Renewable energy workshop brings together industry, government, and academia

A workshop on renewable energy organized by the UC Santa Cruz Center for Sustainable Energy and Power Systems (CenSEPS) will take place August 1 and 2 in Milpitas. Titled "The Road to a 100 Percent Renewable Energy System," it will feature panel discussions and presentations from leading research projects in the United States and Denmark.

"Our goal is to bring together various researchers from both the technological side and the social/economic side to discuss the needs and limitations for implementing more renewable energy into our national and local systems," said CenSEPS co-director Michael Isaacson, the Kapany Professor of Electrical Engineering in the Baskin School of Engineering at UC Santa Cruz.

The workshop will focus on distributed energy generation with components including photovoltaic and photothermal systems, wind turbines, wave and tidal generation, biomass, electric vehicles, and other forms of energy generation and storage. Presentations and discussions will address the challenges of integrating these elements onto the local power grid while maintaining stability. The workshop will also address social, economic, and environmental considerations and implications.

The workshop is funded by the Danish Agency for Science and Technology Innovation (DASTI), the Center for  Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society (CITRIS), and CenSEPS. It is being held in conjunction with the California-Denmark Summer School on Renewable Energy.

Confirmed speakers/presenters include:
•    Patricia, Hoffman, U.S. Department of Energy
•    Brian Vad Mathiesen, Aalborg University
•    Andrew Burke, UC Davis
•    Morten Blarke, Aalborg University
•    Francesco Marra, The Technical University of Denmark
•    Dina Biscotti, UC Davis
•    Arne Remmen, Aalborg University
•    Shi You, The Technical University of Denmark
•    Woodrow Clark, Clark Strategic Partners
•    Jonathan Trent, NASA Ames Research Center
•    Randy Katz, UC Berkeley
•    Ali Shakouri, UC Santa Cruz
•    Max Wei, Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory
•    Lee Ackerson, Soquel Energy
•    Bill Ahlgren, Calpoly, San Luis Obispo