University of Albany's College of Nanoscale Science and Engineering aids global energy quest

ALBANY -- The University at Albany's College of Nanoscale Science and Engineering has been chosen to represent New York in a new international renewable energy consortium formed by the United States and Sweden.

The NanoCollege will join the state university system of Minnesota as well as the University of Georgia and the Georgia Institute of Technology in what is called the International Renewable Energy Technology Institute.

The NanoCollege's 10-year-old Energy and Environmental Technology Applications Center, also known as the E2TAC, will lead the school's participation in the institute. E2TAC is led by professor Pradeep Haldar.

The NanoCollege also will be aided by two state agencies, the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority and the New York State Foundation for Science, Technology and Innovation, and its architecture firm, Einhorn Yaffee Prescott Architecture & Engineering.

Alain Kaloyeros, chief administrative officer of the NanoCollege, said Sweden is well-known for its high-tech development and renewable-energy products, and the purpose of the institute will be to commercialize renewable-energy technologies in the United States and Europe. That means everything from fuel cells to solar energy and bio-mass technologies.

The school has assembled $10 million in private and public funding over the next three years to underwrite its participation in the institute, with more money possible in the future through additional sources like the U.S. Department of Energy.

Kaloyeros said the college's participation in the institute will mesh well with its plans to create a new $60 million zero-energy building that will subsist on its own nonpolluting energy sources and house its growing number of environmental and energy researchers.

That building is being planned for land the college owns north of its existing Fuller Road campus, on the opposite side of the Washington Avenue Extension.

Courtesy: LARRY RULISON