Scott Minos, Senior Policy & Communications Specialist with the U.S. Department of Energy recently visited the Texas A&M campus to learn more about energy initiatives at the Energy Institute and at Texas A&M. During his visit, Mr. Minos spoke to two groups of faculty and students as part of a lecture series and a seminar series hosted by the Texas A&M Energy Club and the Electric Power and Power Electronics Institute (EPPEI).  

In his EPPEI presentation, Minos spoke to attendees about SmartGrid: Changing the Paradigm to Address Challenges of Electrical Power Delivery. This timely lecture explored advanced power production and delivery concepts and how they may be implemented to create economic and societal value. The goal of the lecture was to create a new approach to power by adopting new (and even radical) assumptions, notions, and definitions of power generation, delivery, and end use.

Later that evening, the TAMU Energy Club hosted Mr. Minos at their monthly meeting. Mr. Minos' presentation, Achieving and Maximizing Desired Engineering Results through Behavior Modification, was largely based on his graduate work on social architecture. Mr. Minos' lecture examined how thoughtful engineering design is able to be maximized by influencing human behavior for desired results, and how such practices are tied to professional engineering ethics.

Dr. Robert Balog, Assistant Professor, Electrical and Computer Engineering, was instrumental in arranging Minos' visit to Texas A&M. "Scott's presentation pulled us technologists in the audience outside of our proverbial box by causing us to think more holistically about the usage model for our engineering decisions. Engineers tend to be stereotypically focused on the technology inside the box and are often only peripherally, if at all, aware of the user interaction with the technology.  Scott reminded us that simply building a better mousetrap does not mean we've really developed a robust and comprehensive technology.  This is particularly relevant to energy, which cuts across all demographic segments of the population and is often weighted down with ideological and political baggage that obfuscates the merits of the underlying science and technology."

Federal support of early-stage energy research and development in the 1980s and '90s led to technologies responsible for today's US oil and gas renaissance, witnesses reminded a US House Science, Space, and Technology subcommittee. Alternative energy technologies deserve similar early-stage support now, Democrats on the Energy and Environment Subcommittee argued.

"I'm struck by the fairly dismissive arguments that alternative energy is unreliable and uncertain, and that fossil energy is a slam dunk," said Brad Miller (D-NC), the subcommittee's ranking minority member. Emerging technologies do not have fossil fuels' "incumbent economic power" and consequently deserve early-stage federal funding support, he added.

But subcommittee chairman Andy Harris (R-Md.) said the Obama administration seems to condemn certain potential energy resources without considering ways to improve their extraction.

"This was clearly illustrated in May when [the US Department of Energy's] assistant secretary for fossil energy testified to the subcommittee that oil shale was a component of the administration's all-of-the-above energy strategy," Harris said. "Yet when pressed, he acknowledged DOE was not spending any funding on oil shale R&D, and could not identify anything the administration was doing to actively advance oil shale."

He said the Obama administration is similarly inconsistent toward shale gas production, which it has applauded, since the US Environmental Protection Agency and 13 other federal agencies and offices are trying to find new ways to regulate hydraulic fracturing.

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Excerpt from an article in MySA.com

By Jennifer Hiller

Updated 8:08 p.m., Wednesday, November 28, 2012

A $1.7 million U.S. Energy Department grant will go to Texas A&M University researchers in San Antonio.

The group will develop a way to generate electricity from low-temperature waste heat - one of 66 cutting-edge projects across the county selected for funding by the Energy Department's Advanced Research Projects Agency.

The department announced $130 million in grant awards Wednesday. The program looks for projects with technical promise that haven't attracted private-sector investors.

The grant will go to the San Antonio arm of the Texas Center for Applied Technology, a seven-member group affiliated with the engineering school of A&M's main College Station campus and the Engineering Experiment Station, the engineering research agency for the state and also part of the A&M system.

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Dae-Hyun Choi, a graduate student, and Dr. Le Xie, an assistant professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Texas A&M University, recently received the Best Paper Award at the Third IEEE International Conference on Smart Grid Communications (SmartGridComm) in Tainan City, Taiwan.

Choi and Xie won the award for their paper titled "Malicious Ramp-Induced Temporal Data Attack in Power Market with Look-ahead Dispatch." Their paper presented a new class of false data injection attacks on state estimation, which may lead to financial arbitrage in real-time power markets with an emerging look-ahead dispatch model. In comparison, with prior work of cyber attacks on static dispatch where no inter-temporal ramping constraint is considered, they proposed a novel attack strategy with which the attacker can manipulate, in look-ahead dispatch, the limits of ramp constraints of generators.

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The SMU Geothermal Lab is hosting a Geothermal Energy Utilization conference March 12-14, 2013 on the SMU Campus in Dallas, TX to bring together the geothermal and oil & gas communities.  The conference, entitled

A Geothermal 101 Short Course will be held prior to the start of the conference and will provide a great introduction to the geothermal industry.  A discounted rate will be available for students wishing to attend.

For more information and to register, visit the conference web site at http://smu.edu/geothermal/Oil&Gas/GeothermalEnergyUtilization.htm or contact Maria Richards, mrichard@smu.edu, 214-768-1975.

With a generous donation of $40,000 from ConocoPhillips, the Energy Institute awarded eight fellowships to support outstanding graduate students doing energy research.  Over 40 applicants from 16 departments were nominated for this competitive award.  The award recipients are known as "Energy Institute Fellows."

Each month, a Fellow will be featured in the highlights section of News Briefs.  This month's featured Fellow is Norimichi Nanami who is a PhD student in the department of Mechanical Engineering.

Norimichi's research project is entitled "Assessment of a Multi-Section Modular Composite Wind Turbine Blade."  For a brief abstract of Norimichi's research, click here.   

To see the complete listing of EI Fellows, visit our web site at http://energy.tamu.edu.

You keep hearing about all of the energy research going on around Texas A&M University but do you know who is doing the research? That information, and more, can be found on the Energy Institute's web site at our new web address energy.tamu.edu.

Currently, there are nearly 150 faculty researchers listed by research area - Bioenergy, Electric Power, Energy Efficiency, Geothermal, Nuclear, Oil & Gas, Solar and Wind. Clicking on the desired research area will take you to a page specific to that area. Once there, click on the "Faculty Expertise" tab which will direct you to a listing of all of the faculty members doing research in that area and their areas of expertise.

If you are involved in energy research at Texas A&M University and are not listed on the EI web site and would like to be, please contact Robyn Pearson at rlpearson@tamu.edu.