You’re invited! MSL produces 3rd Annual NM Energy Summit
MSL is once again producing the annual NM Distributed Energy Summit (virtual). Please join us on Zoom for this important event:
Category: partners
MSL Teams with NMSU, NREL for DOE Proposal
MSL has teamed with New Mexico State University and The National Renewable Energy Laboratory (an MSL Member) for a proposal to the U.S. Department of Energy’s Established Program to Stimulate Competitive Research (EPSCoR) program, for a Building EPSCoR-State/DOE-National Laboratory Partnerships grant. The team’s proposal, “Building a federated learning framework for trustworthy and resilient energy internet of things (eIoT) infrastructure,” focuses on Federated Machine Learning (FML). It was selected by DOE at the pre-proposal stage for full proposal submission, and it approaches several FML-related aspects of smart grid data architectures and applications.
Energy Sovereignty Videos Available
We are pleased to share two short videos produced by MSL’s Energy Sovereignty Institute for the Indian Energy community. The first, “Tribal Energy Sovereignty,” features interviews with a variety of experts on tribal energy and its relationship to tribal sovereignty, featuring: Joseph Kunkel (Northern Cheyenne), Co-Director of ESI and Director of the Sustainable Native Communities Design Lab; Sherralyn Sneezer (Diné), PhD student at Rochester Institute of Technology; Stan Atcitty (Diné), Distinguished Member of the Technical Staff, Sandia National Laboratories; and Tiana Suazo (Taos/Jemez Pueblo), Executive Director, Red Willow Center: (more…)
MSL Coordinates Industry Advisory Board
MSL is coordinating the newly-created Industry Advisory Board (IAB) for the NM SMART Grid Center, of which MSL is a primary partner and which is supported by a five-year NSF EPSCoR grant.
The IAB will provide feedback to the New Mexico EPSCoR Project Director, the SMART Grid Center Executive Committee, and the four individual research teams that are encompassed by the Center (SMART Grid architecture, networking, decision-support, and integration and implementation in physical testbeds like Mesa del Sol and Hardware-In-Loop environments). The feedback will focus on the relevance and value of the research performed by the four research teams to practical applications, suggestions for maximizing that value, and potential directions for sustaining research well beyond the remaining two years of the project.
We are pleased to announce these eight outstanding individuals and organizations who will serve on the IAB, and thank them for their participation:
| Name | Title | Organization |
| Matt Cannon | Research Scientist | Shell New Energy Research and Technology |
| Jon Hawkins | Associate Director, Innovation and Communication | PNM Resources |
| Gary Oppedahl | Vice President, Emerging Technologies | Emera Technologies |
| Bill Kipnis | Senior Business Development Manager | Siemens Industry |
| Astrid Atkinson | Chief Executive Officer | Camus Energy |
| Bryan Hannegan | Chief Executive Officer | Holy Cross Energy |
| Peter Lilienthal | Global Microgrid Lead | UL |
| Luis Reyes | Chief Executive Officer | Kit Carson Electric Cooperative |
SFCC Educational Microgrid Commissioned
[Editor’s note: this news post is by Frank Currie, Lead Faculty for the Distributed Energy Systems program at Santa Fe Community College (an MSL consortium Member). MSL contributed to the microgrid’s conceptual design.]
After an extensive design and development process, the “educational microgrid” at Santa Fe Community College (SFCC) – also known as the “greenhouse microgrid” and the “nanogrid” – was tested, validated, and commissioned for operation in July, 2021. The system comprises an 11,000 square-foot greenhouse, a classroom/lab building, and several distributed energy resources. As of late 2019, the greenhouse and the classroom were fed from the campus electrical distribution system and a small (12kW) PV tracking array that had been built near the greenhouse also fed into the campus distribution system. (more…)
Camus Energy Joins MSL Consortium
We are excited to announce that Camus Energy, a leader in advanced grid management software, has joined the MSL Member consortium. With a mission of “transforming the grid for a zero-carbon future,” Camus complements the MSL network’s strengths in research centers, utilities, and NGOs with its unparalleled software engineering skills and distributed systems expertise, developed over decades of senior network engineering management experience at ultra-high-performance technology companies such as Google. 
(more…)
Update: Resilient El Rito Project Applies for NM Grid Modernization Grant
Update: Resilient El Rito has completed its design phase, and based on the results of the Sandia National Laboratories modeling (see below) is now entering the engineering phase. The project partners have applied to the NM Energy, Minerals and Natural Resources Department for a Grid Modernization Pilot Project grant to cover engineering requirements, and all other prerequisites to achieve “shovel ready” status, in anticipation of availability of federal infrastructure funds in the near future. (more…)
You’re Invited! Distributed Energy Summit ’21
MSL is proud to be producing this event for the NM SMART Grid Center, and we would like to invite all those interested to attend what promises to be a stimulating series of discussions on NM’s clean energy transition and its broader implications.
We hope you can join us! (more…)
Energy Sovereignty Institute, Rochester Institute of Technology Welcome PhD Student
We are delighted to announce that Sherralyn Sneezer (Navajo/Dine) has been selected from a highly competitive field of applicants as our first PhD student in energy sovereignty research topics, via MSL’s Energy Sovereignty Institute and its partnership with the Golisano Institute for Sustainability at Rochester Institute
of Technology. Sherralyn’s research will be supervised by Dr. Nathan Williams, an Assistant Professor at the Golisano Institute, in collaboration with MSL.
(more…)
MSL Leads Resilient El Rito Project
MSL is leading the Resilient El Rito project, a proposed community resilience microgrid project in the village of El Rito, NM, based on and around the El Rito campus of Northern New Mexico College (NNMC). The village is at the end of a single electric power distribution line that traverses mountainous terrain and wilderness, and is subject to reliability and resilience challenges common to rural isolated areas, including climate-induced wildfires and winds. The project is a collaboration between NNMC and Kit Carson Electric Cooperative (KCEC), the local electric utility, advised by Camus Energy (KCEC’s technology partner) and MSL. (more…)
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