SCC-Planning: Community Energy: Technical and Social Challenges and Integrative Solutions

社区能源的概念涉及在社区层面整合小规模太阳能发电、需求管理和能源储存，为个人和社区创造经济、环境和社会价值，同时提高电网的可靠性和弹性。虽然这个概念具有巨大的潜在好处，但它提出了一些必须解决的概念问题，以实现其潜力。这些包括：(1)在社区背景下如何感知和重视经济和行为激励，以及这些激励是否与个人能源用户的感知和价值观不同；(2)居民和其他利益相关者将如何看待这样的项目，哪些因素影响他们的接受和参与；(3)如何对高粒度数据进行分析、可视化和沟通，以鼓励接受并促进社区能源计划的参与。为了解决这些问题，该规划项目将德克萨斯州奥斯汀穆勒社区的居民和利益相关者聚集在一起，创造知识和工具，以制定社区能源计划，该计划将成为美国其他社区的典范。规划和开发这样一个项目将在每个阶段吸引居民和利益相关者，以最大限度地提高成功的可能性。研究结果将在学术、政策和从业者渠道上发表，数据分析和可视化工具将免费分发给研究人员、政策制定者和从业者。该规划项目将支持和培训雪城大学的研究生，在活跃的研究环境中整合社会科学和数据科学的研究方法。目前迫切需要提高电网的可靠性和弹性，并整合屋顶太阳能、电池存储和电动汽车等新技术。这些技术可能会对老化的电网造成压力，而电网的设计并不是为了处理这些技术，但如果管理得当，实际上可以为电网提供有价值的资源，如需求响应和负载转移。如果在社区一级加起来，这些好处会更大。然而，这需要获得社区成员的理解和参与，并开发工具来分析、可视化和与各种利益相关者交流大型异构数据集。这个多学科的综合项目通过以下方式解决了这些问题：(1)确定并吸引关键的社区利益相关者；(2)举办社区研讨会并对穆勒社区的社区成员进行调查；(3)与目标利益相关者和社区成员协商，开发数据分析、可视化和通信工具，整合电力使用、天气和位置因素的数据。(4)制定在穆勒社区实施社区能源计划的完整提案。该项目与奥斯汀的Pecan Street Institute合作，该研究所收集了穆勒社区300多户家庭的详细家庭用电数据，并与居民、当地政府、开发商和当地商业社区建立了良好的关系。

The concept of Community Energy involves integrating small-scale solar power, demand management and energy storage at the community level to create economic, environmental and social value for individuals and communities while improving the reliability and resilience of the electric grid. While this concept has great potential benefits, it raises a number of conceptual issues that must be addressed to realize its potential. These include: (1) How economic and behavioral incentives are perceived and valued in a community context and whether these differ from the perceptions and values of individual energy users; (2) How residents and other stakeholders will perceive such a project and what factors affect their acceptance and participation; (3) How highly granular data can be analyzed, visualized, and communicated to encourage acceptance and facilitate participation in a Community Energy program. To address these issues, this planning project brings together residents and stakeholders in the Mueller community of Austin, Texas, to create knowledge and tools to develop a Community Energy program that will serve as a model for other communities across the U.S. Planning and developing such a project will engage residents and stakeholders at each stage to maximize the probability of success. The results of the research will be published in academic, policy and practitioner outlets, and the data analysis and visualization tools will be distributed freely to researchers, policymakers and practitioners. The planning project will support and train graduate students at Syracuse University in research methods that integrate social science and data science in an active research setting.There is an urgent need to improve the reliability and resilience of the electric grid and to integrate new technologies such as rooftop solar, battery storage and electric vehicles. These technologies can strain an aging grid that was not designed to handle them, but if managed properly can actually provide valuable resources to the grid such as demand response and load shifting. These benefits are greater if aggregated at the community level. However, this requires gaining the understanding and participation of community members and developing tools to analyze, visualize and communicate large, heterogeneous datasets to a variety of stakeholders. This multidisciplinary, integrative project addresses these issues through (1) identifying and engaging key community stakeholders, (2) conducting community workshops and implementing a survey of community members in the Mueller neighborhood (3) developing data analytics, visualization and communication tools that integrate data on electricity use, weather, and location factors, in consultation with targeted stakeholders and community members, and (4) developing a full proposal to implement the Community Energy program in the Mueller community. The project involves collaboration with the Pecan Street Institute in Austin, which collects detailed household electricity data on over 300 homes in the Mueller neighborhood and has well-established relationships with residents, local government, developers and the local business community.