In this lesson, you will be pulling together all the elements of the course from the past months and composing the first draft of your solar project proposal. The drafts will then go through the peer-review process. This week you will spend some time doing background search and developing your ideas, and also you will have a chance to learn from others by reviewing their work. Comments from your reviewer may provide an additional angle to the problem you are solving and expose some deficiencies that you may not notice. Even if you feel confident in your development, constructive critique will not make it better!
Your proposal will convey the full spectrum of skills that you have been developing to better accomplish the goal of solar design: to maximize solar utility for your client and stakeholders in their specific locale. We have broken down the course into three main blocks, which I will review here:
Be sure that your pre-proposal is balanced and touches upon all of the above areas.
The formal lesson content will be minimial this week to let you focus on the project related tasks.
By the end of this lesson, you should be able to:
This lesson will take us one and a half weeks to complete. Please refer to the Course Syllabus for specific time frames and due dates. Specific directions for the assignment below can be found within this lesson.
Required Reading: | SECS, Chapter 16 - Project Design |
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To Do: | Learning Activities
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Topic(s): | Energy constraint, value of solar energy, historical cases of developing solar energy. |
If you have any questions, please post them to the Lesson 11 General Questions and Comments forum in Yellowdig. I will check the forum regularly to respond. While you are in a discussion, feel free to post your own responses if you, too, are able to help out a classmate.
Design is an extremely important aspect for successfully implementing solar energy systems. To illustrate this point, let us begin with a simple concept of what design is. A proposed theory that helps to provide understanding is that Design is PATTERN with a PURPOSE. Simply put, design is utilizing purposeful approaches to create systems that fit patterns. In Figure 11.1, below, we can see a cartoon illustrating a simplified pattern of relations. At the outside is the influence of the solar resource and ecosystems services, while the three inner rings are related to the coupled influence of the locale, the client, and the actual installed solar energy conversion technology. No useful project can be implemented without context and associated patterns. In fact, these patterns serve as guidelines and parameters for what a system can accomplish.
We can think about the region with respect to the connectivity to additional services (power grid, thermal lines), and think about the region with respect to the diversity of solar systems possible. Does a homeowner in Puerto Rico need large quantities of hot water, or the capacity to cool space?
A well-designed project will make use of an integrative process, an approach that essentially dictates that the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. System design does not merely involve putting together all the required parts and constructing it into a functioning system. It involves careful consideration of how each part fits into the overall system goals set by the stakeholders (clients), while also taking account of the environmental context the system is meant to work in.
By emphasizing the integrated design approach, we identify the solar utility, client and stakeholder, and project locale as the three main components for the goal of solar design. Each of these cannot be addressed without engaging the frameworks of the other two. These components also play a vital role as constraints. Constraints are useful tools for designers since they serve as guidelines for the design decision process.
The design process starts with establishing system goals. The responsible stakeholders generally define the system goals by stating what requirements they have for the system. The solar designer must take this information, coupled with the project locale and solar utility, to determine how much energy can be produced. In the next few sections, we will go into some detail on all of these.
Failure to consider all the important aspects in the design of any project will eventually lead to a system that performs poorly.
Now it's time to pull the prior work together for a proposal to your clients. You are to use both SAM and your knowledge about the solar resource and economic decision making to propose one or more solar solutions for your client.
Your proposal should demonstrate the full spectrum of skills that you have been developing to accomplish this goal of solar design. At the same time, the proposal should not be a heavy technical paper but rather should be crafted as a well-justified pitch to your client. The technical data on project design should be used to strengthen and support your message, not to confuse your potential reader.
In this course, the information covered has been broken down into three distinctive arcs:
The project proposal should present some data and analysis to address all three of these important aspects of project development.
Use any and all available tools to form a creative project proposal that will engage your client and be a compelling first step in project development. Using SAM software will be required, and I recommend that you use the "Create/Duplicate Case" menu to explore various options for a SECS project on behalf of your client. Go back to Lesson 6 for ideas, too. You are welcome to use the financial analysis spreadsheet we worked with in Lesson 7, although that is optional - you can as well use SAM for financial modeling.
Here are some resources from the USA Dept. of Energy:
There are also the extensive resources available at the 7Group website [5]:
When writing, try to look at your narrative through a stakeholder's lens. It is important to relate the analysis you do to your client's goals and clearly explain the presented information to your audience. It is good to finish your proposal with a strong statement summarizing your key findings and benefits your project would bring.
This week, at the pre-proposal stage, you may not be able to complete all of the elements and include all data you want to include. That is fine. If you need more work on a specific part of your proposal - just make space for it, provide a heading, and a description of what is to be completed and to be included in the final document, so that your reviewer sees that you do are not forgetting anything important. Also, the above list can be used as proposal structure, but if you see a need to modify it to better fit your case, please feel creative.
For the first draft (pre-proposal), develop a 5-7 page document (Doc or PDF format) that would be a hybrid of an outline and written report (you can expand on finer details later in the final submission). This work is somewhat similar to Lesson 6, but this time you are specifying your own client and locale. Please submit your pre-proposal draft and *.sam file to "Project Proposal Draft" dropbox in Canvas. Further, you will be able to see someone else’s proposal assigned to you for review in the same dropbox. The peer review assignments will be made by the instructor.
Once all pre-proposals are in, you will have several days for the peer-review task. You will need to send your peer-review and annotated author's proposal directly to the author and will submit it to a separate dropbox in Canvas for instructor's assessment. More detailed peer review instructions are given on the next page of this lesson and in Canvas. Please provide constructive feedback to your peers. You may also get new ideas for your own project from your peers during this review process, and your peer will provide you with ways to strengthen your own proposal. So, the benefits should be multifold, and if you each strive for excellence and creativity, your final proposal due in the final week will be strong and compelling and will have a high likelihood of receiving a high grade.
Please see the grading rubrics for the pre-proposal, peer-review, and final proposal tasks in Canvas.
Check the Canvas Calendar for specific due dates.
In Canvas you will be provided with access to one of the submitted pre-proposals to make your review. While you should feel creative about reviewing your peers' work, I also want to provide you with some guidelines to make sure none of the key points are missed.
You can use the following 8 criteria elements to structure your reviewer summary. Try to compose your comments in the third person, and back up your constructive criticism with examples found in the document (or the absence of content). Most reviews of compelling proposals will be 1-2 pages. If extensive errors or omissions are found, the itemized listing of corrections may extend the review length. You will be evaluated on your ability to provide constructive feedback to your peer that will strengthen their final proposal.
Peer Review should include (feel free to use these items as subheadings in your review document):
Please upload your (i) marked-up PDF and (ii) Reviewer Summary to the "Peer Review of Project Proposal" dropbox in Canvas, and, please, also send a copy of each directly to your peer through Canvas Inbox by the assigned deadline.
Your peer review will be evaluated out of 15 pts.
Thank you for your great work pulling your first drafts together, and reviewing the content from your peers. By this time, you should be finding that the goal of solar design and engineering provide us with a framework to flesh out compelling proposals for future solar energy conversion systems development. You may also have noticed the benefit of working with peers to improve your approach and strengthen or focus your proposals. This is again a part of the integrative design process.
Think about the larger teams that you will need to be a part of in future projects. Is there an ideal transdisciplinary team that you might recruit to develop and deploy future solar projects?
You are ready to move on to the final phase of EME 810.
See you in Lesson 12!