Commercial, Sourcing Renewables  -  August 15, 2023

UConn, UAlbany Researchers Partner on New Climate Center 

Researchers at the University of Connecticut (UConn) and the University at Albany (UAlbany) will lead a new weather and climate facility and research renewable energy options.

The Center for Weather Innovation and Smart Energy and Resilience (WISER) is an Industry-University Cooperative Research Center (IUCRC), which were designed to help corporate partners and government agencies connect directly and efficiently with university researchers to conduct research, drive technology development and develop a high-tech, skilled workforce.

The new center will be supported by a $750,000 National Science Foundation (NSF) grant for each institution and a five-year, $3.7 million industry partnership membership fee. 

WISER’s research will focus on renewable energy in the forms of solar, hydropower, and wind; power outage management; electrical grid resilience brought on by extreme weather; and ways climate change impacts power producers and power distributors.

The center seeks to use the research and expertise at UConn and UAlbany to create advanced weather- and climate-based solutions for the energy industry.

Chris Thorncroft, director of UAlbany’s Atmospheric Sciences Research Center, and Emmanouil “Manos” Anagnostou, director of UConn’s Eversource Energy Center, are leading WISER for their respective universities.

“We envision WISER to become a leading energy industry-academia partnership, advancing research and cutting-edge technologies to continually improve power grid efficiency and reliability in the face of a changing climate and transition to clean energy,” said Anagnostou, a Board of Trustees Distinguished Professor and Eversource Energy Endowed Chair in Environmental Engineering at UConn, in a statement.

WISER’s industry partners currently include IBM, Eversource, National Grid, and Avangrid. The WISER research team includes 13 faculty from UAlbany’s Atmospheric Sciences Research Center, Department of Atmospheric and Environmental Sciences and College of Emergency Preparedness, Homeland Security and Cybersecurity and 16 faculty from UConn’s School of Engineering, School of Business, and the College of Agriculture, Health, and Natural Resources. Anagnostou and Thorncroft welcome additional industries and faculty to join WISER and collaborate on projects and share ideas.

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