DSL Masters / NRF Sprint

Research discussion feedback note

This note is a thinking guide from your research discussion. It is not a proposal draft, not a decision, and not something to paste into an AI tool. Use it to think before you rewrite.

How To Use This

Read it once, close the page, and answer the questions in rough bullets. The goal is to make your own reasoning clearer before the next version of your NRF application.

What you are trying to do

You are exploring how a small site with solar, battery storage, grid electricity, and selected flexible loads could make better energy decisions. The research version is not just to optimise a generic microgrid. It is to choose a local site type, define the decisions available, and test whether forecasting or optimisation improves practical outcomes compared with simple rules.

What is strong

The strongest foothold is the focus on South African constraints: grid unreliability, battery use, demand-side management, solar availability, and the cost of using storage poorly. Those constraints can turn a broad smart-grid idea into a useful local decision-support study.

Main issue

The idea is still too close to the other energy topics unless you differentiate it through literature and scope. You need to decide whether your project is about a household, lab, small facility, or a wider smart-grid concept, and then choose one data route, one optimisation problem, and one baseline.

Three thinking questions

  1. Which site type are you studying, and what decision would the schedule actually help someone make over a 24-hour horizon?
  2. What data can you realistically use for demand, solar, tariffs, battery behaviour, and grid availability?
  3. What will make your contribution different from another PV-battery controller or dashboard: the local load profile, the forecast method, the optimisation formulation, or the decision-support guidelines?

What to do next

Bring rough bullets that list the site type, the controllable loads, the data route, the baseline rules, the optimisation objective, and the specific contribution or lesson that would make the project research rather than a generic build.