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On the Nationwide Renewable Power Laboratory (NREL), researchers usually function guides who assist communities navigate the world of renewable vitality options. However in community-based technical help initiatives, the guiding function goes each methods: Researchers want native views to fill contextual data gaps and create extra significant vitality options.
“Energy problems are people problems. We prioritize the interests of people and develop tools to serve them,” mentioned Katy Waechter, an NREL researcher whose people-focused lens helped her group make important changes throughout an vitality resilience challenge for the island of Oahu in Hawaii.
Over the course of six weeks, Waechter—together with representatives from the Hawaiian Electrical utility and Hawaii Pure Power Institute, affiliated with the College of Hawaii—traveled the 600-square-mile island to listen to how people perceived independently owned hybrid microgrids. No quantity of preliminary analysis might put together the group for what they found: candid considerations, contemporary views, and beforehand uncharted priorities that finally pivoted the group’s analysis course to raised inform Oahu-wide vitality planning.
Oahu was among the many first 11 communities in the USA to hitch the U.S. Division of Power’s Power Transitions Initiative Partnership Challenge (ETIPP), a technical help program for community-driven vitality resilience initiatives that mixes the native data of regional organizations with the experience of nationwide laboratory researchers. Every ETIPP challenge is formed by a neighborhood’s priorities and nuances, together with components akin to vitality assets, cultural heritage, socioeconomic elements, and resilience targets. The technical help in Oahu illustrated how when researchers observe residents’ leads as a substitute of taking customary approaches, they can assist facilitate vitality planning that can greatest serve native wants within the long-term.
Exploring Hybrid Microgrids as a Resolution to Oahu’s Energy Outages
Dwelling in an remoted neighborhood with restricted electrical infrastructure, some Oahu residents wait weeks for energy to be restored after extreme climate occasions. The native utility, Hawaiian Electrical utilized to ETIPP with a imaginative and prescient to convey hybrid microgrids to the island to assist alleviate lengthy outages.
Hawaiian Electrical hoped microgrid siting discussions would inform the Oahu-wide vitality planning dialog about reaching 100% renewable vitality by 2045—particularly, easy methods to equitably distribute the advantages and burdens related to the transition.
“Making sure that a renewable energy transition is done in an equitable manner is something that a lot of utilities and partners are acknowledging that needs to be done, and ETIPP is designed in a way to encourage that cocreation process with the community,” mentioned Kurt Tsue, Hawaiian Electrical’s director of neighborhood affairs, who collaborated on the ETIPP challenge.
With the assist of ETIPP researchers at NREL and Sandia Nationwide Laboratories, Hawaiian Electrical deliberate to judge optimum hybrid microgrid places to enhance the resilience of Oahu’s electrical infrastructure. Not like conventional microgrids, that are put in and operated by utilities, hybrid microgrids in Hawaii are developed and operated independently, which suggests residents should provoke the request to develop them. However hybrid microgrids are a brand new service in Oahu, so many residents will not be but conscious they’re an possibility. The ETIPP group supposed to “help communities learn about hybrid microgrids, how they work, and decide if it’s a solution for them,” Waechter mentioned.
“We were purely working towards designing something with the community and not coming in with any preconceived notions of wanting to build something,” Tsue mentioned.
Nevertheless, in one of many first conferences the ETIPP analysis group held with a gaggle of Oahu residents to debate microgrid choices, they found many residents’ questions wanted to be addressed earlier than they might talk about potential hybrid microgrid places or members.
“It became apparent pretty immediately that the concerns of the communities weren’t necessarily being addressed with what we were trying to talk to them about,” Waechter mentioned. “So, we needed to pivot the dialog to deal with how hybrid microgrids may gain advantage and deal with their considerations about vitality reliability and safety.
Neighborhood members additionally talked about a want to see extra numerous illustration of the 5 completely different Oahu moku (districts)—ʻEwa, Oʻahu, Koʻolauloa, Koʻolaopoko, and Waiʻanae—in island-wide vitality planning conversations.
