Federal Energy Funding Helps Duke Design a More “Risk-Aware” Energy Grid

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Dalia Patino-Echeveri, associate professor in the Environmental Science and Policy Division of the Nicholas School of the Environment, and her team, including PhD students Mauricio Hernandez and Xiaodong Zhang.

Support for the project comes from ARPA-E, a federal agency within the Department of Energy (DOE) focused on  research and development of advanced energy technologies.

Patino-Echeverri said the institutional support GRACE has received from the government, “has been fundamental, allowing us to collaborate with other teams. It has allowed us to advance our research in ways that just the provision of funding would have not."

Duke is thankful to both DOE and ARPA-E for the crucial support they have provided numerous researchers across the university. For instance, DOE also supports Triangle Universities Nuclear Laboratory (TUNL), a fundamental nuclear physics consortium between Duke, UNC-Chapel Hill, North Carolina Central University and North Carolina State University. ARPA-E has supported Professor David R. Smith’s research on Smarter Sensors, a residential sensor system to detect human presence beyond traditional line-of-sight sensors. And Professor Jeff Glass’s development of an ARPA-E supported  “coded aperture” technology could lead to portable mass spectrometers that could be used to detect environmental or safety hazards.