TL;DR - Graduate school is going well. I have a few projects I share below including some policy papers, a debate, and a technology review!

Well folks, the first semester of the program has come and gone, and now I have a swath of time to reflect on it. There was a number of projects that I thought were quite fascinating, so I'll speak to the take aways from those as well as some of the overall subject matter.

Energy Systems and Technologies

This class gave a top level overview of power generating technologies and their interaction with the energy grid. Taught by Josh Radoff, the class centered around excel modeling for different power plants and content from curated guest speakers on topics spanning batteries to distributed energy resources.

For this class I wrote a short paper on Virtual Power Plants and specifically, Distributed Energy Resource Management systems. The software considerations for the technology is complex and very groovy. Check out my developer archives for more information on them.

Sustainable Energy Policy

Elizabeth Doris and Faith Smith covered the energy policies put in place since the environmental movement sparked legislative change in the 1970's. After the oil embargo, changes in the investement for renewables boosted nuclear, solar, and wind projects. The decades following Rachel Carson's Silent Spring and the rise of Envrionmental advoacacy, policy changes in energy began to promote cleaner sources of generation.

The paper I wrote was a policy brief suggesting pathways for ARPA-E's current director to pursue in order to promote Long Duration Energy Storage. I had never written a policy brief before, so I think the research component was strong for this paper, but the recommendations and guidance I put forward could have been more presciptive.

Scientific Basis for Environmental Change

The core to this class was rooted in science that is so well established it's dumbfounding just how many problems we continue to create. Though the subject matter is was in many ways disheartening, thanks to Meghan McCarroll I still found positive takeaways around the innovations and progress we have made so far. We have a lot of environmental intervention left to make so let's do all that we can!

The class would reflect on topics covered in lecture, one being geoengineering. For those unfamiliar with this debate, it is essentially questioning whether we create large scale intervention strategies with a host of potential consequences. My position is pretty clear: let's use the mechanisms we have in place now, just invest in them more before we make potentially irreversible changes to our environments and planet.

Foundations of Environmental Policy

This course was the most in depth and transformative for my personal understanding of policy and it's place in our world. The Chevron Doctrine, Loper Bright, and the commerce clause were clear and distinct peices to how we manage ecosystems, and the outcomes of litigation and common law. Gregor MacGregor is a talented lecturer with a wealth of knowledge at his fingertips.

We were responsible for a 15 page policy brief to cover the potential deployment of a Small Modular Reactor in Colorado Springs. It involved a lot of research on the political, social, infrastructural, and informational aspects of project development.