Rachel Moglen

selected publications

1. The State of Macro-Energy Systems Research: Common Critiques, Current Progress, and Research Priorities

   Rachel Moglen, Kiran Prakash Chawla, Patricia Levi, Yinong Sun, Oladoyin Phillips, Benjamin D. Leibowicz, Jesse D. Jenkins, and Emily A. Grubert

   iScience 2023

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   The growing field of macro-energy systems (MES) brings together the interdisciplinary community of researchers studying the equitable and low-carbon future of humanity’s energy systems. As MES matures as a community of scholars, a coherent consensus about the key challenges and future directions of the field can be lacking. This paper is a response to this need. In this paper, we first discuss the primary critiques of model-based MES research that have emerged since MES was proposed as a way to unify related interdisciplinary research. We discuss these critiques and current efforts to address them by the coalescing MES community. We then outline future directions for growth motivated by these critiques. These research priorities include both best practices for the community and methodological improvements.

   @article{Moglen2023_MESCritiquesFrontiers,
     title = {The State of Macro-Energy Systems Research: Common Critiques, Current Progress, and Research Priorities},
     journal = {iScience},
     author = {Moglen, Rachel and Chawla, Kiran Prakash and Levi, Patricia and Sun, Yinong and Phillips, Oladoyin and Leibowicz, Benjamin D. and Jenkins, Jesse D. and Grubert, Emily A.},
     pages = {106325},
     year = {2023},
     issn = {2589-0042},
     doi = {https://doi.org/10.1016/j.isci.2023.106325},
     url = {https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2589004223004029},
     keywords = {Macro-energy systems, Energy and climate policy, Decarbonization, Energy modeling, Climate change},
   }

2. A Nexus Approach to Infrastructure Resilience Planning under Uncertainty

   Rachel Moglen, Julius Barth, Shagun Gupta, Eiji Kawai, Katherine Klise, and Benjamin D. Leibowicz

   Reliability Engineering & System Safety 2023

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   Natural disasters pose serious threats to Critical Infrastructure (CI) systems like power and drinking water, sometimes disrupting service for days, weeks, or months. Decision makers can mitigate this risk by hardening CI systems through actions like burying power lines and installing backup generation for water pumping. However, the inherent uncertainty in natural disasters coupled with the high costs of hardening activities make disaster planning a challenging task. We develop a disaster planning framework that recommends asset-specific hardening projects across interdependent power and water networks facing the uncertainty of natural disasters. We demonstrate the utility of our model by applying it to Guayama, Puerto Rico, focusing on the risk posed by hurricanes. Our results show that our proposed optimization approach identifies hardening decisions that maintain a high level of service post-disaster. The results also emphasize power system hardening due to the dependency of the water system on power for water treatment and a higher vulnerability of the power network to hurricane damage. Finally, choosing optimal hardening decisions by hedging with respect to all potential hurricane scenarios and their probabilities produces results that perform better on extreme events and are less variable compared to optimizing for only the average hurricane scenario.

   @article{Moglen2023_NexusResilience,
     title = {A Nexus Approach to Infrastructure Resilience Planning under Uncertainty},
     journal = {Reliability Engineering & System Safety},
     volume = {230},
     pages = {108931},
     year = {2023},
     issn = {0951-8320},
     doi = {https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ress.2022.108931},
     url = {https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0951832022005464},
     author = {Moglen, Rachel and Barth, Julius and Gupta, Shagun and Kawai, Eiji and Klise, Katherine and Leibowicz, Benjamin D.},
     keywords = {Infrastructure hardening, Resilience, Stochastic optimization, Disaster planning, Critical infrastructure systems, Energy-water nexus},
   }

3. Resilience Analysis of Potable Water Service after Power Outages in the U.S. Virgin Islands

   Katherine Klise, Rachel Moglen, Joseph Hogge, Daniel Eisenberg, and Terranna Haxton

   Journal of Water Resources Planning and Management Dec 2022

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   The two Category-5 hurricanes that impacted the United States Virgin Islands in 2017 exposed critical infrastructure vulnerabilities that must be addressed. While the drinking water utility has first-hand knowledge about how the hurricanes affected their systems, the use of modeling and simulation tools can provide additional insight to aid investment planning and preparedness. This paper provides a case study on resilience analysis for the island’s potable water systems subject to long term power outages. Power outage scenarios help quantify differences in water delivery, water quality, and water quantity during and after the disruption. The analysis helps illustrate important differences in system operations and recovery time across the islands. Results from this case study can be used to better understand how the system might behave during future disruptions, provide justification for investment, and provide recommendations to increase resilience of the system. The analysis framework can also be used by other utilities to explore vulnerability to long term power outages.

   @article{Klise2022_USVIResilience,
     author = {Klise, Katherine and Moglen, Rachel and Hogge, Joseph and Eisenberg, Daniel and Haxton, Terranna},
     title = {Resilience Analysis of Potable Water Service after Power Outages in the U.S. Virgin Islands},
     journal = {Journal of Water Resources Planning and Management},
     volume = {148},
     issue_date = {December 2022},
     number = {12},
     pages = {05022010},
     year = {2022},
     month = dec,
     doi = {10.1061/(ASCE)WR.1943-5452.0001607},
     url = {https://ascelibrary.org/doi/abs/10.1061/%28ASCE%29WR.1943-5452.0001607},
   }