Building New American Prosperity through Smarter, More Resilient, and More Secure Infrastructure

Job creation, economic growth, and stability for our nation and throughout the world are basic needs. Meeting these goals calls for a systematic effort to reduce the clouds of uncertainty and to meet judiciously selected strategic targets. Enabling factors and accelerators include more reliable, smarter and robust national infrastructures stimulating economic growth.

To set the context: First, what defines an “Infrastructure”? According to the Board on Infrastructure and the Constructed Environment (BICE), on which I served during 2001-07, at the U.S. National Academy of Engineering:

• Infrastructure is the interconnected socio-technological system of facilities and activities that provides the range of essential services necessary to support our economy and quality of life.
• What is a socio-technological system? Socio-technological systems include the physical infrastructure, the people and organizations who build, run, and use it, as well as the economic and legal conditions for operations.

Infrastructures consist of human, cyber and physical components (https://massoud-amin.umn.edu/sites/massoud-amin.umn.edu/files/2020-03/amin_chapter14.pdf). All have inherent commonalities – Physical Actions integrated with Human Owners/Operators, Users, and combined with Sensing and Computation.

According to the U.S. DHS, there are 16 Critical Infrastructures: https://www.cisa.gov/critical-infrastructure-sectors and https://www.dhs.gov/topic/critical-infrastructure-security

Second, so just why are we concerned about our infrastructures? … What makes them so important? Quantified areas include at least:

• National Security: U.S. ability to act in its own self-interest
• Public Well-being: Confidence in access to critical services
• Economic Strength: Foundation for the American economic competitiveness

Third, Condition/Progress Report for America’s Infrastructure: The condition of our nation's roads, bridges, drinking water systems and other public works have shown little improvement since they were graded an overall D+ in 2001, with some areas sliding toward failing grades. American Society of Civil Engineers' (ASCE) Progress Reports for America's Infrastructure examines trends affecting the 12 categories -- the most recent 2021 report shows the same persisting trend: In more than two decades, the United States has made no measurable progress in improving either the condition or performance of our vital infrastructure when viewed in aggregate: https://infrastructurereportcard.org/

To help bring these definitions closer to home ... Have you ever been in a village without electricity? Or have you been in a major city during a black out? In early- to mid-1960s I visited villages outside of Tabriz and Tehran in Iran and witnessed families scratching out a subsistence living, farming plots of earth so parched they cracked under the searing sun, suffering from low life expectancy (life expectancy was in low 40s). Then in mid to late 1960s electricity reached these small villages. With new wells, pumps, and irrigation, barren soil bloomed into green cropland. Life stabilized, the population grew, and better schools and medical facilities followed. More babies survived and grew into children, and more of those children received a better education. A tractor parts factory and other businesses came to the area, providing a more stable and diverse economy.

Electricity is the linchpin: This critical infrastructure constitutes the fundamental infrastructure of modern society. But that pin, upon which the stability and security of modern life depends, is too often taken for granted and considering the increasing demands society is placing upon it.

On 13 July 1977 I was a 16-year-old high school student visiting NYC when lightning triggered a 24-hour blackout that cut power to nine million. I experienced the chaotic blackout with looters smashing their way into an electronics stores. There were fires, looting, and nearly 3,800 arrests, but also many stories of neighbors helping one another. I saw a system that needed to be saved, and that system dealt with the human condition: a short video at https://zpryme.com/media/77-problems/

Not only in developing parts of the world that I had witnessed in the 1960s, but even more so in the advanced societies, our economy and quality of life depends on reliable and disturbance-free electricity and other life-line critical infrastructures that we often take for granted.

Nearly 45 years later, we continue to operate the most advanced economy in the world primarily with 1960s and 70s technology. While blackouts and water main breaks aren't national tragedies, in the long run, they will be costly to our nation's prosperity. Power outages and power quality disturbances cost the U.S. economy over $80 billion and up to $188 billion annually.

Starting in 1995, the amortization/ depreciation rate exceeded utility construction expenditures. Since that crossover point in 1995, utility construction expenditures have lagged behind asset depreciation. This has resulted in a mode of operation of the system that is analogous to harvesting more rapidly than planting replacement seeds. As a result of these diminished "shock absorbers," the electric grid is becoming increasingly stressed, and whether the carrying capacity or safety margin will exist to support anticipated demand is in question.

