk-controlled Expansion Planning with Distributed Resources (REPAIR) v1.0

The Risk-controlled Expansion Planning with Distributed Resources (REPAIR) is an innovative tool to support decisions around utility grid planning to prevent and mitigate the impact of outages caused by routine equipment failures (reliability) or by extreme events (resilience), such as storms, earthquakes or wildfires that long term interruption of service. REPAIR is a risk-based optimization and decision-making model allowing informed and transparent "cost vs risk" decisions regarding infrastructural planning of electric utilities. The model considers long-term resilience and reliability planning strategies that rely on traditional infrastructure upgrade (e.g. circuit hardening, reinforcement, new substations, etc.) or new investment alternatives, such as DERs.

Heleno, Miguel [Lawrence Berkeley National Laborat↗

Stepping into the Midwest Bioeconomy: Stakeholder Engagement and Geospatial Tools to Assist in Perennial Bioenergy Crop Decision Making and Entrepreneurship

This project, “Ecosystem Services and Farm Entrepreneurship Technical Assistance,” was a three-year project originally planned for FY22–FY24. Due to a late start and a few extensions, it is being completed in early FY25. This project explored opportunities to support the deployment of a bioeconomy with a circular, more sustainable supply chain. Using a tool developed by Argonne to identify agricultural areas suitable for use in the bioeconomy, we sought to create opportunities in the bioeconomy as biomass producers, bioenergy users, and environmental entrepreneurs. We proposed to focus at the beginning on enhancing the tool’s capabilities, while engaging with key stakeholders to improve and expand the tool’s functionality for all potential stakeholders in the bioeconomy. We believe that expanding our tools and technologies, coupled with conversations in agricultural spaces, will be needed as we continue to explore how best to offer farmers whole-of supply-chain opportunities to participate in the bioeconomy. Through this project we have continued to gain a better understanding of the ways in which farmers, landowners, bioenergy users, and environmental entrepreneurs may approach the bioeconomy. In addition, as we improve our analytic toolkit, we can continue to refine our communication and the ways in which we can valuate the bioeconomy. Refining these tools allows us to dive deeper into conversations around plausible policies and drivers for future bioeconomy investment and engagement by stakeholders. By working with farmers and agricultural landowners to enable a sustainable bioeconomy business model, enhance their energy options, and recover resources from their waste streams, this project directly responds to the Bioenergy Technology Office’s (BETO) priorities of building a resilient energy economy. It addresses BETO’s focus on fostering the development and adoption of energy technologies that enable the conversion of waste to energy, efficient land use, and robust job creation. By establishing a technical assistance program that develops capabilities and practices in agricultural areas to implement a bioeconomy future, this program will develop an important linkage between technology being developed at U.S. Department of Energy national laboratories and the agricultural communities of the Midwest. This project focuses on farmers with lower productivity farmland. Because less productive lands create a more difficult revenue stream for conventional crops, these farmers may therefore be more open to alternative agricultural land management regimes. Consequently, the technical assistance program and the methodologies for targeting perennial bioenergy crop application on marginal land provide a distinct opportunity to engage with and invest in the bioeconomy in these economically stressed areas. Stakeholders in this project include farmers and landowners, local conservation organizations (NRCS, SWCS, etc.), universities, non-profit environmental and agricultural entities, farm consultants, environmental regulators, and industry, including the industries working on conversion technologies, anaerobic digestion, pyrolysis, and biochar generation, and the companies interested in trading or purchasing/supporting the valuation of ecosystem services (ES).

09 BIOMASS FUELS↗

A Hierarchical Control Architecture: Utilization of Behind-the-Meter Appliances with Increased Visibility and Controllability

Optimal operations of distribution systems to enhance reliability and resiliency can be achieved if information with higher fidelity can be accessed from grid premise devices. This paper discusses a hierarchical control architecture that can introduce higher visibility and controllability by utilizing the estimated injection and absorption of different behind-the-meter controllable loads, and DERs, including EVs, within a premise. The acquired information is used to make control decisions for scheduling the premise appliances to reduce energy consumptions. The premise controller can also optimize the consumptions on a day-to-day basis in addition to taking input signals from the utility operators to support grid-service events (e.g., peak shaving). The entire control architecture is designed in a modular and scalable fashion that provides benefits to the utility from the reuse of existing infrastructure while creating opportunities for various grid services to be enabled by the operation of premise controllers.

