EAGER SAI

Strengthening American Infrastructure (SAI) is an NSF program that focuses on human reasoning and decision making, governance, and social and cultural processes that enable the building and maintenance of effective infrastructure.

The goal is to improve lives and society by building on the advances of technology and engineering. This project, funded by NSF’s SAI program, aimed to understand how social vulnerabilities intersect with engineering outages, with the goal of improving the equity of responses to electrical grid failure to support energy justice.

This study looked specifically at the electric grid and improving it to ensure that the most vulnerable people in the U.S. are not the most likely to be harmed by grid failure. Outages are more likely to occur and harm communities that are already vulnerable. This project aimed to improve equity in electric grid response management.