Where should $8 million in resilience go?
Last July, a heat wave followed by a line of storms knocked out power across the service area. Three census tracts were among the hardest hit. You're the utility's resilience planning team. You have $8 million for next summer, and every option helps someone.
How we'll work
- One room. Raise a hand or call out an answer.
- Three or four volunteers will come up and each spend the $8 million.
- We reveal each plan's effects one at a time, then add new information.
- There's no single right answer. Good answers name a tradeoff and who bears it.
The utility and tracts are fictional. Variables and tier thresholds come from Schlegelmilch et al. (2025).
Risk multiplies, so where you add capacity matters
Risk = (hazard × exposure × vulnerability) ÷ capacity to cope. Set two places, then see what one more point of capacity buys in each.
Start from
The first preset is loosely inspired by San Simeon and Bam. It's illustrative, not a model of either.
One more point of capacity
A teaching model for building intuition. The scores are not measurements.
How the variables connect
Move a lever
Or click any variable on the map.
What moves
Pick a lever to trace its effects through the map.
Meet the tracts
Volunteers spend the $8 million
Reveal the plans
New information arrives
Opens the Plans screen. Unlock a plan to edit it, lock it again, then re-reveal it. The water pump option is there now.
Debrief
- What did the scorecard make visible that the reliability data didn't?
- What did it miss, or get wrong, until someone told you?
- Who would need to be in the room to make this decision well?
Carry to Friday: which of these questions would you ask about Puerto Rico’s grid after Maria?