Contextualization of Rural Microgrid Design for Improved Sustainability

NSF的这个项目旨在识别和应用社会背景的技术设计过程中，农村，偏远的微电网和能源系统的设计。该项目将为微电网设计实践带来变革性变化，并通过将人和地点的非技术数据与场地和资源的技术数据融合，创造出更可持续和更可采用的技术输出，从而实现工程设计的范式转变。这将通过制定一个强有力的决策框架来实现，该框架将设计参数与社会的独特身份、价值观、能力和局限性之间的关系量化。该项目的智力价值包括一种跨学科的方法，为既定的技术设计提供民族志数据收集方法，确定一个社会的特定背景，管理该设计。该项目更广泛的影响包括通过展示社会和物理技术条件如何在互动考虑时改善基础设施的功能和可持续性，从而更全面地了解工程设计过程。这对于确保设计的能源系统是适当的，持久的，并可由目标用户群体操作，为生活在电网边缘以外的社区提供公平的能源接入至关重要。 该项目将开发的上下文知情设计框架使用观测技术来支持设计农村社区微电网的优化和基于分析的方法。初步应用开发的框架将在一个试点项目，设计可再生能源系统在美国农村土著社区。从试点项目中吸取的经验教训将用于微调概念化框架。最终确定的概念框架预计将是一个系统的和描述性的过程，指导技术设计人员认识到社会背景的数学设计公式和决策的重要性。认识到从业者的决策是由他们的社会经验指导，将有助于设计师解决不熟悉的社会背景下的技术决策，导致在农村偏远的能源基础设施的设计，针对用户的背景，而不是设计师的经验。这一认可将使系统设计更好地与技术现场条件和人的能力、限制和社区的期望保持一致。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。

This NSF project aims to identify and apply societal context to the technical design process for rural, remote microgrid and energy system design. The project will bring transformative change to the practice of microgrid design, as well as a paradigm shift to engineering design in general, by fusing non-technical data of people and place with technical data of site and resources to create a more sustainable and adoptable technical output. This will be achieved by developing a robust decision-making framework that quantifies the relationship between design parameters and a society’s unique identity, values, capabilities, and limitations. The intellectual merits of the project include an interdisciplinary approach that informs established technical design with ethnographic data collection methods that identify a society’s particular context governing that design. The broader impacts of the project include creating a more holistic understanding of the engineering design process by demonstrating how social and physical-technical conditions, when considered interactively, improve infrastructure functionality and sustainability. This is crucial to ensure that designed energy systems are appropriate, enduring, and operable by the intended user population to provide equitable energy access to communities that live beyond the grid edge. The contextually informed design framework that this project will develop uses observational techniques to support optimization and analysis-based methods of designing rural-community microgrids. Preliminary application of the developed framework will be in a pilot project to design renewable energy systems in a US rural indigenous community. Lessons learned from the pilot project will be used to fine-tune the conceptualized framework. The finalized conceptual framework is expected to be a systematic and descriptive process that guides the technical designer to recognize the significance of societal context in mathematical design formulations and decision making. Recognition that practitioner decision-making is guided by their societal experience will assist designers to address unfamiliar societal contexts in technical decision-making, resulting in a design that targets user context rather than designer experience in rural remote energy infrastructure. This acknowledgment will better align system design to both the technical site conditions and the human capabilities, constraints, and expectations of the communities for which it is being built.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.