Transforming transitions: The energy futures of community-driven design
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Trueworthy, Ali (ORCID:0000000254017460)↗
Engineering topics
DuPont, Bryony
Publications and source records attributed to DuPont, Bryony.
Who will be making wave energy? A community-driven design approach toward just and sustainable energy futures in Alaska
Renewable energy transition, once thought of as a singular, large-scale switch in industrial energy generating technologies from fossil fuels to renewables, have gained a broader set of requirements, including the need for justice and environmental protection. While discourse around policy and process has grown to consider these requirements, the focus of design of new renewable energy projects and technologies remains dominantly fixed on maximizing energy production, and renewables are falling short of meeting the requirements of just energy transitions. Meanwhile, in design studies, participatory and co-design approaches which explicitly consider justice in both process and outcomes have long been theorized and applied. However, applications of these approaches to renewable energy project design are under-theorized. In this paper, we explore the effectiveness of the adoption and adaptation of a co-design approach called Community-Driven Design (CDD) in enabling meaningful participation prior to technological maturity and bringing the attention of designers to a more diverse set of energy futures focused on justice and sustainability. Here, we do so by developing and testing the approach with community members in Sitka, AK, USA. We conclude that the approach has the potential to increase meaningful participation. Furthermore, we conclude that through diverse understandings of energy and the emergence of design narratives that engage with the complexity of vulnerability, accountability, and resilience, CDD led designers to consider justice, sustainability, and a diverse set of possible energy futures both within and beyond Sitka.
16 TIDAL AND WAVE POWER↗
Understanding the Uncertainty in the Technical Performance Level Assessment for Wave Energy
In recent years, the design and development of wave energy converters (WECs) has been explored with intense interest, with highly varying design concepts emerging globally across both research enterprises and industry. The design space for WECs is vast - many concepts ranging in functionality, control systems, power development systems, materials, and scale have been ideated and prototyped, but WEC technology has yet to converge. One critical element of the technology trajectory that governs the speed of adoption is the performance of a WEC concept. In analogous but more-established industries (such as aerospace, and environmentally sustainable electronics design), performance assessment is a quantitative method, based on historical data, that is used as an iterative tool to improve the design of these systems early on in the design process. Though more nascent than these approaches, in wave energy R&D, WEC performance has been assessed using the Technology Performance Level (TPL) assessment, which provides designers with a quantitative score, situating a grid-scale WEC concept on a scale from 1-9 (1 being the lowest performance, and 9 being the highest, trending with the oft-used Technology Readiness Level, or TRL). The TPL assessment is designed to be used during design iteration, when a WEC concept is fully ideated, to enable designers to consider potential means of improving the downstream performance of the concept. One concern that may be slowing the adoption of TPL among WEC developers is the inherent uncertainty in the assessment, and how uncertainty in the individual questions asked as part of the assessment may contribute to perceived inaccuracies in the final score. In this work, we explore the uncertainty present in the assessment and quantify this uncertainty using both traditional mathematical operations and a Monte Carlo simulation. Results imply areas of improvement of the TPL assessment, where reducing uncertainty will be most helpful to end users, enabling both TPL practitioners and users to understand with more accuracy those design elements that can be improved to impact device performance most substantively.
techno-economic analysis↗
Reliability‐based layout optimization in offshore wind energy systems
Abstract Existing methods for optimizing wind array layouts typically use power or cost objectives and rarely consider reliability‐based objectives. Component and system failure rates, however, are dependent on location‐specific wind conditions, are influenced by array layout and wake interactions, and have a direct and significant impact on capital costs, operational costs, and power production. Although wind power plant models exist that calculate wind loads with sufficient resolution to capture component loading dynamics from wind conditions, they are computationally expensive and thus not suitable for research applications requiring many evaluations, particularly optimization. This study describes the development of computationally efficient, reliability‐based layout optimization methods, enabling us to explore the relationship between component reliability and layout optimization. These methods include the surrogate modeling of the planet bearing life based on varying wind conditions simulated in FAST.Farm and the formulation of reliability‐based objectives based on failure cost and power production models. Through demonstration of this method, we explore how wind conditions, objective functions, and capacity density influence reliability‐based layout optimization. Results indicate that considering reliability alongside power production can reduce failure costs associated with replacement costs and downtime while maintaining or improving power production. Our conclusions highlight the opportunity for wind power plant developers to integrate reliability and operational expenditures alongside performance and capital expenditure objectives in plant design and development to improve plant performance and costs.
17 WIND ENERGY↗
The Wave Energy Converter Design Process: Methods Applied in Industry and Shortcomings of Current Practices
Wave energy is among the many renewable energy technologies being researched and developed to address the increasing demand for low-emissions energy. The unique design challenges for wave energy converter design—integrating complex and uncertain technological, economic, and ecological systems, overcoming the structural challenges of ocean deployment, and dealing with complex system dynamics—have lead to a disjointed progression of research and development. There is no common design practice across the wave energy industry and there is no published synthesis of the practices that are used by developers. In this paper, we summarize the methods being employed in WEC design as well as promising methods that have yet to be applied. We contextualize these methods within an overarching design process. We present results from a survey of WEC developers to identify methods that are common in industry. From the review and survey results, we conclude that the most common methods of WEC design are iterative methods in which design parameters are defined, evaluated, and then changed based on evaluation results. This leaves a significant space for improvement of methods that help designers make better-informed decisions prior to sophisticated evaluation, and methods of using the evaluation results to make better design decisions during iteration. Despite the popularity of optimization methods in academic research, they are less common in industry development. We end this paper with a summary of the areas of WEC design in which the testing and development of new methods is necessary, and where more research is required to fully understand the influence of design decisions on WEC performance.
16 TIDAL AND WAVE POWER↗