24 POWER TRANSMISSION AND DISTRIBUTION↗

Caffeine: CoArray Fortran Framework of Efficient Interfaces to Network Environments

This paper provides an introduction to the CoArray Fortran Framework of Efficient Interfaces to Network Environments (Caffeine), a parallel runtime library built atop the GASNet-EX exascale networking library. Caffeine leverages several non-parallel Fortran features to write type- and rank-agnostic interfaces and corresponding procedure definitions that support parallel Fortran 2018 features, including communication, collective operations, and related services. One major goal is to develop a runtime library that can eventually be considered for adoption by LLVM Flang, enabling that compiler to support the parallel features of Fortran. The paper describes the motivations behind Caffeine's design and implementation decisions, details the current state of Caffeine's development, and previews future work. We explain how the design and implementation offer benefits related to software sustainability by lowering the barrier to user contributions, reducing complexity through the use of Fortran 2018 C-interoperability features, and high performance through the use of a lightweight communication substrate.

Rouson, Damian↗

Conceptual Design of Pulverized Coal Electricity Generating Units for Flexible Operation

This National Energy Technology Laboratory (NETL) study addresses the conceptual design of greenfield pulverized coal (PC) plants intended for flexible rather than high capacity factor baseload operation. The United States has plentiful, low-cost natural gas resources - studies of aggressive decarbonization scenarios of the US energy sector suggest that the variability of carbon-free power can be economically addressed using dispatchable natural gas-fueled generation. Globally, natural gas resources are not as plentiful or low cost; consequently, some regions of the world are anticipated to continue to rely upon coal generation, even as they pursue decarbonization efforts. To support the increased utilization of variable renewable generation in these coal-dependent regions, plant designs must target low-capacity factor coal plants with increased emphasis on flexibility attributes such as start-up times, ramp rates, minimum load, and part-load heat rates. While much work has been performed on the improvement of the flexibility for existing coal plants originally designed for baseload service, little public literature exists on clean sheet design for flexible operation. This conceptual design study aims to define the features, performance characteristics, and costs for greenfield coal plants intended for flexible operation. Quantifying these characteristics provides critical information required by utility owners, grid planners, energy market modelers, and energy policy decision makers in coal-dependent regions of the world to better understand how coal-fired power plants can support a transition to low carbon generation.

20 FOSSIL-FUELED POWER PLANTS↗

Energy Community Atlas

The Energy Community Atlas provides efficient access to authoritative, curated, and relevant data that is vital to supporting energy planning, development, and economic growth across the U.S. In this effort, researchers at the National Energy Technology Laboratory (NETL) are utilizing advanced data visualization and transformation capabilities to develop an integrated, data atlas and resource focused on supporting energy community transitions to new manufacturing opportunities. Specifically, this project is working to find, acquire, integrate, and virtually host in a user-friendly, public and private solution from available resources, relevant to understanding and characterizing fossil energy communities themselves and inform energy planning, development, and economic growth opportunities, including opportunities for co-development to support manufacturing, critical materials, and more. This Atlas when complete is to offer a one-stop-shop for stakeholders to derive new insights to accelerate energy investments and strategic decision support needs. These are following datasets that are available as part of this ongoing project • Energy Community Atlas Map Package - This is ArcPro Map package and it contains all of the symbolized layers along with ArcPro map and geodatabase • Energy Community Atlas ArcGIS REST service - https://www.arcgis.com/apps/mapviewer/index.html?panel=gallery&suggestField=true&layers=537ced69bd88440380a62c2ec8aca30c • README Energy Community Atlas - Read me word document that has details about feature classes in Map package, ArcPro map and ArcGIS Rest Service

Bipartisan Infrastructure Law↗

Evaluating Basin-Scale Forest Adaptation Scenarios: Wildfire, Streamflow, Biomass, and Economic Recovery Synergies and Trade-Offs

