Community Energy' refers to people working together to reduce and manage energy use and increase and support local energy generation. It has the potential to support the infrastructural, social and cultural changes needed to reduce the impact of climate change and increase energy security. The core part of communi ty energy initiatives is people; therefore, successful engagement strategies are essential. SCENe (Sustainable Community Energy Networks) was a research and development project focused on community energy application in a real-world setting involving in its first phase 44 new homes built along the banks of Nottingham's River Trent (UK) in 2016.The project team adopted a variety of established and innovative engagement strategies including website and social media channels, an online user engagement platform, a physical community energy hub with an interactive virtual energy model where meetings and workshops were held, and in-home smart voice-controlled and visual technologies. The influence of the project and the effectiveness of the engagement tools to generate behavioural changes were investigated through a survey, workshops and interviews. It was concluded that engagement with SCENe generated awareness regarding energy issues and participation in community energy initiatives.
A study into the phenomena of multimodality in wind farm layout optimisation problems is presented. Little previous work has studied multimodality so this work aims to begin providing quantifiable results on multimodality in farm layout optimisation. The problems of optimising the location of a four and nine turbine farm within a bound circular domain are considered. Multi-start gradient-based optimisation is used to determine optima present in each case. Clear multimodality was found in all cases tested. With increasing farm size, the number of optima present increases, however the difference in performance of those optima is small. Therefore, while multimodality is present, for large farms, the chance of locating a local minima that has a detrimental performance compared to the global optimum, is small.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.