SCC-IRG Track 1: Assessing the Potential for Transactive Energy Communities in Rural New Hampshire

This project advances our knowledge of how to develop and implement transactive energy services in rural communities. A transactive energy service is an energy-sharing, real-time pricing market that exchanges electricity among retail customers and power producers that could include large generation companies and households with rooftop or backyard solar. Transactive energy services have long been recognized as potentially useful for decarbonizing the electric grid, enhancing community resilience to supply shortages, extreme weather, and natural disasters, and reducing electricity rates for everyday consumers. This project aims to assess the social and technical factors influencing the potential for implementing transactive energy services. The project is investigating the potential for a transactive energy service in rural New Hampshire with a collaboration of community power partners. Through surveys, focus groups, and interviews, the research team is studying the technical and social psychological factors that will influence rural New Hampshire residents' willingness to enroll in the transactive energy service. It is examining the technical and social features and factors that can produce a market that is socially beneficial, technically reliable, and environmentally sustainable. And it is examining human-machine interactions to produce an artificially-intelligent in-home automation system that facilitates rural New Hampshire residents' participation in the transactive energy service. The project is also assessing if the knowledge of transactive energy service design and implementation generated in New Hampshire could be scaled to, transferred to, and sustained by other community partnerships or coalitions in the United States. 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.