(THE PICKET) To kick off the events of inauguration day on April 8, President Mary Hendrix held a public symposium to discuss the future of energy and how Shepherd University and its students can fit into it.
Titled, Inauguration Symposium: The University’s Role in Translating Energy Challenges into Business and Employment Opportunities, the event featured Michael Polsky, the CEO of the world’s largest privately-held renewable energy generation company, Invenergy; Xingbo Liu, professor and associate chair of research at the Benjamin M. Statler College of Engineering and Mineral Resources at West Virginia University; and Shepherd University’s Professor Jeffrey Groff, associate professor at Shepherd’s Institute of Environmental and Physical Sciences.
Originally to be held in Erma Ora Byrd, the event was moved to the Frank Center Theater to accommodate the much larger than expected crowd. The theater’s seats were packed with business men, university officials from Shepherd and beyond, and students curious about how Shepherd is planning on keeping up with the world’s changing energy industry, a topic that is relevant in a major energy producing state such as West Virginia.
Polsky promotes the idea of a diversified energy portfolio, and his companies have operated everything from coal fired and natural gas fueled plants, to wind farms. Invenergy also operates one of the largest utility scale battery storage programs in the country. Battery storage is becoming a necessity with intermittently available power sources such as wind and solar on the rise.
Polsky was quick to admit his current push toward renewable energy and battery storage wasn’t for ideological reasons, but because it made business sense as the world moves away from fossil fuels.
“We can’t shy away from honest dialogue about the changing world,” he said.
Polsky said Shepherd can be a “beacon for change” in renewable energy, and praised the school’s sustainability site behind the Bryd Center, where the university’s environmental studies students and faculty perform research with wind turbines, photovoltaics, biofuels, and alternative agricultural techniques.
Shepherd University’s sustainability site, where university students and teachers perform research on alternative energy and agricultural practices.
At the event, he also announced the new Beech Ridge Energy Facility internship program, where every year his company will accept a Shepherd student to work and learn at his company’s Beech Ridge Facility over the summer.
Liu focused more on the technical aspects of energy. He opened his talk with the little-known fact that two thirds of energy produced for the grid is lost. Energy demand is in a constant state of flux throughout the day and what isn’t used up is almost instantly lost due to a lack of storage capacity. Because of this, to prevent rolling blackouts more energy must be produced than is used at any given time. The electricity flowing through your home wasn’t generated any more than a few seconds ago, he said.
For this reason, Liu said there is opportunity in the further development and deployment of grid-scale battery-storage systems, believing them to be a “game changer,” which would reduce the demand for energy production and make technologies such as wind and solar more viable.
He also spoke about how emerging technologies such as solid oxide fuel cells and integrated gasification fuel cells can greatly reduce the environmental impact of human carbon emissions with more research and development to improve performance and reduce costs.
Liu criticized shale gas as an alternative for coal, noting that 17 percent of what’s extracted from the earth is lost through leakage and that the motors operating on the drilling pads are operated using diesel engines, “the least efficient technology out there.” Natural gas is composed of methane and is a greenhouse gas 72 times more potent than carbon dioxide.
Dr. Groff spoke as a strong proponent of small scale residential energy. In fact, he designed and built his own photovoltaic array in his backyard, which now produces a third of the energy consumed in his home.
One of the major benefits of small scale distributed solar is that it doesn’t require the development of hundreds or thousands of acres of new land, instead taking up space in people’s own yards and rooftops. Also, even though such arrays are not part of a centrally controlled utility, they can still be connected to the grid to allow for shareable energy. Some electric companies will even pay customers who produce more energy than they use and put the extra back onto the grid.
Groff also took time to mention Solar Holler and Mosaic Power as companies trying to make residential energy generation more accessible. Solar Holler is a company for helping affordable housing organizations, churches, and non-profits across the state fund their own solar projects, including the Shepherdstown Presbyterian Church. Mosaic Power describes themselves as “making it possible to control, store and use energy more efficiently in a flexible power grid,” by matching customers’ water heater electricity use with small surges in power availability on the grid as a sort of “virtual power plant.”
Groff discussed how rapidly solar power generation has grown in the past years, attributable in part to favorable tax credits and power purchase agreement models, but was sure to keep the audience’s expectations reasonable. At the current rate of growth, solar power would take over 120 years to match what coal produces in this country today, and that is even with coal at a 10 year low.
“We still have a long way to go,” Groff said. “I don’t want you to underestimate the amount of commitment that is needed.”
Still, he considers solar power a powerful engine for job creation, stating that between November 2014 and November 2015, one in 83 jobs produced was in solar.
Polsky, who Hendrix considers a long-time friend, immigrated to the United States in 1976 from Ukraine, part of the Soviet Union at the time. After arriving stateside, Polsky helped found energy companies Indeck, Skygen, and his current entrepreneurial venture, Invenergy. Polsky also cofounded the Clean Energy Trust, a non-profit that supports student-led startups and businessmen to commercialize new energy technologies.