Open-Source Renewables: Coupling Resilience to Natural Disasters with Environmental Justice

In a region where earthquakes, heat waves, wildfires and an increasingly unreliable grid are an inescapable reality, resilience hubs bring community-wide benefit. Through the partnership of an innovative community-based non-profit dedicated to extending the reach of renewable energy to low-income households and a leading college of science and engineering, we propose to undertake civic engagement, collaborative research, cost analysis and meticulous planning, yielding a project with significant community impact, ready to deploy in the coming year.

Most resilience hubs are built in a top-down-fashion by outside experts who determine where these centers will be sited, the services they will offer, and how they will be operated. The project team believes that they can build a better resilience hub if they situate the know-how, talent and potential of those whose needs these sites are intended to address at the center of the project planning.

The project team proposes to use community engagement to assess just which services are deemed essential, where the centers can optimally be sited, and how they will in fact be operated in the event of a natural disaster or power shutoff. Absent a crisis, too, this project proactively leverages resilience hubs' clean-power generation to support renewable energy affordability across the community.

This project leverages renewable-energy to create resilience hubs that are economically self-sustaining whether or not threats become crises. The project will pair a community non-profit with a local higher-ed consortium to deliver a family of models that (a) account for energy-use-and-cost across CA's complex of renewable/traditional sources and delivery/storage, (b) are tunable across needs, use-patterns, and community identities, and (c) are publicly available for refinement to serve other geographic, market, and community-identity conditions.

The models, in turn, yield strategies to maximize renewable-power resilience hubs' community support: when the grid is operating normally, hubs generate power used to tilt energy-cost-effectiveness toward renewables. This renewable-energy-shift specifically supports the lowest-income members of our diverse community: those for whom renewable energy is least accessible.

In a crisis, resilience hubs can be immediately islanded into an operating power-base from which further crisis-response proceeds. This positive feedback loop is perhaps the project's most important piece: advancing community agency and cohesion via crisis-readiness. Whether or not the future makes islanding necessary, this project will not be an island.

Its models and template for community-driven resilient energy will be available and tunable, to find and deploy analogous positive-feedback loops across our nation's widely-varying communities.

This project is supported by the CIVIC Innovation Challenge program Track B - Resilience to Natural Disasters: Equipping Communities for Greater Preparedness and Resilience to Natural Disasters through a collaboration between NSF and the Department of Homeland Security.

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.