Contextualization of Rural Microgrid Design for Improved Sustainability

University Of Illinois At Urbana-Champaign, Urbana IL

Investigators

Abstract

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.