CNIC: U.S.-Danish Planning Visit for Research on Smart Products and People on the Smart Grid

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Through this planning visit, Prof. Alice Agogino of the University of California-Berkeley will initiate cooperative research with Danish partners to further our understanding of human-centered, community assessment of renewable energy and sustainability, with an emphasis on smart products and Smart Grid use. Her counterpart, Prof. Ulrik Jorgensen and colleagues at the Technical University of Denmark, in Copenhagen, have established expertise in engineering education and user involvement in design and innovation, thereby complementing the U.C.-Berkeley team's strengths in energy and sustainable technologies. Together their goal is to refine plans for a longer-term U.S.-Danish research partnership aimed at integrating sustainable technologies (buildings, products, and systems) with demand response and the Smart Grid. If successful, the resulting collaboration should lead to a larger interdisciplinary research effort focused on sustainable product innovation using embedded, distributed sensor networks; data and sensor validation and fusion; and environmental machine monitoring to promote energy conservation. Participating U.S. graduate students will gain valuable early career exposure to an international professional network that should yield opportunities for expanding their own research as future faculty.Professors Agogino and Jorgensen also plan to integrate research on the role that curricula and pedagogy play in improving our basic understanding of how to reduce environmental impact through sustainable design. The US-Danish team will pursue this by building on lessons learned from Demark's Smart Grid implementations to collect case studies, sustainable design methods, and curricula for dissemination. This will be done through an online portal called "TheDesignExchange." Their objective is to facilitate the capture, analysis and use of research results via a large, virtual public library of proven tools for use by educators and practitioners. The cooperating research partners maintain that giving consumers, governments and corporations access to the latest data, models, and solutions has the potential broader impact of accelerating wider adoption of sustainable solutions that enable communities to reduce unwanted environmental impacts associated with human activities.