Future City Fellowship

Propose a plan for the electrification of your city to keep citizens healthy and safe. In your plan, you will need to set targets to meet demand at three 10-year intervals, stay within budget, and address various concerns about electrification solutions, such as: 

1. Ensuring technical feasibility in electrical energy production, transmission, storage, and distribution for the specific city’s needs while “greening” the energy supply chain via electrification.
2. Satisfying safety concerns by adhering to ULSE safety standards, choosing at least two to highlight as significant in your plan, and proposing one new safety standard, along with the tests that will demonstrate certification to safe limits.
3. Prioritizing environmental sustainability and resilience to help your city stay livable and strong. You may use ULSE standards to make this argument as well.
4. Demonstrating economic viability for your plan using the specific city’s actual budget and funding streams, and/or suggesting opportunities to ensure meeting fiscal needs over the entire term of your plan.
5. Addressing societal and stakeholder impacts, including equity issues in the production, transmission, storage, and distribution of electrical energy. Your pitch should both explain why you believe the plan is adoptable and how it will benefit the community.

1. Fellows
   • Fellows serve as consultants to their client, the City Partner. The Fellows are responsible for liaising with the city representatives and any external partners, understanding the client’s needs, narrowing the problem space to a manageable electrification challenge, and designing a feasible, standards-based solution. In their presentations to their city client and other stakeholders, Fellows demonstrate how their solution will evolve over 10-, 20-, and 30-year increments and how UL safety standards will ensure long-term safety, sustainability, and equity.
2. City
   • Serving as the Fellow’s client, the city will share its electrification needs, available resources, and constraints, and offer feedback and critique as the team narrows the problem definition and develops potential solutions. The city’s satisfaction is the ultimate indicator of success in the Fellowship.
3. Faculty Advisor
   • A Faculty Advisor will provide guidance, feedback, and critique to each team. The Faculty Advisor will ensure that the team is prepared to meet with the city and corporate sponsors and that they access the provided materials to best understand the challenge before them. The Faculty Advisor will use their expertise in engineering and education to encourage success through problem definition, design and modeling, standards application, and effective presentation.
4. ULSE
   • ULSE is the corporate partner to all Future City Fellows teams. ULSE will provide expertise on the application of safety and sustainability standards to the city’s systems and products, as well as to students’ design ideas.
   • Additional Partners
   • External Partners: Teams are encouraged to seek out additional stakeholders and partners.
   • DiscoverE Team: Available for support, clarifications, critique, and connections.
   • ULRI: Fellowship sponsor. Provides StandardsAcademy.org.

Who is the client?

The city, or another designated municipal entity, is your client. Your client’s stakeholders include the city government, citizens, local industry, and the city’s environment. You will interact with your client in three explicit opportunities: the initial client interview, a presentation of your chosen narrow problem, and a final consulting pitch. You are encouraged to connect with other local or national stakeholders, experts, and resources as you investigate the depth and breadth of the narrow electrification problem that you choose to focus on.

What is the scope of the Fellowship?

The Fellowship includes three phases spanning six months. Each phase concludes in a Milestone. 

• Phase 1: Interview Client. Research and Assess Electrification Challenge and Opportunities. Milestone 1: Problem Narrowed. Meet with DiscoverE.

• Phase 2: Share Challenge Focus with Client. Design and Model Potential Solutions. Milestone 2: Solution Chosen. Meet with DiscoverE.

• Phase 3: Develop and Practice Pitch. Milestone 3: Pitch Presented. Meet with DiscoverE.

Please refer to the City Electrification Challenge and Fellowship Milestones for support on each phase.

What support and resources do Fellows receive during the project?

• Each Fellow receives a $5,000 stipend.
• Support from their Faculty Advisor, DiscoverE, and ULSE experts.
• The ULRI Standards Academy provides clear descriptions of the role of standards in society and case studies featuring electrification-related standards.
• Optional resources include a recommended Fellowship timeline, a project success rubric, questions to research and consider, and How to be a good consultant.

What kind of modeling is required?

Your team has the latitude to choose how to model and test your solutions, as well as how to pitch your plan to your client. Quantitative and visual models should be used to convey the plan and its impact over 30 years clearly.

What do Standards have to do with it?

Standards are guidelines that define safe, reliable, and consistent ways to design, build, test, and operate systems. In engineering and civil planning, standards help ensure that infrastructure and technologies function as intended, protect public health and safety, enable different systems to work together, and reduce risk, costs, and uncertainty across projects. 

Criterion five of the Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology (ABET, 2022) requires undergraduate engineering students to understand and apply appropriate safety standards to their senior capstone design projects to complete the undergraduate engineering degree. This fellowship will help Fellows learn to use that application seamlessly. 

Fellows must include UL Standards & Engagement safety and sustainability standards throughout the Fellowship: 

• Your baseline research on electrification should determine which standards are currently in place in the city’s electricity system. You may find standards embedded within regulatory codes.
• Your narrowed problem must include any relevant standards, 
• Your solution and pitch must include standards. Specifically, your cost-benefit analysis must demonstrate increased safety or sustainability from adherence to standards.

Learn more about ULSE standards at the ULRI Standards Academy and on the dedicated Standards Webinar all-teams call, Tuesday, March 24, 7 PM ET. You may include standards from other organizations in addition to ULSE standards. 

What makes a good solution? 

A good solution will include a wide range of disciplinary perspectives, including public health considerations, industry-appropriate modeling, climatic considerations, and existing or potential civil regulations and engineering standards. A good solution is one that Fellows justify thoroughly to increase viability and mitigate risks. A good solution will address the trade-offs between engineered systems and legal, governmental, and social choices, demonstrating Fellows’ appreciation for the world’s complexity and making intentional, justifiable choices.

