Finding
The model selects three upgrades and reserves $7.716 million of a $20 million envelope. Its worst specified social NPV is $0.827 million, compared with −$8.539 million for the comparison plans. An additional stress outside the original scenario set produces −$6.316 million.
Why it matters
The case makes the cost of different allocation rules visible. It supports questions for engineering and investment review, with no guarantee that the chosen scenarios cover future conditions.
Who could use this
An investment committee balancing outage-related social value, crew capacity and critical-service commitments.
Data and scope
EIA 2023/2024 state reliability benchmarks for ten selected states, combined with fictional districts, projects and investment assumptions.
How the analysis works
An exact finite-scenario optimizer evaluates 59,049 allocations under budget, crew and service constraints. Equal-weight optimization, a greedy baseline, an independent dynamic-programming check and coverage sensitivity challenge the choice.
Limits of the evidence
Project costs, effectiveness and outage valuation are hypothetical. The objective is social value, not utility cash profit. State averages are not feeder forecasts, and robustness applies only to the specified uncertainty set.