This Tuesday at Change, Professor Dan Schwartz will talk about his work on community-based renewable energy research.
Since 2008, a diverse group of UW Ph.D. students from the colleges of engineering, environment, and built environment have worked with the Yakama Nation and Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes to explore the ecologic, economic, and societal implications of renewable energy. These Columbia River Basin tribes seek to manage natural resources on their ~1.2 million acre reservations to meet the needs of current and future generations. Our main focus has been on bioenergy as a tool to address the economic, ecologic, and societal aspects of western forests that are no longer resilient to disturbances (fire, insects, drought, etc). Community-based renewable energy research is described via 2 tribal case studies. I then will describe the development of the "pyrolysis blanket" a radically simple technology innovation that was created to address a need found in all the remote and resource-limited communities where we worked. Tribal partnership projects are now being developed across nine Northwest Universities as part of the Northwest Advanced Renewables Alliance, the largest research grant every awarded by the USDA. Professor Daniel Schwartz the Chair of the Chemical Engineering Department at the University of Washington. His main research interests lie in electrochemical nanoscience and microtechnology. These interests date back to the mid-1980s, when he got his first cleanroom experience at Cybernex Corp, now part of Western Digital. In recent years, Dan has become interested in the ways that technology, economics, ecology, and people interact to define the success or failure of renewable energy projects. He leads NSF and USDA-sponsored Ph.D. training programs that explore these interactions in partnership with several Northwest Native American tribes. What: Professor Dan Schwartz on Tribal partnership projects: A model for community-based renewable energy research. When: Tuesday, November 20th at 12 noon Where: The Allen Center, room CSE 203
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