Active forest management is applied in many parts of the western United States to reduce wildfire severity, mitigate vulnerability to drought and bark beetle mortality, and more recently, to increase snow retention and late-season streamflow. A rapidly warming climate accelerates the need for these restorative treatments, but the treatment priority among forest patches varies considerably. We simulated four treatment scenarios across the 3,450 km 2 Wenatchee River basin in eastern Washington, United States. We used a decision support tool (DST) to assess trade-offs and synergies within and among treatments on wildfire risk and smoke emissions, water yield and snow retention, biomass production, and economic return. Treatment scenarios emphasized prescribed burning ( BurnOnly ), biomass production ( MaxBiomass ), gap-based thinning to optimize water yield ( IdealWater ), and a principle-based restoration scenario ( RA1 ). Fire hazard, smoke emissions, and biomass production metrics were evaluated across scenarios using the Forest Vegetation Simulator, and water yields were modeled using the Distributed Hydrology Soil Vegetation Model. Simulations were summarized to both patch- (10 1 –10 2 ha) and subwatershed- (10 3 –10 4 ha) scales, and treatment effects were evaluated against an untreated baseline landscape. We used logic models to rank effect sizes by scenario across metrics along a continuum between −1 (no or weak effect) to +1 (large effect). All treatments produced benefits across one or more ecosystem services and led to synergistic benefits to water yield and wildfire hazard reduction. Tradeoffs among resource benefits were clear in wilderness where reliance on prescribed burning without mechanical treatment increased costs and eliminated the potential for biomass recovery. The BurnOnly scenario improved fire risk metrics and streamflow, but effect sizes were lower compared to other treatments. IdealWater showed the strongest benefits overall, demonstrating the ability to capture multiple resource benefits through spatially explicit thinning. Our study provides a framework for integrating strategic and tactical models that evaluate tradeoffs and synergies gained through varied management approaches. We demonstrate the utility of decision support modeling to enhance management synergies across large landscapes.

54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES↗

NARUC grid data sharing playbook

In 2022, the National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners (NARUC) launched an initiative to support its members in addressing issues related to grid data sharing. The Grid Data Sharing Collaborative was funded by the DOE’s Office of Electricity and Office of Cybersecurity, Energy Security, and Emergency Response (CESER). NARUC invited programmatic, policy, technical, and cybersecurity subject matter experts from public utility commissions, utilities, non-governmental organizations, energy service companies, and DOE to join the two-year Grid Data Sharing Collaborative to help develop a flexible framework for states to use as a starting point when navigating complex decision-making inherent in grid data sharing. The framework took shape through a series of intensive workshops during which Collaborative participants explored illustrative use cases to identify data needs, articulate the benefits and risks of sharing such data, and assess the trade-offs. Along the way, participants offered suggestions for how the framework could be used in practice. The purpose of this playbook is to describe the elements of the Grid Data Sharing Framework and to begin supporting its implementation.

24 POWER TRANSMISSION AND DISTRIBUTION↗

Weather effects on the lifecycle of U.S. Department of Defense equipment replacement (WELDER)

Extreme weather has a direct and significant impact on buildings and infrastructure, resulting in billions of dollars of damage each year. This problem continues to grow as climate patterns change and buildings are exposed to new and different hazards than what they were designed to withstand. In order to better plan for the long-range sustainment, restoration, modernization, and eventual recapitalization of these buildings, organizations with large building portfolios, such as the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD), must have an awareness of the risks that these extreme weather events present. This research aimed to develop an approach to estimate condition loss and reduction in service life for the components of a building due to extreme weather hazards, to understand the risks that may be present in certain buildings and building systems. To achieve this objective, a damage association matrix was developed that categorizes climate hazards, the damage modes that they produce, and the individual component types impacted. This damage matrix formally links state-of-the-art climate model output, which provides projections of the probability of various climate hazards with a damage effects model that quantifies the consequence on component-level condition and service life. This method is applied to an actual portfolio of buildings in a particular geographic location and with a pre-defined component inventory that comprises the building. This approach can be aggregated to the system-, facility-, and site-level thus helping support billions of dollars in recapitalization decisions related to restoration/modernization of facilities.

54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES↗

Integrating Intelligent Hydro-informatics into an effective Early Warning System for risk-informed urban flood management

The urban drainage system constantly facing flooding issues in coastal and urban areas. Robust and accurate urban flood management, particularly considering fast-moving compound floods, is crucial to minimize the impact of flood disasters in coastal cities. Till now, Ho Chi Minh City (HCMC) lacks an effective means of urban flood management because of flood risk communication among residents. Existing flood risk communication tools rely on post-disaster flood model outcomes and data. Therefore, this research proposes a real-time Early Urban Flooding Warning System (EUFWS) integrated with a user-friendly web and app interface. The backbone of this system consists of flood models developed using machine learning (ML) algorithms, combined with big data and Web-GIS visualization, with ML serving as the core for constructing the EUFWS. EUFWS offer several key advantages: they are available at all times, accessible from anywhere, and provide a real-time, multi-user working platform. Additionally, the system is flexible, allowing for the easy addition of components and services and scalable, adjusting to workload demands. EUFWS have been successfully deployed in Thu Duc City, Vietnam, as a case study and are operating effectively. EUFWS have been successfully deployed in Thu Duc City, Vietnam, as a case study and are operating effectively. Research results indicate that EUFWS supported decision-makers to be effectively risk informed and make intelligent decisions during urban flood emergencies. Finally, this underscores the significant potential of integrating ML and information technology to enhance the management of smart urban drainage systems in flood-prone cities worldwide.

