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Faculty at the University of California, Santa Cruz, have organized a renewable energy program that will bring together U.S. and Danish students in Lolland, Denmark.
The Lolland California Renewable Energies (LoCal-RE) program is an international collaboration involving three UC campuses--Santa Cruz, Davis, and Merced--and Denmark's Roskilde University and Technical University of Denmark. About 20 UC students and 20 Danish students, both undergraduates and graduates, will take part this summer.
The students will visit communities in Lolland, where a variety of renewable energy sources are being used, and they will work with experts to study these projects. Such hands-on, project-based learning will give them a better grasp of the complexities involved in the global push to shift from fossil fuels to sustainable and renewable forms of energy, said program organizer Ali Shakouri, a professor of electrical engineering in UCSC's Baskin School of Engineering.
Lolland, a municipality south of Copenhagen has signed a "green partnership resolution" with the City of Santa Cruz.
Lolland's projects include large-scale facilities such as the Nysted Offshore Wind Farm (the world's largest), the Vestas Wind Systems blade factory, as well as "community test beds" for renewable energy sources that don't yet exist commercially. For instance, researchers at the Hydrogen Community on Lolland recently completed a project using wind power to generate hydrogen gas and pump it through pipes into several houses. They then used another device to convert hydrogen in these houses to electricity and heat. Bioenergy plants are also a big feature in Lolland.
Shakouri will be joining the students in Denmark this summer as one of five members of the program's teaching staff. The others include Joel Kubby, associate professor of electrical engineering at UCSC, Bryan Jenkins, professor of biological and agricultural engineering at UC Davis, and two faculty members from the participating Danish universities.
Eight of the U.S. students participating in LoCal-RE this summer hail from UCSC. At the end of the summer program, each student will write one chapter of a final research report covering analyses of renewable energy problems, solutions from Lolland that might be useful in their home communities, and recommendations for the future. Shakouri and the other participating faculty members are also discussing the potential for graduate-level exchange programs between universities in Denmark and California, along with internship opportunities at various renewable energy companies.
Next year, LoCal-RE will be held on U.S. soil; students will spend two weeks at UCSC and another two at the NASA Ames Research Center in Silicon Valley. According to Shakouri, California is of great interest to Danish researchers as a state with some of the most progressive laws for increasing the use of renewable energy and for encouraging sustainable development. The state is also home to many innovative start-up companies in green technologies, he said.
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