The Challenges of Food-Energy-Water Data Collection in Remote Islanded Microgrids: Lessons Learned and Recommendations Moving Forward

Understanding food-energy-water (FEW) connections is inherently complex, requiring data of different types and scales and from various owners. So how do we obtain data to support a research project that is both of high quality and will yield results? And provide results that are useful to both researchers and stakeholders? MicroFEWS is an Alaska-based National Science Foundation-sponsored project (http://ine.uaf.edu/microfews/) that seeks to examine interactions and tradeoffs among FEWS security in and among communities dependent on isolated microgrids. Given that these communities are not connected to the electrical grid or the road system and are seemingly well bounded, it would seem that collecting data regarding their food, energy, and water usage should be straightforward. However, we have not found this to be true. Often, historical data records are poor, incomplete, targeted toward different goals from the current research, or locked under proprietary hesitance to share, such as in the case of privately-owned utilities. We will discuss challenges faced due to data access, quality, and complexity of data types, including how to balance the time commitment required to collect and analyze large amounts of data against the utility of the results obtained per time spent by both researchers and stakeholders. We will present some workarounds and strategies we have developed to strengthen weak data, fill in data gaps using reasonable assumptions, set baseline data collection strategies for the future, and meld qualitative and quantitative data. We will also discuss the importance of engaging community members, especially key community members, and discussing with them that while the immediate impacts of our work may not be evident, we are helping to build a foundation to strengthen the community. Finally, we will outline how to motivate data collection efforts from both the researchers' and the stakeholders' point of view, with both sides in a balanced, mutual exchange of benefits. The simplest way to achieve this is with cash payment, but other benefits may be less direct, for example, by providing evidence that a community will benefit from installation and support of a renewable energy project, and share the gained knowledge, which strengthens their case to seek funding from federal, state, or other entities.