54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES↗

Wildfire management decisions outweigh mechanical treatment as the keystone to forest landscape adaptation

Modern land management faces unprecedented uncertainty regarding future climates, novel disturbance regimes, and unanticipated ecological feedbacks. Mitigating this uncertainty requires a cohesive landscape management strategy that utilizes multiple methods to optimize benefits while hedging risks amidst uncertain futures. We used a process-based landscape simulation model (LANDIS-II) to forecast forest management, growth, climate effects, and future wildfire dynamics, and we distilled results using a decision support tool allowing us to examine tradeoffs between alternative management strategies. We developed plausible future management scenarios based on factorial combinations of restoration-oriented thinning prescriptions, prescribed fire, and wildland fire use. Results were assessed continuously for a 100-year simulation period, which provided a unique assessment of tradeoffs and benefits among seven primary topics representing social, ecological, and economic aspects of resilience. Projected climatic changes had a substantial impact on modeled wildfire activity. In the Wildfire Only scenario (no treatments, but including active wildfire and climate change), we observed an upwards inflection point in area burned around mid-century (2060) that had detrimental impacts on total landscape carbon storage. While simulated mechanical treatments (~ 3% area per year) reduced the incidence of high-severity fire, it did not eliminate this inflection completely. Scenarios involving wildland fire use resulted in greater reductions in high-severity fire and a more linear trend in cumulative area burned. Mechanical treatments were beneficial for subtopics under the economic topic given their positive financial return on investment, while wildland fire use scenarios were better for ecological subtopics, primarily due to a greater reduction in high-severity fire. Benefits among the social subtopics were mixed, reflecting the inevitability of tradeoffs in landscapes that we rely on for diverse and countervailing ecosystem services. This study provides evidence that optimal future scenarios will involve a mix of active and passive management strategies, allowing different management tactics to coexist within and among ownerships classes. Our results also emphasize the importance of wildfire management decisions as central to building more robust and resilient future landscapes.

54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES↗

Accelerated Materials Deployment in Advanced Nuclear Power Plants

The purpose of this report is to begin the development of a maximally efficient process for licensing and deploying new materials in Advanced Non-Light-Water Reactors (ANLWRs). Some new materials that are to be used in some new plants are seen as possibly introducing risks, because our understanding of those new materials’ behavior in the conditions generated by some novel plant designs is less complete than our understanding of the behavior of materials with long use histories in existing designs. In these cases, an approved code/standard or a code case to support the use of these materials in the novel design’s safety case may not exist for the regulator to utilize as part of the licensing determination. This circumstance creates the potential for an extremely long licensing process for new designs using new materials. The present strategy is to show how to manage these risks proactively, in such a way as to permit licensing decisions to be made in a timely manner, based on this risk management process. The present report outlines the gaps in the current codes to support deployment and use of novel materials and begins the development of the necessary risk management framework that is focused on the subject materials issues; it is based on risk-informed in-service surveillance practices, carried out in such a way as to compensate for current limitations in our state of knowledge. This development will enable licensing and deployment of the subject materials, conditional on the proactive surveillance process to be established. While this report is occasioned by limitations in our knowledge of certain materials issues that may arise in advanced designs, in-service surveillance is always done in order to compensate for a lack of knowledge: if we knew that components were not already failed and not trending toward failure, we would not perform surveillance, even in current-generation plants (except that prescriptive requirements would force us to do so). What is different about the surveillance program discussed here is that the issues are newer and the relevant experience base is less complete, so the surveillance presently contemplated may need to measure new things and/or measure them more often than has been traditional for surveillance coupons. The present report is devoted to the risk management framework and applies American Society of Mechanical Engineers Boiler and Pressure Vessel Code Section XI, Division [1] to establish the structure of a protocol for carrying out the necessary surveillance. These documents are generic: they do not tell us how often to surveille, or what to surveille, or what to measure, but rather how to determine those things, given certain technical inputs. The Regulatory Development R&D Program [2] is currently developing the companion supporting technical basis for the materials surveillance technology that, when completed and validated, can be used by owner/operator and NRC to implement a materials degradation management program for ANLWRs. This report also outlines salient points of discussion, positive potential outcomes, and potential concerns from industry and the USNRC. These aspects of the report intend to inform future work to develop a proposed technical process for adoption by the industry and endorsement by the USNRC to allow developers to propose a risk informed and conservative approach for the use of materials where operating experience/data and codes and standards may not exist for use of a novel material in an operating reactor environment. Additionally, such a technology could be leveraged to potentially reduce part of the upfront materials data requirements from ongoing long-term materials testing so that early action on license application could be undertaken by NRC, in parallel with the continuation of long-term data collection. This could accelerate the schedule for a first-of-a-kind ANLWR deployment or a nth-of-a-kind new materials insertion for established ANLWR designs.

