{"id":228447,"date":"2025-10-30T07:00:08","date_gmt":"2025-10-30T11:00:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/?p=228447"},"modified":"2025-10-28T14:01:21","modified_gmt":"2025-10-28T18:01:21","slug":"diego-cerrai-wins-nsf-career-award-for-advancements-in-power-outage-restoration-modeling","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/2025\/10\/diego-cerrai-wins-nsf-career-award-for-advancements-in-power-outage-restoration-modeling\/","title":{"rendered":"Diego Cerrai Wins NSF CAREER Award for Advancements in Power Outage, Restoration Modeling"},"content":{"rendered":"

Diego Cerrai, assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering and interim director of the Eversource Energy Center (EEC), has received a National Science Foundation (NSF) Faculty Early Career Development Program grant (CAREER) Award.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

This award will support Cerrai\u2019s research aimed at deepening our understanding of snow and ice accretion on infrastructure. This understanding, in turn, enables the development of models capable of forecasting its occurrence, and accurately predicting power outages and their restoration during winter storms <\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Over the past four years, Cerrai has been collaborating with NASA to gather data on winter precipitation. Specifically, measuring the amount and density of falling snow and the number of particles of rain or snow present in a given volume.\u00a0<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

At the same time, Cerrai\u2019s research team was running simulations using weather and storm impact models, looking at where they diverged from these observations. That\u2019s where challenges started to emerge \u2013 existing observations only include measurements of density of snow on the ground, not of falling snow. But snow on the ground gets compacted over time, meaning measurements right after a storm can be very different from later measurements. <\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cThe first step is to fix those inconsistencies and biases and make sure that the quantities that the weather model predict match the observation we collect,\u201d Cerrai says.\u00a0<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

After improving the characterization of snow density in weather models, through this CAREER Award, Cerrai will use this more refined information to model snow and ice accretion on power infrastructure.\u00a0<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cThe goal here is to predict snow and ice accretion on power lines, because those are very correlated to power outages,\u201d Cerrai says.\u00a0 <\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\"A
Diego Cerrai (Contributed photo)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

This will, in turn, enable the development of a more accurate outage prediction model.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cThe UConn Outage Prediction Model (OPM) still exhibits significant errors in advance of some specific winter storms,\u201d Cerrai says. \u201cThis may hinder proper preparation from utility companies. An under allocation of crews and resources may result in delays in power outage restoration.\u201d<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Eversource Energy, Dominion Energy, Avangrid, and Exelon have already used the UConn OPM.\u00a0<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Cerrai says the CAREER Award will help him improve the accuracy of the model and expand its application to more utility companies.\u00a0<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

In tandem with improving the accuracy of the OPM, Cerrai has been developing a restoration model. This model will use data on snow density and other precipitation measurements alongside OPM forecasts and restoration priorities dictated by the power companies to estimate the time to power outage restoration.\u00a0<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

One of the key challenges restoration models face currently is that they do not account for road conditions, which have a big impact on how quickly crews can move. <\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cRight now, we use the speed limit to predict how fast the crews move,\u201d Cerrai says. \u201cBut in winter, you can have blocked roads, and you can have snow on the roads. So, for accurate forecasts it is absolutely necessary to model the road conditions.\u201d\u00a0<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

One goal of the model is to reduce disparities between how long customers in rural areas versus towns wait for their power to be restored.\u00a0<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cWe will look at if we can change or suggest new prioritization strategies to make sure that customers in towns and customers in rural areas will not experience big differences in restoration,\u201d Cerrai says.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Another segment of this grant will enable the development of a course where Cerrai will train decision-makers and utility company employees on how to use storm impact and restoration models.\u00a0<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cI will teach this course to make sure these new tools will be passed to the utilities, and to make sure they will have the most recent information in terms of technology that is available out there,\u201d Cerrai says.\u00a0<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Diego Cerrai’s models help utility companies predict power outages during winter storms and restore power more efficiently. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":147,"featured_media":228448,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_crdt_document":"","wds_primary_category":0,"wds_primary_series":0,"wds_primary_attribution":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1866,2076],"tags":[],"magazine-issues":[],"coauthors":[2277],"class_list":["post-228447","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-engr","category-research"],"pp_statuses_selecting_workflow":false,"pp_workflow_action":"current","pp_status_selection":"publish","acf":[],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-05-08 17:56:09","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/228447","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/users\/147"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=228447"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/228447\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":234741,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/228447\/revisions\/234741"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/media\/228448"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=228447"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=228447"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=228447"},{"taxonomy":"magazine-issue","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/magazine-issues?post=228447"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=228447"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}