The electricity grid faces (at least) three looming challenges: its organization, its technical ability to meet 10-25 year and 50 year electricity needs, and its ability to increase its efficiency without diminishing its reliability and security with adequate shock absorbers and smarter infrastructure to enable a resilient system which adaptively reconfigures and preserves its capacity.

Infrastructure investment isn't limited to building new roads and filling potholes, it also includes the "invisible" infrastructures that Americans rely on. It is easy to forget about these lynchpins of our daily lives -- that is, until the power goes out or your phone line is dead during an emergency. We must build a bridge to a 21st century economy supported by smarter, more secure and high-quality infrastructure.

The electrical power grid system has been hailed by the National Academy of Engineering as the 20th century's most influential engineering innovation of our civilization. Even so, American progress with the electrical power grid has stalled. Power outages cost Americans anywhere from $80-188 billion each year and, excluding extreme weather and disasters, on average last 92 minutes a year in the Midwest and 214 minutes in the Northeast.

Japan averages only 4 minutes of power outages each year.

We've wasted over 20 years arguing the roles of the public and private sectors while our global competitors adapt and innovate. Now is the time to gain speed in infrastructure investments. We need to renew public/private partnerships, cut red tape and reduce the cloud of uncertainty on the return on investment in infrastructure modernization and upgrades. In addition the electric power sector is second from the bottom of all major U.S. industries in terms of R&D spending as a percentage of revenue, exceeding only pulp and paper. The pet food industry, hotel industry and the insurance industry each invests in R&D at a higher rate than electrical power. To upgrade our nation's invisible infrastructure, the federal government must demonstrate a prolonged commitment to funding strategically selected and judiciously monitored research. Industry must also commit to modernizing and investing in the technology federal research dollars develops.

At the same time the digitization of our society is in its mere infancy, and we can already project that the world's electricity supply will need to triple by 2050 to keep up with demand. Consider that Twitter alone-with 1 billion Tweets sent every week, at 0.025 watt-hours per Tweet-is responsible more than 2500 MWh per week of demand on the grid that simply did not exist before the application's advent. And then you factor in services such as Internet TV, video streaming, online gaming, the digitation of medical records, smartphone applications. It's very easy to see that we have to build a stronger and smarter electrical-energy infrastructure.

America's long-term goal ought to be transitioning our power grid system on to a Smart Grid. There are many definitions of the Smart Grid, a suite of technologies that would catapult America into the 21st Century. The term "Smart Grid" refers to an overlaid/interwoven system that uses information, sensing, control and communication technologies to allow it to deal with unforeseen events and minimize their adverse impact.

Recent policies in the U.S., EU, China, India, Korea, Brazil and other nations, combined with potential for technological innovations and business opportunities, have attracted a high level of interest in smart grids. Smart grids are seen as a fundamentally transformative, global imperative for helping the planet deal with its energy and environmental challenges.

The Smart Grid starts at the fuel supply link to the electrical power generator and ends at your refrigerator, homes and businesses. Over the next decades of global rollout the Smart Grid's benefits could span empowering businesses and individuals with more control over their electricity consumption, enabling greater reliance on renewable power sources and distributed generation, strengthening energy security and creating new services and business models. Every single person on the planet is a stakeholder in Smart Grid. From individual consumers to the world's largest businesses, regulators, politicians, academia, etc., every single person is going be touched by Smart Grid in some fashion.

On options and pathways forward, I am often asked "should we have a high-voltage power grid or go for a totally distributed generation, for example with microgrids?" We need both, as the "choice" in the question poses a false dichotomy. It is not a matter of "this OR that" but it is an "AND." To elaborate briefly, from an overall energy system's perspective (with goals of efficiency, eco-friendly, reliability, security and resilience) we need both 1) microgrids (that can be as efficient and self-sufficient as possible, and to protect themselves rapidly during emergencies), AND we need 2) a stronger and smarter power grid as a backbone to efficiently integrate intermittent renewable sources into the overall system.

The total costs are:

1) Stronger Grid: The current high-voltage system needs to be expanded and strengthened. The total cost of the stronger transmission system is about $82 billion ($8 billion per year for a decade).

2) Smarter Grid: The total estimated net investment needed to realize the envisioned smarter end-to-end power delivery system of the future is between $338 and $476 billion, which translate into annual investment levels of between $17 and $24 billion over the next 20 years.

