Open-Source Renewables: Coupling Resilience to Natural Disasters with Environmental Justice

在一个地震、热浪、野火和日益不可靠的电网是不可避免的现实的地区，复原力中心为整个社区带来了好处。通过一个创新的以社区为基础的非营利组织的伙伴关系，致力于将可再生能源的覆盖范围扩大到低收入家庭和领先的科学和工程学院，我们建议进行公民参与，合作研究，成本分析和精心规划，产生一个具有重大社区影响的项目，准备在来年部署。大多数弹性中心都是由外部专家以自上而下的方式建立的，他们决定这些中心的位置，他们将提供的服务以及他们将如何运营。项目团队认为，如果他们能够在项目规划的核心位置，充分利用这些网站旨在满足其需求的人的专业知识、人才和潜力，他们就可以建立一个更好的弹性中心。项目团队建议利用社区参与来评估哪些服务被认为是必不可少的，中心可以最佳选址的地方，以及在发生自然灾害或停电时它们实际上将如何运作。在没有危机的情况下，该项目也积极利用弹性中心的清洁发电，以支持整个社区的可再生能源负担能力。该项目利用可再生能源创建弹性中心，无论威胁是否成为危机，这些中心都能在经济上自我维持。该项目将一个社区非营利组织与当地高等教育联盟配对，以提供一系列模型，这些模型（a）考虑CA可再生/传统资源和交付/存储复杂的能源使用和成本，（B）可在需求，使用模式和社区身份之间进行调整，（c）可公开用于改进，以服务于其他地理，市场和社区身份条件。反过来，这些模型产生了最大化可再生能源弹性枢纽社区支持的策略：当电网正常运行时，枢纽产生的电力用于向可再生能源倾斜能源成本效益。这种可再生能源的转变特别支持我们多样化社区中收入最低的成员：那些最难获得可再生能源的人。在危机中，恢复力中心可以立即孤立成一个运作的权力基础，进一步应对危机。这种积极的反馈循环可能是该项目最重要的部分：通过危机准备来推进社区机构和凝聚力。 无论未来是否需要孤岛化，这个项目都不会是一个孤岛。它的社区驱动弹性能源的模型和模板将是可用的和可调的，以在我们国家广泛变化的社区中找到和部署类似的正反馈循环。该项目得到了CIVIC创新挑战项目轨道B -自然灾害恢复能力：通过NSF和国土安全部之间的合作，为社区提供更好的备灾能力和自然灾害恢复能力的支持。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

In a region where earthquakes, heat waves, wildfires and an increasingly unreliable grid are an inescapable reality, resilience hubs bring community-wide benefit. Through the partnership of an innovative community-based non-profit dedicated to extending the reach of renewable energy to low-income households and a leading college of science and engineering, we propose to undertake civic engagement, collaborative research, cost analysis and meticulous planning, yielding a project with significant community impact, ready to deploy in the coming year. Most resilience hubs are built in a top-down-fashion by outside experts who determine where these centers will be sited, the services they will offer, and how they will be operated. The project team believes that they can build a better resilience hub if they situate the know-how, talent and potential of those whose needs these sites are intended to address at the center of the project planning. The project team proposes to use community engagement to assess just which services are deemed essential, where the centers can optimally be sited, and how they will in fact be operated in the event of a natural disaster or power shutoff. Absent a crisis, too, this project proactively leverages resilience hubs' clean-power generation to support renewable energy affordability across the community.This project leverages renewable-energy to create resilience hubs that are economically self-sustaining whether or not threats become crises. The project will pair a community non-profit with a local higher-ed consortium to deliver a family of models that (a) account for energy-use-and-cost across CA's complex of renewable/traditional sources and delivery/storage, (b) are tunable across needs, use-patterns, and community identities, and (c) are publicly available for refinement to serve other geographic, market, and community-identity conditions. The models, in turn, yield strategies to maximize renewable-power resilience hubs' community support: when the grid is operating normally, hubs generate power used to tilt energy-cost-effectiveness toward renewables. This renewable-energy-shift specifically supports the lowest-income members of our diverse community: those for whom renewable energy is least accessible. In a crisis, resilience hubs can be immediately islanded into an operating power-base from which further crisis-response proceeds. This positive feedback loop is perhaps the project's most important piece: advancing community agency and cohesion via crisis-readiness. Whether or not the future makes islanding necessary, this project will not be an island. Its models and template for community-driven resilient energy will be available and tunable, to find and deploy analogous positive-feedback loops across our nation's widely-varying communities. This project is supported by the CIVIC Innovation Challenge program Track B - Resilience to Natural Disasters: Equipping Communities for Greater Preparedness and Resilience to Natural Disasters through a collaboration between NSF and the Department of Homeland Security.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.