Approach

Through PNNL Laboratory Directed Research and Development funding, FORESIGHT was developed to address the growing need for reliability amid evolving and compounding uncertainties in energy infrastructure planning. By incorporating probabilistic assessments of variability and modeling the impacts on both bulk and distribution systems, FORESIGHT supports the development of reliable and financially responsible energy infrastructure.

To guide long-term infrastructure planning, FORESIGHT explicitly represents interdependencies across systems and stakeholders, enabling integrated planning under compound uncertainties. It further supports coordinated, financially feasible investment strategies that manage multi-actor and multi-system risks, ensuring efficient, strategic expansion of the grid.

The FORESIGHT initiative is structured around three pillars to enable actionable planning and investment.

Core Capabilities

• Artificial intelligence–based weather and hydrology extreme-event emulators for probabilistic near-term planning
• Weather-to-grid deterministic and probabilistic impact models
• Innovative dissemination tool and access to libraries of extreme events and associated power-system-ready datasets 
• Advanced algorithms for cross-system planning under compound risk
• Artificial intelligence–based modeling of interacting investor decisions under uncertainty to realize future infrastructure portfolios.