DEVELOPMENT OF A DESIGN TOOL FOR SHARED SOLAR POWER PLANTS: A SIMULATION WITH AGENTS HAVING BASIC NEEDS AND SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGICAL CHARACTERISTICS

摘要

As an aid to designing shared solar power plants (SPPs) for remote, non-electrified communities, a multiagent simulation is presented that is based on social psychology. Each agent of the simulation represents a household in a small community sharing a SPP. The household consumes energy depending on its basic needs (for lighting or household appliances, for example). The agent's basic needs are fed into the simulation as use profiles (needs over time) that base on data collected from real users in SPP communities. Use profiles differ subject to the number of residents and their socio-demographic features. From hundreds of such profiles it is possible to generate prototypes of households. The prototype called 'small family,' for example, consists of 2 adults and one child. With these prototypical profiles, we can put together any desired community for simulation. But besides the basic needs of a household, its social psychological characteristics are of prime importance. Two households may be identical in their basic needs and have the same prototypical use profile but nevertheless differ in their consumption behavior due to different psychological attributes. We therefore implement a social psychological model of human resource use in the simulation that modifies the prototypical use profile according to relevant variables from resource dilemma research. The values of these variables are collected by meaas of face-to-face interviews in a real comnunity that plans to have a SPP. The use behavior of this particular community can then be simulated based on its basic needs and its social psychological characteristics. By conducting any desired number of experiments with the simulation, we can obtain information that is crucial to the design of a suitable SPP. The experiments reveal what is required of the SPP and what is needed for efficient organization of the community before installing the SPP in the community.