Equitably Allocating Wildfire Resilience Investments for Power Grids: Challenges with Vulnerability Indices and the Need for Group-Level Protections

Core Concepts

Vulnerability indices like Justice40 and Social Vulnerability Index (SVI) fail to adequately protect disadvantaged minority groups, particularly indigenous communities, when allocating investments for power line undergrounding and de-energization to mitigate wildfire risk. Group-level protections are necessary to ensure equitable outcomes.

Abstract

This paper explores the challenges in equitably allocating funds for power line undergrounding and de-energization to mitigate wildfire risk in power grids. The authors use a high-fidelity synthetic power grid model of the Texas transmission system to analyze the effectiveness of two major vulnerability indices - the Justice40 index and the CDC's Social Vulnerability Index (SVI) - in protecting disadvantaged communities.
The key insights are:

Vulnerability indices like Justice40 and SVI fail to adequately capture the vulnerability of indigenous and other minority communities, who experience disproportionately high power outages from emergency power shutoffs but are not well represented in these indices.

This is due to the "curse of aggregation" - the indices rely on aggregated census tract data, which can overlook minority populations within a tract. Indigenous communities, in particular, make up a small fraction of the total population in each tract and their relative disadvantage is overlooked.

Modifying the Justice40 index to focus only on Texas-specific wildfire risk does not resolve this issue, as the underlying problem of data aggregation persists.

To address this, the authors propose using group-level protections through a percentage-based Min-Max Fairness (MMF) framework in the optimization model. This ensures that each population group receives an appropriate level of investment and load shed reduction, preventing minority groups from being overlooked.

The MMF framework, when combined with a sufficiently high budget (at least $500 million in this case), is able to achieve both low overall load shed and equitable outcomes across different racial and socioeconomic groups, including indigenous communities.

Stats

"Poorer families are less likely to own a backup power generator, so they are much more susceptible to food and medicine spoilage as well as loss of critical cooling in hot summer months if they lose power [25]."
"Our simulations in Table 5 of Appendix D.3 show that the indigenous groups experience approximately 2.52% of load demanded that is shed whereas the overall population experiences 1.22% of load demanded that is shed when there is no undergrounding budget or equity objectives."
"An estimated 22.5% of indigenous American groups were below 125% of the poverty line compared to 13.3% of white and 24% of Hispanic groups, which are the other two groups prone to at- or above-average load shed in this case. However, white and Hispanic groups made up 48% and 40% of the Texas population respectively, and indigenous groups make up less than 1% of the Texas population."

Quotes

"The challenge in defining such an index is the necessary aggregation of the statistics of a population in various census tracts."
"We hypothesize that this is because indigenous populations make up such a small fraction of the total population of each census tract that their relative disadvantage is overlooked when other groups within the census tract are not disadvantaged."
"Furthermore, when using policy constraints alone, lack of context-specificity in defining who is vulnerable prevents a generalized policy from being helpful in a specific setting."

Key Insights Distilled From

Equitably allocating wildfire resilience investments for power grids: The curse of aggregation and vulnerability indices

by Madeleine Po... at arxiv.org 04-19-2024

https://arxiv.org/pdf/2404.11520.pdf

Deeper Inquiries

How can vulnerability indices be designed to better capture the unique challenges faced by small but highly disadvantaged minority populations, such as indigenous communities?

Vulnerability indices can be enhanced to better address the specific needs and challenges of small but highly disadvantaged minority populations, like indigenous communities, by incorporating the following strategies:

Fine-grained Data Collection: Collecting more detailed and localized data on factors that contribute to vulnerability within these communities, such as historical injustices, cultural factors, and access to resources, can provide a more accurate representation of their unique challenges.

Contextualized Indicators: Tailoring vulnerability indicators to reflect the specific vulnerabilities faced by indigenous communities, such as traditional land use practices, reliance on natural resources, and cultural heritage, can ensure that the indices capture their distinct challenges.

Community Engagement: Involving indigenous communities in the design and implementation of vulnerability indices can help ensure that the metrics used are culturally sensitive, relevant, and meaningful to the communities being assessed.

Intersectional Approach: Recognizing that vulnerability is often intersectional, incorporating multiple dimensions such as race, ethnicity, gender, age, and disability status can provide a more comprehensive understanding of the challenges faced by indigenous populations.

Weighted Criteria: Assigning different weights to various indicators based on their significance to indigenous communities can prioritize factors that have a greater impact on their vulnerability, ensuring that the indices accurately reflect their unique circumstances.

By implementing these strategies, vulnerability indices can be tailored to better capture the nuanced challenges faced by small but highly disadvantaged minority populations, ultimately leading to more effective and equitable resource allocation strategies.

How can the insights from this study on power grid resilience investments be applied to other domains of climate adaptation and mitigation to ensure equitable outcomes for marginalized groups?

The insights from the study on power grid resilience investments can be extrapolated and applied to other domains of climate adaptation and mitigation to promote equitable outcomes for marginalized groups through the following approaches:

Customized Vulnerability Assessments: Conducting tailored vulnerability assessments in different sectors, such as water resource management, agriculture, and urban planning, to identify the specific challenges faced by marginalized groups and develop targeted adaptation strategies.

Equitable Resource Allocation: Implementing policies and initiatives, similar to the Justice40 initiative, that prioritize the allocation of resources to vulnerable communities across various climate adaptation projects to ensure that marginalized groups receive adequate support.

Community-Centered Approaches: Engaging with marginalized communities in the decision-making process, incorporating their perspectives and traditional knowledge, and co-designing climate adaptation strategies to address their unique needs and priorities.

Intersectional Analysis: Considering the intersecting vulnerabilities of marginalized groups, including factors like socioeconomic status, race, gender, and geographic location, to develop holistic climate adaptation and mitigation plans that address multiple dimensions of vulnerability.

Capacity Building: Investing in capacity-building programs and initiatives within marginalized communities to enhance their resilience to climate change impacts, empower local leadership, and foster self-reliance in adaptation efforts.

By applying these insights across various domains of climate adaptation and mitigation, policymakers, researchers, and practitioners can work towards ensuring that marginalized groups are not disproportionately burdened by the impacts of climate change and that equity is at the forefront of all adaptation and mitigation efforts.