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The communities of Puerto Rico are highly vulnerable to climate change as the archipelago has experienced a multitude of compounding crises and extreme weather events in recent years. To address these issues, the research, analysis, and design of grand challenge solutions for disaster-prone regions like Puerto Rico can utilize collaborative transdisciplinary efforts. Local non-governmental and community-based organizations have a pivotal role in the reconstruction processes and the building of community and environmental resilience in underserved communities. This paper contributes an empirical case study of an online transdisciplinary collaboration between a group of academics and a Puerto Rican non-governmental organization, Caras con Causa. From participant observation, it includes a document analysis of meeting notes with cohort members who were involved in a collaborative National Science Foundation Project, The INFEWS-ER: A Virtual Resource Center Enabling Graduate Innovations at the Nexus of Food, Energy, and Water Systems, with Caras con Causa between October 2020 and April 2021. Caras con Causa focuses on uplifting Puerto Ricans by creating and administering environmental, educational, economic, and community programs, highlighting disaster relief and resilience to help Puerto Rican food, energy, and water systems. Eight key discussion themes emerged from the document analysis: team organization, collaboration with Caras con Causa, deliverables, team contributions, context understanding, participation outcomes, technology setup, and lessons learned. We analyze each of the emerging themes to explain how academics may use transdisciplinary skill sets in addition to standard disciplinary-based approaches or techniques to enhance the institutional capacity of a non-governmental organization doing community resilience work to benefit local food, energy, and water systems. While the learned lessons in this non-governmental organization-academic collaboration may be context-specific, we provide insights that may be generalizable to collaborations in comparable transdisciplinary settings.
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Best Practices for Microgrids Applied to a Case Study in a Community
Microgrids, especially renewable-based, represent an opportunity to increase sustainability and resiliency in places prone to natural disasters. The aftermath of hurricane María accelerated the discussion in Puerto Rico about supporting microgrids as an energy policy and strategy to build a different power grid. This paper presents an overview of microgrid literature relevant to Puerto Rico and it is used to identify best practices. The paper also describes a recommended process for feasibility studies needed to develop a community microgrids based on distributed energy resources (DER). An example applying this process to an actual community wraps up the paper
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- Award ID(s):
- 1828443
- PAR ID:
- 10174234
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- 2020 IEEE Power & Energy Society Innovative Smart Grid Technologies Conference (ISGT)
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 1 to 5
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Conference Paper:
- https://doi.org/10.1109/ISGT45199.2020.9087660
