Wisconsin Energy Institute

Transcription

Building on the legacy of renewable energy research - The Wisconsin Energy Institute, The University of Wisconsin - Madison. Farrington Daniels, Director, UW Solar Energy Lab: Let's just say there have been incentives for solar energy resarch. The first one was just basic research - the incentive of new discoveries. Pushing back the frontiers of knowledge. The next incentive was the realization that our fossils fuels - coal, oil, and gas - won't last forever. We'll have to get substitutes somehow. The third incentive was the unequal distribution of wealth around the world. Wealthy nations are the ones which have plenty of fuel. Another incentive was that we realized, with these blackouts and brownouts, that we are going to run short of electric power. We've got enough coal for perhaps two centuries, but we're going to have difficulty getting a new electric power. Steven Chu, Secretary of Energy: Now, we're finding out that we have limited resources. We need to worry about the collateral damage of the use of this engine, namely, the carbon emissions and most of the other pollutants. We need a second industrial revolution, where you can have both the energy that would supply this growing prosperity in the world, but in a clean form and a sustainable way. Tim Donohue, Director, Great Lakes Bioenergy Research Center: The way that we've generated energy in the last hundred years, from essentially a single point of fossil fuels, is not sustainable. Either by the end of this century, or clearly, moving on, we need to have other strategies. What we're doing in the Center is critical to this energy grand challenge, because it's helping diversify how we source energy for society. We're evaluating the potential for how one specific part of the biofuels area, cellulosic biofuels, can contribute to that energy equation that society will need to live on. We've decided to take an approach that allows us to try and extract as much energy from a diverse set of crops and convert it into a small number of fuels. The sustainability of these technologies, from the field through the pump, will really be critical in getting consumer and society acceptance into the types of new fuels that we're going to be generating. Michael Corradini, Director, Wisconsin Energy Institute: The thing that makes Madison historically great is the fact that people get together across disciplines, and try to determine what is an emerging problem. We try to pull together and really attack something that's really important. Take the solar energy lab. It was thought up, essentially, by Farrington Daniels in the Chemistry Department. He then connected with a professor in Mechanical Engineering and Chemical Engineering, formed a committee, and started a laboratory. And we are one of the prime places, historically, since the late 50's, in doing work in solar energy. Here, with the Energy Institute, our major purpose is to try and look at ways to discover new methods, take those discoveries to some sort of process or product, and then essentially provide real world solutions. The WEI will hopefully accomplish some of these goals in energy research, because we founded it on the principle with which, at Madison, we had been doing energy research for decades. We felt it was important to kind of pull it together and facilitate a lot of the work which is becoming more and more interdisciplinary. The WEI is founded on these three principles: research, education of our students and the community, and outreach to the community. We try to get top notch people as faculty. We try to involve the students and the scientists as best we can. With those people, we come up with imaginative ideas. Essentially, then, we try to provide the infrastructure to get it done. We were lucky enough to get the state to contribute a central facility for the Energy Institute, and that is the Wisconsin Energy Institute building. The focus of the building, initially in Phase I, is really to put a lot of the pieces together that we already have on campus in renewables - primarily in biofuels. We have a large part of the building in an integrated energy systems approach, where we have large, high bay areas. We can essentially put systems together and look at how these renewable energy systems work together, in terms of production of useful energy, storage of it, then a proper power control, and redistribution of the energy. That's what the building is used for - it's a bringing together of a lot of opportunities for the future. Wisconsin Energy Institute, University of Wisconsin-Madison Friday, April 5th, 2013, energy.wisc.edu Production by Matthew Wisniewski Video and Audio: Matthew Wisniewski. With contributions from University of Wisconsin-Madison Archives, Jan Eerala, VidEVO, NASA, Mockmoon, Adam Buick, Scott Hiddelston, Ecamcito, Beachfront Productions, Phil Fred, University of Wisconsin-Madison Communications "Perpetuum Mobile" by Penguin Cafe Orchestra. Special thanks to: Eric Anderson, Tim Donohue, Mike Corradini, Falicia Hines, Margo Broeren, Celia Smith, Heather Heggemeier, Vicki Tobias, Peter Kleppin, Craig Wacker, Dan Lauffer & Megan Janssen