The "Microgrid Development & Energy User Behavior" project is a multi-year study of electricity use in a cohousing development, with the goals of assessing the feasibility and performance of a local renewable microgrid, covering 20 homes and a neighborhood community building. One of the critical issues that we face in the future is construction of a distributed non-carbon based energy network that does not rely on the current political and economic power relationships (see . These relationships threaten to compromise individual/ community privacy and control of how their energy and valuable ancillary system support is produced, consumed, and managed in a distributed system. The current industry conceptual model presumes centralized control, with essentially no individual or community control of locally produced energy resources. Our model presumes that microgrids can fulfill the same basic needs as current energy systems/infrastructure.

The design system would include up to 80 kW of rooftop and ground-based solar capacity, with 50 kW of dispatchable load control, and 100 kWh of battery storage capacity. This neighborhood currently has charging facilities for 10 electric vehicles, as well as real-time distribution grid support of power quality and reliability that connects to a local transmission substation level. It also provides valuable insight into the relationship between perceived and actual energy practices among neighborhood residents. This includes both before and after they have access to detailed information about how they use energy as individual households, and as a hypothetical aggregate microgrid.

This project will provide one of the first closely researched and monitored field deployments of an advanced, distributed residential microgrid in California. It will also provide us with a detailed understanding of the interaction among individual and community energy norms. The embedded infrastructure and implications of our microgrid deployment model are important to the economic, social justice, and local control implications of a fundamental shift to a networked, decarbonized electric infrastructure model.

There are three phases to the project.

1. Surveys of and behavioral interviews with residents regarding energy attitudes and practices (partially completed as of 1/2016);

2. High resolution, real-time monitoring of electric energy use at a plug, circuit, and meter load level as well as several existing solar photovoltaic and electric charging installations in the community. This will provide detailed information about household and aggregate neighborhood energy use patterns, and allows testing of high performance sensor and control arrays that allow the microgrid to provide real-time voltage, power factor, and hourly dispatch commitments of energy and load reduction to the regional grid system (beginning 1/2016).

3. Design of a hypothetical advanced neighborhood microgrid, based on solar supply and resident demand patterns, and interaction with the utility macrogrid (beginning mid-2016).

This project is tightly integrated with an emerging, cross-disciplinary, project-based initiative at UCSC. This combines sustainable systems education and skill-building with original, high quality, multi-year longitudinal research into critical issues regarding our transition to a just and sustainable human-built world (see https://projectclearinghouse.ucsc.edu/sustainability-studies-and-ideass-...).