National Labs Set Groundwork for Marine Energy Development in Island and Remote Coastal Communities

The National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) and Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) completed the first step in developing the Community Deployment Readiness Framework to support remote, coastal, and island community-driven energy transitions. This framework can be used by researchers, technical assistance experts, and program officers at the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) to better understand the readiness of communities for marine energy technology demonstration projects and their operation. The framework builds on DOE's Energy Transitions Initiative Partnership Project supported, in part, by the Water Power Technologies Office (WPTO).

The Community Deployment Readiness Framework is being developed in three phases and in close collaboration with communities, stakeholders, and end users, such as sponsors of DOE's technical assistance programs and researchers at national labs.

In Fiscal Year 2023, the team completed the learning phase. During this first phase, PNNL published a report identifying metrics for understanding community readiness, like technical capacity, environmental factors, and social implications. The NREL team then used these metrics to inform an outreach and engagement campaign, which surveyed and interviewed key people involved in DOE's technical assistance programs.

Interviewees had the opportunity to share unique perspectives and experiences with renewable energy technical assistance projects, uncovering the priorities and challenges that each community experiences when integrating marine resources into their energy system. From interview responses, the team identified themes that set the foundation for the framework, which are detailed in NREL's full outreach report. 

This feedback and groundwork will help WPTO and the national laboratories enable realistic and scalable marine energy solutions for communities embarking on a clean energy transition. The Community Deployment Readiness Framework considers technology innovation, technical readiness, and demonstration holistically, and will be guided by the following recommendations:

• Sustained, consistent, and iterative collaboration among communities, national laboratories, and DOE within an adaptive management framework.
• Sustained and consistent funding, which is key for communities to build their own capacity.
• Community-centered plain language to meet a community where it is in its energy transition with the appropriate technical assistance. 
• A peer-to-peer process that connects communities to share lessons learned in technology education, as well as technical and demonstration support.
• Support beyond the life span of technical assistance projects that focuses on capacity and funding. 

Now that the learning phase has concluded and the groundwork for the Community Deployment Readiness Framework has been laid, the team is working to complete the design phase. In this second phase, the team is defining and developing the specific approaches and tools that will help decision makers better understand a community's readiness to integrate marine renewable energy resources. After the second phase is complete, the team will focus on the third phase—implementation. This final phase will focus on creating the applications and user interfaces needed for researchers and decision makers.

This work is supported through WPTO's Powering the Blue Economy™ initiative.