Social Research on the Energy Issue

Overview

Our iGEM project, "Solar Hunter", is highly relevant to developing a sustainable and scalable strategy towards hydrogen production by integrating the power of synthetic biology and materials science. Our project is about an energy topic of broad interest. To better understand the energy issues from a broader perspective, and to figure out the current relationship and major differences between academic research and real industrial applications in the context of energy issues, our team carried out a wide range of social investigations. Our social investigations mainly consisted of two main parts, public questionnaire and personal interviews.The public questionnaire was implemented to be familiar to the general public attitudes. We carefully analyzed the data collected. Based on the main concerns and opinions we found through the data analysis, we invited several field experts from different walk of to participate in a series of theme interviews. Our interviewees included scientists working at the cutting-edge in energy field, industrial representatives dedicating to the energy conservation, as well as from representatives from the administrative government.

Through these social investigations, we found out that yet they shared common interests and goals, academic research are more interested in putting forward new solutions to increase energy efficiency without necessarily connecting to scalable production, while real industrial applications mainly care about costs and how a new strategy can lead to large-scale production. Our social investigations helped us to gain a better view about the developing background of the energy issue in China, and to brainstorm how our project would contribute to energy issue not only from academic perspective, but also in an industrial context.

Questionnaire

A questionnaire about the energy issue was designed and then widely distributed online. In all, 37 questions were asked, and we performed the core analysis of the questionnaire here. Finally, we collected 231 samples, 15 of which were canceled as invalid samples due to their short answering time (less than 180 seconds). The remaining 216 samples were regarded as valid responds that qualified for further analysis.

1. Respondents’ Backgrounds

Most participants were from the 18-25 age group or the 41-50 age group. About 39% of the respondents aged from 18 to 25, and 13% of them aged from 31 to 40, while more than 35% were aged from 41 to 50. The diagram below shows an ideal age distribution aged from 18 to 50, with only a few respondents below 18 or over 50. With regards of the education background, over 77% of the participants were well-educated with at least a bachelor degree who surely shared sufficient social experience and intellects. These statistics here demonstrate and ensure the underlying statistical significance.

2. Awareness of the Energy Issue

When investigated on public awareness of the energy issue, as many as 78% respondents laid strong emphasis on the issue. They considered the energy issue as an extremely urgent social problem that needed to be solved, which strongly illustrated the huge potential and prospect for our project.

3. Knowledge of Green Energy

When asked about whether people were familiar with the green energy, only 13% of the participants chose the most familiarity. Over 51% of the samples showed insufficient knowledge in green energy, which demonstrates the strong need for more public propagation. And this assumption were then further illustrated by the following question that “whether it is necessary to publicly enforce the idea of green energy”, with about 95% participants demonstrated positive attitude.

However, when talked about the potential influence raised from the studies on green energy, over half of the participants declared the strongest attitude. And plus, another 35% were with the second strongest attitude. From this, the promising prospects to apply green energy to deal with the energy issue are apparent. Besides, our team believes that with a wider spread of the background knowledge on the topic, more and more people would be likely to support the study on green energy to solve the energy issue.

We tested on the kinds of green energy well known by the public, where the solar energy ranked first with nearly 88%. Also, we asked about the important characteristics for a good form of green energy; less pollution, strong sustainability, reasonable costs ranked at the top three. Obviously, the application of solar energy can perfectly meet all these three requirements. Additionally, when asked about the opinions on the application of solar energy as the main energy source, near 88% demonstrated positiveness.

4. Attitude towards Hydrogen

Speaking of the overall attitude towards the present application of hydrogen production, more than half of the participants showed negative attitudes, which was understandable due to the high costs and immature methods of industrial production. However, when asked about whether the hydrogen could be a sustainable energy source, a substantial increase in positive attitude could be seen, which shows the huge potential for the further development of hydrogen. Although there were still 45% held a negative attitude towards the application of hydrogen, our team believes that people may become more and more confident about it as long as the technologies are more mature and they are more familiar with the hydrogen with their main concerns eliminated.

In terms of the concerns for the application of hydrogen as an energy source, the biggest two dominating concerns were laid in safety and costs. From a scientific point of view, as long as the transportation and storage of hydrogen is proper enough to avoid the explosion limits, the usage of hydrogen is relatively safe. (This point would be verified by the field professors through the late interview.) Actually, it is pretty much similar to the usage of coal gas and nature gas. Since people could handle with these two inflammable gasses properly, with the further development of relevant technologies, we hold pretty positive prospects with regards of the safety concerns. However, based on our background search, the way to maintain relatively low cost producing hydrogen are still not available; and this just again demonstrates the huge potential value of our project.

5. About Our Project

In the questionnaire, we briefly described the idea and mechanism of our energy-conversion platform, gaining about 63% of the positive feedback. Therefore, the real application of our platform in a big productive scale is relatively promising and deserved. However, we also notice the 37% with a relatively negative feedback, which also reminds us of further improvements on our ideas, especially with regard to the safety, cost, and efficiency based on the feedback from previous questions. And we believe that as long as the technologies are more mature and their main concerns are eliminated, people would hold a more positive point of view.

To assist our further integration of our project into real social application, further questions on the necessity of collaborations with industrial partners, academic research groups, and the government were asked.

About 62% of the participants demonstrated the strongest necessity to cooperate with some green energy related enterprises. Near 87% supported to acquire more technological assistance from the academics. More than 62% of participants thought the supportive policies from the authority would be very important for the real application. In responses to these results, further interviews from these three aspects were then scheduled.

For the next step of the social research, our team got connected with people working with the energy issue in industry community, at academic groups, and administrative government. A series of further social activities were then carried out to make our project more adaptable to the real industrialization. Click here to find our further Integrated Human Practice.

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 Our iGEM project, "Solar Hunter", is highly relevant to developing a sustainable and scalable strategy towards hydrogen production by integrating the power of synthetic biology and materials science. Our project is about an energy topic of broad interest. <strong>To better understand the energy issues from a broader perspective, and to figure out the current relationship and major differences between academic research and real industrial applications in the context of energy issues, our team carried out a wide range of social investigations. Our social investigations mainly consisted of two main parts, public questionnaire and personal interviews.</strong>The public questionnaire was implemented to be familiar to the general public attitudes. We carefully analyzed the data collected. Based on the main concerns and opinions we found through the data analysis, we invited several field experts from different walk of to participate in a series of theme interviews. Our interviewees included scientists working at the cutting-edge in energy field, industrial representatives dedicating to the energy conservation, as well as from representatives from the administrative government.<p></p>
 Through these social investigations, we found out that yet they shared common interests and goals,  academic research are more interested in putting forward new solutions to  increase energy efficiency without necessarily connecting to scalable production, while real industrial applications mainly care about costs and how a new strategy can lead to large-scale production. Our social investigations helped us to gain a better view about the developing background of the energy issue in China,  and to brainstorm how our project would contribute to energy issue not only from academic perspective, but also in an industrial context.<p></p>
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Difference between revisions of "Team:ShanghaitechChina/HP/Silver"

Revision as of 02:25, 20 October 2016