Annex B - Research Justification (2012)

RESEARCH JUSTIFICATION

YEAR ONE INTERDISCIPLINARY RESEARCH STUDIES

Research Topic: Environment

Chosen Area of Focus: The positive and negative effects of the next generation of power plants to produce sufficient energy for the future.

1. Framing our research topic

Our chosen area of focus is “A investigation of the average household's energy usage and ways to decrease it.”. We have chosen this topic as we use loads of kWh per day, so to keep up with the large demand, we want to find out how to conserve this energy and use it for other, meaningful purposes. 

1. Possible reasons for problems related to power is using too much electricity as the new technologies are energy demanding and costly. 
2. As this topic will touch on conservation, this research topic will make others aware of the looming situation. 

1. Reasons for choice of topic

1. Seeing that our main power source, natural gas isn't as long-lasting as we thought, the only other solution is to conserve our remaining energy. This is important and urgent as without it, we would not have energy. This will disallow us to do even the simplest daily activities, such as driving or turning on the lights. Without energy, hospitals cannot run, street lamps cannot light up and people cannot cook. This is why conserving energy is so important.
2. This allows us to fulfill the requirements of the project task as the project task looks at energy conservation from a good point of view.
3. The beneficial parts of this research is that people will understand that electricity is not to be wasted, and to make them realize that the depletion of natural gas will result in a gigantic energy crisis that will cause major cities to have black-outs, thus the economy would fail.
4. There is a need for our research, as many people do not know what kind they are waisting, as there is a large demand of electricity that is needed for our living conditions and our daily needs, and that the supply is slowly running out.

1. Feasibility of the research

1. Our research is feasible as most of our information can be salvaged form the world wide web, 
2. The proposed course of action is logical and realistic as it can be completed with the help of experts and the internet as they are both reliable resources.
3. The research provides sufficient opportunity for generation of ideas, as we will constantly have to think of ways to do certain things in the project. As for analysis and evaluation of ideas, we will certainly have many opportunities to analyze information and evaluate ideas on how to go about deciding what to do next.

1. Manageability of the research

1. We hope that the project will be done well and it will help the whole community to conserve energy.
2. This research provides sufficient opportunity for group work as we will need to research on lot of matters regarding the project, and we will give out the different tasks to our group members to ensure no slackers. 
3. We do anticipate some difficulties along the way, such as poor communication among the group members and lack of data. We intend to cope with these difficulties by trying to get the group to go and upload their findings and their part of the project onto the google site or other useful platforms for sharing ideas.

1. Accessibility of the information required

1. Information/knowledge that will be relevant to our research would be the amount of energy used on an average each day.
2. We will be obtaining this information from primary and secondary sources, depending on which one gives more reliable and useful information.
3. Some alternatives that we have thought of would be to ask professors/Public-utility board members and reliable others for information or where can we find the information that we need.
4. Some problems we anticipate while gathering our materials would be that the information that we can find is not entirely relevant to our project and that that is already the closest piece of information among all others that we have found.