Applying Systems Engineering in a Renewable Energy Research & Development Environment

Systems Engineering (SE) practice has largely developed around a few specific industries, especially aerospace/defense and IT. SE is well understood by, and remains associated with, these industries. The classical systems engineering process starts with conceptual development of a specific system that will ultimately be produced and deployed. In the renewable energy R&D environment, neither of these normal cases apply; the work is being conducted in a culture that is generally unfamiliar with systems engineering, and the R&D activities are mostly oriented toward technology development and refinement rather than toward development of a specific deployable system. Nevertheless, systems engineering principles can be applied to enhance the management of the Research & Development (R&D) process, but significant tailoring of SE processes is required, and enhanced modeling and simulation techniques must be applied to deal with all the unknowns at a very early part of the system lifecycle. The lessons learned from several years of experience in this unique environment at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, as well as a number of new ideas for future process enhancements, will be explored in this paper.