Speaker: Amanda Wachtel
Description: Sandia National Laboratories is offering a workshop on community resilience planning and its publicly available Resilient Node Cluster Analysis Tool (ReNCAT). It will address what makes a community resilient, how to incorporate the risks associated with different types of threats, and common goals communities have when making decisions around resilience investments. Training will also be provided on the lab’s Social Burden Metric, a novel way to identify and quantitatively measure equities or disparities in resource access across different study areas. The Social Burden Metric can be used alone or in conjunction with ReNCAT to make equity-driven decisions regarding siting critical infrastructure or selecting energy resilience technologies at least cost. Participants will walk through a case study that closely represents situations researchers have seen during extensive work with communities to get a better idea of how these studies take shape and the value of technical analysis in place-based projects.
Moving from the theoretical to the practical, workshop attendees will be trained on and use the ReNCAT software to develop a model of the community from the case study. They will run an optimization to understand potential locations for microgrids throughout the community that minimize both cost and the burden on residents to acquire critical services. The workshop will end with a deep dive into results from the model, what they mean, and how to talk through the tradeoffs of different resilient investment options with community stakeholders.
