SAI-P: Developing Long-Term Socio-Technical Research Programs with Electric Cooperatives

Strengthening American Infrastructure (SAI) is an NSF Program seeking to stimulate human-centered fundamental and potentially transformative research that strengthens America’s infrastructure. Effective infrastructure provides a strong foundation for socioeconomic vitality and broad quality of life improvement. Strong, reliable, and effective infrastructure spurs private-sector innovation, grows the economy, creates jobs, makes public-sector service provision more efficient, strengthens communities, promotes equal opportunity, protects the natural environment, enhances national security, and fuels American leadership. To achieve these goals requires expertise from across the science and engineering disciplines. SAI focuses on how knowledge of human reasoning and decision-making, governance, and social and cultural processes enables the building and maintenance of effective infrastructure that improves lives and society and builds on advances in technology and engineering.Most electricity in the United States is delivered by large utilities. But a significant segment of the population is served by electric cooperatives, mostly in rural areas. These are community-owned and community-managed electric utilities that have shown great innovation in their self-governance. Electric cooperatives have built portfolios of distributed resources that achieve economies of scope. Yet they are now seeking to adapt their electric grids to a world with less centralized fossil-fueled generation and more decarbonized and electrified distributed energy resources. With societal demands for new technologies, organizational competencies, and business practices to transition from fossil fuel combustion to cleaner electric end uses, electric cooperatives are facing intense pressure to adapt. This SAI planning project builds new and deeper capacity-building partnerships between university researchers, land grant university extension services, and rural electric cooperatives for research-to-action programs. The aim is to advance the collective innovation and management of rural energy transitions while improving the quality of life for rural communities.Rural electric cooperatives maintain coupled socio-technical infrastructure systems consisting of connected physical electricity-system assets and social systems of governance and institutions surrounding their physical infrastructure. This project builds capacity to identify, manage, and innovate around the dynamics of the physical and social infrastructure systems of rural electric cooperatives. The goal of this project is to establish a model of “Long-Term Socio-Technical Research” (LTSTR) programs wherein locally situated interdisciplinary researchers, extension services, and rural electric cooperatives build durable partnerships for knowledge-to-action programs, elevation of community stakeholder participation, and durable consumer-centric energy transitions. This project seeks to understand effective models for long-term university-cooperative utility partnerships and develop strategies for strengthening the impact of these partnerships on rural community vitality over time. LTSTR programs provide a platform to facilitate short-term researcher- and student-led projects, along with training to support a decarbonized and electrified future with rural communities. In partnership with utility and community partners, this SAI planning project builds a strategy for expanding and formalizing engaged research methods in diverse contexts across the United States.This award is supported by the Directorate for Social, Behavioral, and Economic (SBE) Sciences.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.