Understanding how the compounding and evolving uncertainties introduced by climate change and other stressors will impact the electric grid necessitates detailed simulation of how the power plant landscape may evolve over time. Modeling efforts that can project these transitions and impacts at a high resolution can strengthen our understanding of energy system transformations and provide multisectoral insight towards energy planning. Using a wide range of geospatially defined technological, socioeconomic, and natural resource constraints in combination with an economic model of site-specific tradeoffs between interconnection costs and energy values, the Capacity Expansion Regional Feasibility (CERF) model ingests coarse capacity expansion plans and sites new power plants on a 1 km² grid. CERF delivers a form of “ground-truthing” to ensure that capacity expansion planning models are producing feasible futures and illustrate how the power plant landscape evolves over time under different climate, socioeconomic, technology, and policy futures. This research is part of the Integrated Multisector, Multiscale Modeling (IM3) project funded by the EESM MultiSector Dynamics program area.

This presentation gives an overview of CERF model capabilities and demonstrates the various scientific questions the model can help explore. Additionally, we summarize how the CERF model has been leveraged in recent research applications such as the Grid Operations, Decarbonization, Environmental and Energy Equity Platform (GODEEEP) project. Under GODEEEP, CERF is used to project power plant development locations under a net zero Western US economy. The power plant siting locations from CERF provide insight into projected land-use conversion, highlight geospatial areas where more local collaboration and evaluation of tradeoffs may be warranted, and are used to determine job impacts from infrastructure development at a county level.