Tuesday, May 5, 2009

US President's commitment to energy research and education

US President Obama has committed to high increase in funding for the future of the US energy supply. I a speech to the National Academy of Sciences he made a very strong commitment to support R&D, education, ... to "enlist the talents and skills of the very best American scientists
and engineers
to address current fundamental scientific roadblocks to clean energy and energy security."

"In the 1950s and 1960s, Sputnik and the space race inspired young people to pursue careers in science and engineering. The average age of NASA’s Mission Control during the Apollo 17 Mission, for example, was 26.
President Obama believes that we have a similar opportunity to inspire today’s young people to tackle the single most important challenge of their generation – the need to develop cheap, abundant, clean energy and accelerate the transition to a low carbon economy." ...

"The President’s initiative will empower young men and women to invent and commercialize advanced energy technologies such as efficient and cost effective methods for converting sunlight to electricity and fuel, carbon capture and sequestration, stationary and portable advanced
batteries for plug-in electric cars, advanced energy storage concepts that will enable sustained energy supply from solar, wind, and other renewable energy sources, high-efficiency deployment of power across “smart grids” and carbon neutral commercial and residential buildings."

Click HERE for the complete ARPA-E news letter.

Education on international standards is one of the pillows of the future "smart grids" - education of people that want to become engineers and education of engineers that are already working for years. In some years down the road most young engineers are likely to have a solid knowledge of modern information and communication technologies. In the meantime many well experienced power engineers need to understand better the change in power system automation: the shift from wires to smart networks: to the distributed energy web. Every node in the network would have to be awake, responsive, flexible, and – most important – interconnected with everything else!

Click HERE for a comprehensive paper on "Seamless Communication with IEC 61850 for Distributed Power Generation" (presented in 2002 at the DistribuTech 2002, Miami)

2 comments:

Unknown said...

I like it. I work with a handful of young engineers who are "chomping at the bit" to work with this technology, Your blog does an excellent job inspiring the growing number of young engineers aggressively seeking to participate in the smart grid initiatives.

Unknown said...

I like it. I work with a handful of young engineers who are "chomping at the bit" to work with this technology, Your blog does an excellent job inspiring the growing number of young engineers aggressively seeking to participate in the smart grid initiatives.