The costs cover a wide variety of enhancements to bring the power delivery system to the performance levels required for a smart grid. They include the infrastructure to integrate distributed energy resources and achieve full customer connectivity but exclude the cost of generation, the cost of transmission expansion to add renewables and to meet load growth and a category of customer costs for smart-grid-ready appliances and devices.

Moreover, investment in a Smart Grid would nearly pay for itself by reducing stupendous outage costs-a savings of $49 billion per year-and improving energy efficiency-a savings of $20.4 billion per year. Likewise, through Smart Grid-enhanced energy efficiency, by 2030 CO2 emissions from the electric sector would be reduced by 58 percent.

The benefit-to-cost ratios are found to range from 2.8 to 6.0. Thus, the smart gird definition used as the basis for the study could have been even wider, and yet benefits of building a smart grid still would exceed costs by a healthy margin. By enhancing efficiency, for example, the smart grid could reduce in the cost of infrastructure expansion and overhaul in response to annual peaks. The demand response and smart grid applications could reduce these costs significantly while increased cyber security, and overall energy security, if security is built in the design as part of a layered defense system architecture would safeguard this fundamental critical infrastructure.

Americans should not accept or learn to cope with increasing blackouts. Nor should we rest on the notion that the technical know-how, political will, or money to bring our power grid up to 21st century standards do not exist.

The truth is, as a nation we must and absolutely can meet the power needs of a pervasively digital society if the United States wishes to maintain its role as a global economic and political leader. The best of American innovation is yet to come and the Smart Grid must be part of our future.

Additional Resources:

1. Amin, M. “On Leadership of Complex Dynamical Systems,” https://www.cybersecuritysummit.org/2020/06/17/on-leadership-of-complex-dynamical-systems/, June 18, 2020, Cyber Security Think-tank Blog, and presentaion at the 2020 Cyber Security Summit in October 2020
2. Amin, M. “Continuity & Change: Assuring Proactive Security, Defense, and Resilience Among Automation & Digitization.” https://smartgrid.ieee.org/newsletters/november-2019/continuity-change-assuring-proactive-security-defense-and-resilience-among-automation-digitization
3. Amin, M., “On Countering Multi-pronged Evolving Systemic Threats: Covid-19 and Beyond,” https://smartgrid.ieee.org/newsletters/may-2020/on-countering-multi-pronged-evolving-systemic-threats-covid-19-and-beyond, IEEE Smart Grid, May 2020
4. For elated material/references please see: please see: https://massoud-amin.umn.edu/research/publications, including “We Are Not in Kansas Any More:" https://massoud-amin.umn.edu/.../mro_newsletter_9-2011_p1... And please see https://massoud-amin.umn.edu/.../turning_the_tide_on...
5. Three related articles/interviews (as part of one of my 3 forthcoming books), with Mr. David Wagman:

• Article 1: Addressed foresight and pivotal/emerging technologies (which we sent to the MOT 8224 class, Emerging and Pivotal Technologies in August-Sept. 2019): https://insights.globalspec.com/article/12354/in-conversation-a-framework-for-assessing-new-technology
• Article 2: Addressed some of the ethical aspects facing design engineers: https://insights.globalspec.com/article/12393/in-conversation-a-framework-for-addressing-technology-s-ethical-challenges
• Article 3: Addressed globalization and a framework for designing for disruptive technologies https://insights.globalspec.com/article/12658/in-conversation-a-framework-for-designing-for-disruptive-technologies

And short pieces, written for hopefully wider audiences, are posted at:

• https://www.dhirubhai.net/.../proactively-address-what...,
• https://www.dhirubhai.net/.../witnessing-i-35w-bridge...,
• https://www.dhirubhai.net/.../urban-planning-defining..., and
• https://www.dhirubhai.net/.../46th-anniversary-walking....

Pertinent detailed analyses available at https://massoud-amin.umn.edu/ (including https://tinyurl.com/2ck34zya), at the #ASCE (https://infrastructurereportcard.org/), #ASME, #ieeeorg, #ieeepes, #ieeexplore , #IEEEUSA, #NAE/ #NAS / #NRC and the #DOE, #NSF, #DHS, #DoD, #arpa, non-profit think-tanks/do-tanks including EPRI, RAND, Brattle Group, and others.