Abstract
The United States power grid faces mounting stress. According to Grid Strategies, after decades of near-zero growth, peak demand is rising rapidly. Simultaneously, generation retirements are eroding reserves, transmission networks are congested, and renewables are introducing intermittency. According to Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, new infrastructure is needed, but only 19% of interconnection projects reach commercial operation, with average completion times growing to 55 months. Holding the Line: A Digital Twin Framework Supporting Policy Design for U.S. Power Grid Resilience asks how we can maximize existing infrastructure in the short term. Barriers to Achieving the Modern Grid, Revisited asks how structural bottlenecks can be removed to accelerate development in the long term. Together, this work bridges the technical and sociopolitical dimensions of grid modernization over time.
Holding the Line addresses peak load: the periods of highest collective electricity consumption. Near-term resilience depends on optimizing current resources to withstand peak load events. Price-Based Demand Response (PBDR) incentivizes households to shift use away from peak periods, but existing evaluations aggregate reductions across entire service territories, obscuring localized impacts. To close this gap, the paper develops: (1) a high-resolution digital twin coupling a synthetic population, hourly demand profiles, and a distribution network; (2) a stochastic adoption model and demand reallocation algorithm; (3) a case study of Virginia's Eastern Shore under Time-of-Use (TOU) and French Tempo tariffs. The quantitative results align with established PBDR literature. Both TOU and Tempo scenarios produced peak reductions near 5%, within the 5–15% range documented in prior studies. The novel contribution is not the magnitude of these shifts, but the resolution at which they are observed. Deriving system-level reductions from individual household decisions while reproducing established results validates the approach. We show how consumption is spatially distributed across infrastructure, information lost when residential demand is aggregated. Some substations serve dense clusters of high-consumption households while others operate well within capacity, and demographic groups with distinct PBDR responses may cluster geographically. By modeling behavior at the correct unit of analysis—the household—planners can identify at-risk substations and act accordingly. The framework is extendable nationwide.
Barriers investigates the long-term sociotechnical obstacles to supply-side expansion. How can heterogeneous stakeholders accelerate technology adoption to deliver clean, reliable, affordable electricity? Drawing on Actor-Network Theory and the Social Construction of Technology, the paper argues modernization is a coordination problem across three coupled pillars: regulatory, financial, and human capital. Technical solutions—solar, hydrogen, storage, distributed energy, alternative business models, market designs, regulatory regimes—already exist or are rapidly emerging, yet their deployment is blocked by misalignment between actors who construct the problem and its solutions differently. The argument is developed through case studies of coordination failures and successes across each pillar, then tested against small modular reactors (SMRs), which interface with all three. Although widespread adoption could resolve problems for nearly every actor, no single actor can deploy SMRs without incentive, aid, or assurance from others. Yet even with strong alignment, the promise of SMRs has failed to materialize, revealing the limits of coordination. SMRs exemplify modernization as a coordination problem bounded by the agency of technology.
