The project will enable academic exchange and collaborative research on matters of renewable energies with specialists of important foreign research centers, like Lancaster University, UK, and the Institute of Technology Assessment of the Austrian Academy of Sciences, Austria.
The Network Project 140007 Isolated Energy Communities, led by the director of the Institute for Advanced Studies (IDEA, in Spanish), Dr Cristián Parker, was awarded funds by the National Commission for Scientific and Technological Research (Conicyt, in Spanish), in the 2014 Contest “Support to the formation of international networks among research centers”.
On November 13th, at the IDEA facilities of Universidad de Santiago, a letter of intent was signed by two important research centers that formalized their participation in an international research network: Lancaster University, UK, and the Institute of Technology Assessment of the Austrian Academy of Sciences, Austria.
The participants in this meeting were the substitute director of IDEA, Dr Fernando Estenssoro; the researcher in charge of the project in Chile, Dr Cristián Parker; the national co-researcher, Dr Gloria Baigorrotegui; the researcher responsible for Austria, Dr Michael Ornetzeder, and the researcher for the UK, Gordon Walker.
Energy Communities
“The purpose is to make possible an academic exchange, at a researcher level, to understand what energy communities are,” Dr Parker said with regard to the objective of the project.
“We are in a period in which energy systems are being transformed and we are moving forward to renewable energies. But technologies are not something you implement on the first try: they are developed when they are accepted and adapted to the different needs and requirements of each community,” he said.
He specified that the idea is to study the research works on energy communities conducted in Europe and then promote their implementation in our country.
“We have selected two very interesting [research] groups for their progress, one in Austria (Institute of Technology Assessment of the Austrian Academy of Sciences) and one in the UK (Lancaster University), in such a way that we can have a benchmark and see how to promote the development of energy communities with renewable energies in Chile,” he said.
According to Dr Gloria Baigorrotegui, the European experience is interesting because, “there, in the seventies, they started without any funding, maybe in similar conditions to the ones we have today, but with a more economically promising and more advanced technological development.”
“These are the ways in which communities somehow organize their own energy systems and keep the benefits for themselves,” Dr Baigorrotegui added.
The project
The project involves seminars, publications in international indexed journals, as well as cooperation agreements that are being established with foreign institutions to continue with new research works and academic collaborations.
As the project has a multidisciplinary approach, it gathers academics of different areas, like Dr Fernando Estenssoro; Dr Ingeborg Mahla, professor at the Department of Electric Engineering, and Dr María Teresa Santander, professor at the Department of Industrial Engineering, among others
This project will help to extend the use of renewable energies in different communities, in different places of the country. It seeks to learn from the European experiences in these matters.
Universidad de Santiago’s hallmark
This project is in accordance with the social focus of our university, which impact should aim to solve the fundamental challenges of national development, in a creative way.
Translated by Marcela Contreras
