Scott Morgan, Evergreen’s Director of Sustainability, sent us this advice and suggestions in response to our request for his support of your winter quarter energy projects:

“I have a few thoughts, for what they’re worth. Feel free to tell me what you want/need, and I’ll respond specifically as those questions come up. Of course, I’m looking at infrastructure-level projects, so these ideas may be beyond the scope of work you’ll be focused on.

1. I’m sure you all understand this, and it may already be a contextual assumption, but I’ve spoken with many students who do not realize the losses involved in transforming one energy resource into another. I would encourage making that context explicit and asking students to define the actual amount of energy available before transformation. Applied energy projects must consider those losses, along with productive capacity and costs in comparison to other existing resources. I love the idea of human powered generation – bikes, treadmills, hamster wheels, playground equipment – and piezo-electric surfaces. But, those strategies seldom prove out because we’re trying to tap a small resource with an inefficient generator/transformative process, so the actual output is trivial.
2. As far as projects are concerned, we have small solar PV, solar thermal, compost heat recovery, and human-power projects (exercise bikes and a treadmill) on campus. We also have the large natural gas boiler – simple combustion – but it’s worth providing a sense of the relative energy density of our available resources. Speculatively, we’ve looked into syn-gas (biomass gasification), hog fuel boilers, anaerobic digestion for methane, natural gas fuel cells, a couple different applications of heat pumps, and wind turbines (very briefly). Personally, I would love to see demonstration-scale micro-hydro and hydrogen combustion or fuel cells. Also, energy storage systems – batteries or otherwise – are an important component of renewable energy systems. That’s a valuable area of research. None of the aforementioned technologies are going to work for us at the campus scale, but they could be very interesting demonstration projects. We have not considered nuclear, though a few past students have been very excited about Thorium reactors. I don’t know enough about that technology to judge.
3. Given that you’re aiming for literature research, it would be nice if some of the projects included engineering analyses of systemic performances, as well as the basic physics and/or chemistry of energy transformation.
4. As for contacts, I can help make connections with folks at WSU Energy, the Dept of Commerce (bio and renewable energy), a local solar PV manufacturer and a PV installer, LOTT’s anaerobic digester and methane-fueled co-generation system, along with a few others in the region.

Let me know what you need, and I’ll do my best to help.”