2012-10-03 - The National Science Foundation (NSF) has awarded a five-year, $4.5 million grant to UC Santa Cruz to fund a cooperative research and education program on renewable energy involving universities in the United States and Denmark. The project addresses the technical, social, and economic aspects of community-scale renewable-energy microgrids.
"The issues of how to integrate renewable energy sources like wind and solar power with the existing electrical grid have not been fully explored. It's not just a technical problem, because the technical issues are coupled with the economics and sociology of how people use energy," said principal investigator Michael Isaacson, the Kapany Professor of electrical engineering in the Baskin School of Engineering at UC Santa Cruz.
In addition to UC Santa Cruz, the primary partners in the program are UC Davis and two Danish institutions, Aalborg University and the Technical University of Denmark. Faculty at these institutions have worked together for several years on a renewable energy summer program that brought together U.S. and Danish students for hands-on, project-based learning in both countries. The new grant allows a significant expansion of this program. read more>>>
Renewable energy technologies are clean sources of energy that have a much lower environmental impact than conventional energy technologies. Renewable energy is reliable and plentiful and will potentially be very cheap once technology and infrastructure improve. It is far cleaner than fossil fuels.
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