22 GENERAL STUDIES OF NUCLEAR REACTORS↗

A multi-criteria land suitability assessment of field allocation decisions for switchgrass

With the goal of evaluating biomass resource availability in certain regions in the United States, the Department of Energy, Department of Agriculture, Environmental Protection Agency, national laboratories, and Forest Service research laboratories, together with academic and industry collaborators, performed a resource analysis study, 2016 Billion-Ton Report: Advancing Domestic Resources for a Thriving Bioeconomy, Volume 1: Economic Availability of Feedstocks, using POLYSYS model to estimate biomass potential. The study provided county- and state-level biomass potential projections, with biomass feedstock production estimates and suitability assessment of lands acreage likely to transition to energy crops. For this analysis, we estimate biomass supply by year 2028, more specifically, lands acreage transition to switchgrass in the Midwest of the United States, across 50 counties in 3 states (Nebraska, Kansas, and Colorado). We propose a multi-criteria site suitability framework, to determine the potential acreage and production for switchgrass, at the field level. Site selection criteria span agronomic and ecosystem services such as previous land cover, crop rotation, soil water holding capacity, crop productivity, field efficiency, topography, soil organic matter, soil leaching propensity, distance to surface water bodies, and soil erosivity. Efficient agricultural field selection for dedicated energy crops field allocation is critical to evaluate biomass resource availability, and it is our position that estimation at the field level would provide a more accurate and useful estimation to support an emerging bioeconomy. Using field suitability scores and county-level assessments, we model land allocation decision for energy crop in the future, estimating the spatial distribution of dynamics of energy crop adoption with priority to fields scoring the highest. Additionally, compared with POLYSYS results from the report mentioned above, our method shows good performance overall, with about 2% and 1.2% of difference in switchgrass acreage allocation and crop production, respectively.

54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES↗

Quick Talk: Resilient Communities, Maryland

Groundswell, Inc., in partnership with the Maryland Energy Administration (MEA), Ayika Solutions, the National Renewable Energy Lab (NREL), and the Baltimore Office of Sustainability, is advancing a vision for resilient, community-centered energy systems in Maryland. This effort aligns with Groundswell's commitment to a clean energy economy that equitably benefits all communities, closing gaps in representation, wages, and access to wealth generation, savings, and local jobs within a diverse energy supply chain. Project Vision and Objectives The project emphasizes "energy resilience," defined as a community’s capacity to anticipate, adapt to, and swiftly recover from power disruptions through inclusive planning and technical solutions. The approach centers on Resilience Hubs—designated community facilities equipped to support residents before, during, and after power-related disruptions. These hubs offer emergency resources, coordinate communications, and deliver essential services while reducing carbon emissions, ultimately enhancing residents' quality of life. Additionally, Resilience Hubs foster social connections, support disaster preparedness, and provide spaces for community programming and everyday use. The goals of Resilient Communities Maryland include: Developing a replicable framework for community energy resilience, applicable beyond Maryland. Defining community-led indicators of social impact and resilience. Establishing equitable decision-making processes in project design and implementation. Informing MEA of practical, community-based resilience strategies to shape future state initiatives. Approach Groundswell and its partners prioritize collaborative engagement with local stakeholders, ensuring that solutions are responsive to each community's unique needs. By integrating feedback from residents, local organizations, and government entities, the team has developed a holistic model for resilience that balances immediate benefits, such as improved emergency response, with long-term gains in social equity and environmental sustainability. Key Outcomes This initiative has produced valuable resources and insights, including: A Community Energy Resilience Framework: Designed to guide other communities in establishing energy resilience strategies tailored to their specific needs. Case Studies: Documenting best practices and lessons learned from pilot projects to serve as models for future resilience efforts. Community-Driven Impact Metrics: Highlighting the positive social impacts that resilience initiatives can bring, such as improved social connectedness and local decision-making power. Recommendations for MEA: Offering evidence-based insights to inform policies and funding opportunities that support resilient energy infrastructure in vulnerable communities. Next Steps Groundswell's final report will detail findings, including the potential for scaling resilience hubs across Maryland and other regions, with a focus on equitable access and community-driven outcomes. This project underscores the importance of aligning energy resilience with social equity, reinforcing community agency, and building systems that withstand and recover from future challenges effectively and sustainably.

14 SOLAR ENERGY↗