Electrification is a broad topic. In the first phase of the Fellowship, you should learn about your client and narrow the broad goal of electrification to a specific challenge or focus area that your client agrees with. Research your client’s existing electrical systems and goals, and consider possible systems that your team can tackle before and after you interview your client. By the end of this Milestone, you will share and defend the direction you’re taking with DiscoverE. For this phase of the project, we suggest your team:

1. Construct a city profile including:
   • Current population & population growth projections
   • Climate & environmental conditions
   • Current electrification status, i.e., what percentage of energy currently comes from renewable sources? Are there existing electrification plans?
   • Major economic sectors. What are the city’s primary industries? Will your electrification plan affect these sectors?
2. Establish a baseline for electrical use and electrification efforts. Research current electrical generation and demand within the city, including trends for demand, e.g., peak use times and the biggest consumers. Research the current electrification systems in place and any electrification plans the city has to wean itself off fossil fuel dependency.
3. Use the ULRI Standards Academy to understand the significance of standards in the engineered world, and to learn about ULSE safety and sustainability standards related to electrification. How do these technical standards interact with current regulations? How can they be leveraged to demonstrate the safety and sustainability in an electrified city?
4. Interview your city clients to help define a narrow problem that you will address (Client Meeting #1). Be prepared to ask well-informed questions to get the information that you need. What is the city already doing, and what information can they provide? Ask them where you can find local or representational data.
5. Choose the narrow electrification-related problem or system that your team will design to improve. A criterion for narrowing your focus is your client’s needs and goals, the goals of this project, and what you’ve learned about electrification and safety/sustainability standards thus far.
6. MILESTONE 1: Meet with DiscoverE at the end of this phase to briefly outline your narrowed challenge, describe your goals, share any pertinent safety or sustainability standards, and identify key focus areas for your team’s design work. Like all engineering design, you may need to revisit and revise your challenge, goals, and options as you work. See the Phase 1 Rubric.
7. Phase 1 Optional Resources:
   • Project Management 101
   • Being a Good Consultant
   • Questions to Research and Consider
   • Client Electrification Analysis
   • Additional stakeholder analysis and interview. Contact other stakeholders and learn about their needs, costs, and concerns (optional but helpful).

Once you have decided on the narrowed focus area you plan to improve, meet again with your client (Client meeting #2) to explain to them the location you have chosen and why. Then, work to brainstorm possible solutions to develop and model. Play out the impacts of each of your favorite ideas over the next 10, 20, and 30 years. By the end of this phase, you should identify your best solution idea, choosing the best solution after you have some data, not based on first instincts.

1. Meet again with your client (Client meeting #2). Present your narrowed problem focus and justify why you’ve chosen to move forward with it using data and analysis. Work with your client to brainstorm some solution ideas and gather their feedback on any initial ideas.
2. As a team, brainstorm a range of ideas, then identify two or more possible solutions that you think would best fit the needs you identified.
3. Compare possible solutions. Use any modeling that helps quantify or qualify the strength of your ideas (Excel, GIS, R, SPSS, etc). Consider standards that would affect the safety and sustainability of your ideas, and analyze which safety, sustainability, and quality-of-life measures are in place and which may be needed. Consider stakeholders’ interests and gather information to inform your solution choices. Outline possible budget needs and revenue sources for the potential solutions.
4. Choose your best solution idea and prepare to justify your choice:
   • Model the expected outcomes of at least two aspects of your electrification plan in 10, 20, and 30-year timelines to demonstrate your plan’s efficacy and outcomes. For example, how will your planned changes contribute to your city’s 10, 20, and 30-year sustainability or resilience goals? Collect data on the key metrics that you can use to evaluate the success of your design (e.g., energy savings, cost reduction, reduction of CO2 emissions).
   • Choose ULSE safety and sustainability standards that you will adhere to to ensure your solution is feasible, safe, and sustainable.
   • Conduct a risk management analysis to identify potential risks that could derail your electrification plan and propose mitigation strategies. See the Phase 2 Rubric.
5. MILESTONE 2: Meet with DiscoverE and the other Fellowship Teams to share your plan and the data or inferences you are using to justify its impact over 10, 20, and 30 years. DiscoverE may bring in additional partners, as needed, to provide feedback.

Create and rehearse a consulting pitch to share your recommendations with city stakeholders, including city and industry partners and experts (Client meeting #3). See the Phase 3 Rubric. Your pitch should also make sense to anyone “off the street,” so please include:

1. Opening slides to set the tone, provide some background, and illustrate the reasons for increasing electrification in your city. This baseline should include the existing safety and sustainability standards relevant to this issue.
2. Problem definition slides that describe the problem in terms of the gaps that you are trying to meet, including any safety standards that are missing. Describe projected monetary costs, or impacts on human safety, environmental sustainability, or any other issues that could arise without an intervention, over the next three decades.
3. Provide a standards analysis, including how ULSE safety and sustainability standards impact this issue and potential solutions.
4. Present your solution to meet the city’s needs in terms of the narrow challenge you defined. Describe how ULSE standards that are integrated into your proposal ensure safe and sustainable electrification.
5. Justify your pitch with a value proposition and a cost-benefit analysis compared to the projections without your intervention. Identify increases in human safety and environmental sustainability based on data from your model compared to what would happen if the city did not implement your plan in 10, 20, and 30 years from now. Include a brief analysis of stakeholder interests and potential impact on your plan.
6. Milestone 3: Present the pitch to DiscoverE before presenting to your city clients.
7. Phase 3 Optional Resources:
   • Client pitch template slide deck
   • Client pitch example slide deck