Contextualization of Rural Microgrid Design for Improved Sustainability

这个NSF项目旨在确定并将社会背景应用于农村、偏远微电网和能源系统设计的技术设计过程。该项目将通过将人员和地点的非技术数据与场地和资源的技术数据融合在一起，创造更可持续和可采用的技术输出，为微电网设计实践带来革命性的变化，并为总体工程设计带来范式转变。这将通过开发一个强大的决策框架来实现，该框架可以量化设计参数与社会独特身份、价值观、能力和限制之间的关系。该项目的智力价值包括跨学科的方法，通过民族志数据收集方法，确定控制该设计的社会特定背景，为已建立的技术设计提供信息。该项目的更广泛影响包括通过展示社会和物理技术条件如何在相互考虑时改善基础设施功能和可持续性，从而更全面地了解工程设计过程。这对于确保所设计的能源系统是适当的、持久的、可被预期用户群体操作的，从而为生活在电网边缘之外的社区提供公平的能源接入至关重要。本项目将开发的基于环境的设计框架使用观察技术来支持优化和基于分析的农村社区微电网设计方法。开发的框架的初步应用将在一个在美国农村土著社区设计可再生能源系统的试点项目中。从试点项目中吸取的经验教训将用于对概念化框架进行微调。最终的概念框架预计将是一个系统和描述性的过程，指导技术设计师认识到社会背景在数学设计公式和决策中的重要性。认识到从业者的决策是由他们的社会经验指导的，这将有助于设计师在技术决策中解决不熟悉的社会背景，从而使设计以用户背景为目标，而不是以农村偏远能源基础设施的设计师经验为目标。这种确认将更好地使系统设计与技术站点条件、人类能力、约束和社区的期望保持一致。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，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.