Archive of Topic: innovation

Gbemisola “Gbemi” Akinsipe

My inter­ests range from the inte­gra­tion of renew­ables into exist­ing grids,the pos­si­bil­i­ty of indi­genes (espe­cial­ly women) in rur­al com­mu­ni­ties pro­duc­ing their own pow­er or at least under­stand­ing its work­ings and the inter­ac­tion between sci­ence and pol­i­cy mak­ing in devel­op­ing coun­tries. I would love to study in the Renew­able & Appro­pri­ate Ener­gy Lab­o­ra­to­ry (RAEL) or the Ener­gy Mod­el­ing, Analy­sis and Con­trol Group (EMAC)

Jess Carney

Jess Car­ney is inter­est­ed in under­stand­ing how sus­tain­able ener­gy inte­gra­tion impacts pow­er grids and elec­tric­i­ty mar­kets. She received her under­grad­u­ate degree at Johns Hop­kins Uni­ver­si­ty in 2018, where she majored in Envi­ron­men­tal Sci­ence and minored in Applied Math­e­mat­ics and Sta­tis­tics. She has held intern­ships at the Inde­pen­dent Sys­tem Oper­a­tor or New Eng­land (ISO-NE), study­ing envi­ron­men­tal pol­i­cy and its effect on car­bon emis­sions and ener­gy prices, and at the Ver­mont Elec­tric Pow­er Com­pa­ny (VELCO), ana­lyz­ing the impact of high renew­able pen­e­tra­tion on sys­tem sta­bil­i­ty and inte­grat­ing state renew­able goals into trans­mis­sion plan­ning procedures.

She has wide-rang­ing inter­ests that include renew­able ener­gy inte­gra­tion, grid sta­bil­i­ty, ener­gy access, and ener­gy lit­er­a­cy and education.

Nia Novella Jones

A recent grad­u­ate of North­east­ern Uni­ver­si­ty with a B.S. in Indus­tri­al Engi­neer­ing with minor in Law & Pub­lic Policy.

I intend to research the inter­sec­tion of renew­able ener­gy tech­nol­o­gy, edu­ca­tion, and specif­i­cal­ly prison edu­ca­tion pro­grams focused on STEM. Ulti­mate­ly, my goal is to work with for­mal­ly incar­cer­at­ed cit­i­zens as they pre­pare for re-entry into soci­ety. I aspire to work with renew­able ener­gy projects in Africa to ful­fill my goal as devel­op­ing into a World Class “Ener­gy” Engineer.

Castellanos, Sergio

Ser­gio Castel­lanos is a Berke­ley Ener­gy & Cli­mate Insti­tute – Tec­nológi­co de Mon­ter­rey (BECI–ITESM) Ener­gy Fel­low work­ing at the Renew­able and Appro­pri­ate Ener­gy Lab with Prof. Dan Kam­men. His research focus­es on expand­ing an opti­miza­tion mod­el –SWITCH– to Mex­i­co to deter­mine the opti­mal invest­ments in new gen­er­a­tion and trans­mis­sion assets. Through his research, he also ana­lyzes the man­u­fac­tur­ing capac­i­ty of pho­to­volta­ic solar tech­nolo­gies in Mex­i­co. Pre­vi­ous­ly, in his Ph.D. stud­ies (Mechan­i­cal Engi­neer­ing ’15, MIT) he char­ac­ter­ized the elec­tri­cal impact of struc­tur­al defects in sil­i­con-based solar cells. He enjoys read­ing, explor­ing new hob­bies, and learn­ing more about the inter­sec­tion of tech­nol­o­gy, busi­ness, and pol­i­cy in renew­able energy.

Cur­rent posi­tion:

Assis­tant Pro­fes­sor of Civ­il, Archi­tec­tur­al and Envi­ron­men­tal Engi­neer­ing, Uni­ver­si­ty of Texas, Austin

Countercyclical energy and climate policy for the U.S.

Con­tin­u­a­tion of the U.S.’s his­tor­i­cal pat­tern address­ing ener­gy prob­lems only in times of cri­sis is unlike­ly to cat­alyze a tran­si­tion to an ener­gy sys­tem with few­er adverse social impacts. Instead, the U.S. needs to bol­ster sup­port for ener­gy inno­va­tion when the per­ceived urgency of ener­gy-relat­ed prob­lems appears to be reced­ing. Because of the lags involved in both the ener­gy sys­tem and the climate sys­tem, decar­boniz­ing the econ­o­my will require extra­or­dinary per­sis­tence over decades. This need for sus­tained com­mit­ment is in con­trast to the last several decades, which have been marked by volatil­i­ty and cycles of boom and bust.  In con­trast to the often ‑repeat­ed phrase that one should ‘nev­er let a good cri­sis go to waste,’ the U.S. needs to most active­ly fos­ter ener­gy inno­va­tion when aspects of ener­gy and cli­mate prob­lems appear to be improv­ing. We describe the ratio­nale for a ‘coun­ter­cycli­cal’ approach to ener­gy and cli­mate pol­i­cy, which involves pre-com­mitment t o a set of poli­cies that go into effect once a set of trigger con­di­tions are met.

Ponce de Leon, Diego

I am work­ing on my  MS/​PhD at the Ener­gy and Resources Group (ERG). My research is in low-car­bon (low-impact) ener­gy sys­tems and eco­nom­ic devel­op­ment, mod­el­ing high renew­able ener­gy future sce­nar­ios, and deploy­ing sMArt Grid (high-tech/low-cost) pilots in the ris­ing south.  I’ve worked in Chi­a­pas (Mex­i­co) devel­op­ing region­al micro­cre­d­it schemes and riv­er sur­vey stud­ies,  designed and built ‘low-tech/high- impact’ water dis­tri­b­u­tion sys­tems for small com­mu­ni­ties in Ugan­da and Hon­duras, have used GIS mod­els and InVest (Inte­grat­ed Val­u­a­tion of Envi­ron­men­tal ser­vices and Trade­offs) to study the hydrol­o­gy of the Linthipe Basin (Malawi), and inves­ti­gat­ed link­ages between hydro­log­i­cal vari­abil­i­ty, ener­gy use, and agri­cul­ture in Pun­jab and Telan­gana (India).

My cur­rent work is in Nicaragua devel­op­ing and build­ing sce­nar­ios for the SWITCH mod­el – opti­miz­ing the pen­e­tra­tion of renew­able ener­gy into the country’s elec­tric pow­er sys­tem, and deploy­ing the country’s first micro-scale demand response pro­gram (DR) through the use of ‘flex­i­ble ener­gy toolkits’.

You can vis­it my web­site: dleonb​.com, LinkedIn, and Insta­gram accounts

 

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310 Barrows Hall
University of California
Berkeley, CA 94720-3050
Phone: (510) 642-1640
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Email: ergdeskb@berkeley.edu

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