Building Smart Communities to Advance Solar Energy in Rural America

This planning NSF S&CC project aims to investigate key technical, economic, social, and policy issues that influence the transition to a green and sustainable energy future for rural communities. The project is based on a hypothesis that policies, incentives and strategies that are community-focused rather than individual-focused will be more effective in advancing solar energy in rural America. The intellectual merits include convergent research to investigate social, technical, economic, and policy issues in an integrative manner to obtain detailed understanding of barriers to solar energy in rural communities and to explore strategies to advance solar energy in these communities using a smart and interconnected co-design framework. Broader impacts include enhancing the understanding of barriers to advancing solar energy in rural America and seeking solutions to overcome these barriers while explicitly placing social equity as key criteria in the models. Advancing solar energy in rural communities will not only contribute to the social goal of reducing dependence on fossil fuels and mitigating climate change, it adds economic values to the rural communities and provide economic opportunities to its citizens. By engaging the community of citizens of Greensburg and other rural communities in Kansas, and the community of rural energy service providers, the project will disseminate relevant information for advancing solar energy in rural America. The project will support students for research tasks. Efforts will be made to engage women students and students from under-represented groups in the project. The students' involvement will enable them to receive hands-on training in a range of interdisciplinary research techniques.

The research team will conduct appropriate surveys of the community of residents in Greensburg, Kansas and other rural communities in Kansas, and the community of rural municipalities and electricity service providers to delineate issues that influence the transition to a green and sustainable energy future for rural communities. Understanding these barriers will enable effective strategies to foster an environment that would be conducive to advancing solar PV in rural communities. This research will also develop the application of persuasion research in psychology to real-world problems and context in order to achieve positive social change. Innovative data analysis, engineering, and economics principles will be used to determine appropriate size and locations of the PV and storage for Greensburg. A key innovative aspect is co-design of planning and operational framework with engagement of city administrators, industry, community and other stakeholders. The project will use a holistic approach to find solutions for optimal deployment of solar energy and management of distributed energy resources. Economic solutions will integrate impacts on social and economic equity for rural areas in the transition to a green energy future. Given that solar energy penetration in rural communities is at a nascent stage, the proposed co-design framework could serve as a shining example for other communities aspiring to transition towards a sustainable energy future.

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.