Grid Vs Evil - Project Overview
“The US grid is aging. It is failing in ways we never believed it would fail. It’s being threatened by climate change. So wildfires, hurricanes, tornadoes, winter storms - pretty much every year we have a horror story where people die and billions of dollars of destruction.” Keri Baker
One of Mission Zero’s funded capstone projects is to challenge students to build an exhibit that helps teach people the importance of modernizing the US electrical grid by supporting more renewable energy, reducing the carbon impact on the grid as well as transitioning from gas cars to electric cars.
“Electrical vehicles are such a good asset for the grid and the consumer because they double up on benefits. Considering we have a ton of wind in the midwest, but most of our load centers are on the coast. So Putting up a new transition line could take over a decade whereas we could have these decently size mobile storage devices that can help take power from cheap, abundant areas into more expensive congested areas. This benefits cost and resiliency.”
These electrical students are currently in a critical stage of their project prototyping all the concepts they’ve spent months coming up with.
This overview video was shot in early December before the devastating Colorado Marshall fire took place, but these students were already voicing their concerns about climate change and its increasing effects.
“We live somewhere where forest fires happen pretty often, and with the smoke rolling in and you can smell it - climate change is here.“ Carson Berg
“It’s December 2nd and 72 degrees in Boulder. I’ve accepted this as the biggest problem of our generation. None of the other problems really matter if we can’t fix this one” Alex Burg.
These students believe the greatest challenge of this project is sharing this story with others - because with just a car and some lights and a little tablet, how much can you really get across. They hope people will walk away thinking perhaps our current grid isn’t really working and there could be a better solution.
“Short-term goal is to get an A in capstone, long-term goals are to educate people how about how we can use these electric vehicles as well as mass battery storage and renewable sources to actually make a carbon-neutral grid.”
Alex Burg