“We have our highest native Hawaiian population on the western side, which has been experiencing more of the renewable transition because the resource potential and land availability is much greater there,” Tsue mentioned. “People in the west ask why everything has to be sited there. They feel that [the renewable energy transition] is being carried on their back.”
Yielding the Ground: Listening to What Issues Most to Residents Throughout Oahu
NREL researchers labored with Hawaiian Electrical in addition to Hawaii Pure Power Institute and the Hawaii Emergency Administration Company to create a neighborhood engagement technique that addressed these considerations. The ETIPP group hosted 5 conferences, one for every of the areas in Oahu, to allow larger participation. Reside broadcasts of the conferences included suggestions choices by way of Zoom and social media channels. The group additionally posted recordings of the conferences to Hawaiian Electrical’s web site, giving residents the prospect to submit feedback on their very own time.
Although the analysis group knew what forms of amenities would sometimes be prioritized for inclusion in microgrid protection—like hospitals and emergency providers—they as a substitute requested every regional neighborhood to determine what they felt had been the precedence buildings and providers.
“That was my favorite part: learning about the places that matter to these communities,” Waechter mentioned. “That knowledge changed what we mapped and changed what these hybrid microgrid opportunities could potentially cover.”
A number of the precedence places included veteran facilities, business kitchens, sewer pumps, and a distant dam that serves as a neighborhood rallying level throughout main climate occasions like tsunamis and hurricanes. Tsue mentioned it was “extremely valuable” to doc suggestions from neighborhood members about locations that had been vital to them.
“Asking about things like resilience hubs or gathering places that are meaningful for communities—those we didn’t have any previous insight on,” Tsue mentioned.
To handle logistical challenges to participation, seize a wider viewers, and share assets, ETIPP researchers mixed their hybrid microgrid info periods with Hawaiian Electrical’s built-in grid planning conferences and different neighborhood group conferences.
“Pairing these microgrid discussions with some of the other renewable energy planning that we were already doing made it even more valuable. It led to really meaningful community discussions,” Tsue mentioned.
All the neighborhood enter knowledgeable the information assortment course of that ETIPP researchers used to construct a map sequence exhibiting various kinds of hybrid microgrid alternatives in every neighborhood, in addition to island-wide. Whether or not a hybrid microgrid was thought of appropriate for a given space was based mostly on present electrical energy distribution and neighborhood wants and whether or not it might present improved assist for important providers and lifelines, improved service reliability for susceptible grid infrastructure, and equitable entry to microgrid providers.
Hawaiian Electrical plans to make use of these supplies to conduct additional neighborhood outreach and lengthen its microgrid evaluation to the opposite Hawaiian islands in its service territory.
One of many neighborhood leaders who participated in Hawaiian Electrical’s ETIPP challenge was impressed to use to ETIPP the next 12 months to obtain assist for a particular resilience hub. Hui o Hau’ula, a neighborhood group on the east coast of Oahu, was accepted to ETIPP in 2022 and is coordinating the planning and improvement of a neighborhood resilience hub, which is able to generate and retailer energy earlier than, throughout, and after a catastrophe or energy outage for the encompassing Koʻolauloa district.
“ETIPP is a really unique opportunity to empower communities to make decisions for themselves,” Tsue mentioned.
Waechter agreed.
“The work is ultimately to serve communities by giving them a data-driven foundation to make decisions,” she mentioned. “Everything comes down to what people value. The different types of analysis that we do to help people answer questions about their own energy autonomy—it’s really heartening to get to do that.”
ETIPP is managed by NREL and funded and supported by the U.S. Division of Power’s Workplace of Power Effectivity and Renewable Power.
EL and funded and supported by the U.S. Division of Power’s Workplace of Power Effectivity and Renewable Power
By Brooke Van Zandt | Courtesy of NREL.
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