Renewable and Sustainable Energy Institute

Create Integrated Energy Campus: Create a world-leading venue for energy research and education that benefits from the concentration of academic institutions, federal research laboratories, and businesses involved in the green economy along Colorado’s Front Range.

Perform Innovative Research: Develop a comprehensive and multidisciplinary approach to research that meets the scientific and institutional energy challenges of the 21st century.

Educate Energy Leaders and Workforce: Provide programs, lectures, and opportunities that prepare students to become the energy leaders of the future.

Develop Industry Partnerships: Engage industry partners in comprehensive programs involving energy research, education, policy, and technology development.

We face an unprecedented global energy challenge. Demand for energy is projected to double within the next few decades and continue to grow through the end of the century. To meet this ever-growing demand, energy industries of the 21st century need an entirely new infrastructure that produces more energy at a lower cost, uses energy far more efficiently, improves the security of supply by relying more on domestic and stable sources, and produces far fewer greenhouse gas emissions.

The scale and complexity of the energy challenge and the intense competition in the energy marketplace necessitate a comprehensive approach for developing new energy industries. A measured investment from the public and private sectors and new models for public-private partnerships are required.

Understanding the dynamics of this new marketplace and the factors governing a sustainable energy system are crucial for emerging energy industries to succeed. These systems must meet multiple requirements such as scaling to a terawatt, using readily available resources for manufacturing, and having a sustainable lifecycle.

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Arthur Nozik

The Renewable and Sustainable Energy Institute today announced its inaugural group of RASEI Fellow appointments and plans for future faculty hires to form one of the world's leading university and federal laboratory partnerships in the development and commercialization of renewable energy technologies.

RASEI, a new joint institute between the University of Colorado at Boulder and the U.S. Department of Energy's National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Golden, made the announcement at CU-Boulder's Annual Energy Research Symposium taking place today in Boulder.

"NREL and CU-Boulder, along with research colleagues from Colorado State University and the Colorado School of Mines, are already working together on a variety of critical energy technologies that will help to ensure a clean and sustainable energy supply for our nation's future," said Robert McGrath, NREL deputy laboratory director for science and technology, and one of RASEI's chief architects. "The newly established RASEI significantly strengthens the structural platform enabling CU-Boulder and NREL researchers to take full advantage of the complementary strengths resident within each institution."

A national search will be conducted for RASEI's director. In addition to creating the resources to attract a top candidate to lead the new institute, CU-Boulder plans to designate as many as 10 new faculty hires to RASEI over the next several years, with exact levels of support contingent upon the Colorado economy and the university's budget.

Institute management and decision-making will be coordinated by the new director, a private-sector Leadership Board and a set of prominent research fellows appointed from NREL and CU-Boulder. The initial 34 RASEI fellows named today include 18 from CU-Boulder and 16 from NREL.

"CU has a long history of joint institutes with national laboratories that attract the highest caliber leadership and scientific talent," said CU-Boulder Chancellor Philip P. DiStefano. "With this initiative, CU is fostering an invaluable working relationship with an important partner, and opening up new opportunities for CU researchers to collaborate with Stanford, MIT and other major American Association of Universities research institutions focusing on the development of new energy solutions."

RASEI will operate much like CU-Boulder's other independent research institutes, including JILA, which collaborates with the National Institute of Standards and Technology, and the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences, which collaborates with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

According to McGrath, "RASEI will expand and build upon the work already initiated under the Center for Revolutionary Solar Photoconversion, the Colorado Center for Biorefining and Biofuels, the Center for Research and Education in Wind and other research centers affiliated with the Colorado Renewable Energy Collaboratory."

The Collaboratory's partners include CU-Boulder, CSU, the Colorado School of Mines and NREL.

"Colorado's new energy economy is leading America toward a new energy future, and collaborations between our universities and national laboratories such as RASEI are leading the way," said Colorado Gov. Bill Ritter. "RASEI is poised to attract the best and brightest new research talent to the state of Colorado, which will also bring good jobs and advance clean energy technologies."

And with ConocoPhillips, a member of RASEI's industry-driven Leadership Board, building a new global technology center and corporate learning center at the Sun Microsystems/StorageTek site in Louisville, the new institute will spur greater overall investment in new energy development in Colorado, now seen as a national hub for clean energy technology creation. The new ConocoPhillips center will handle research and development of renewable energy and high-tech carbon fuels recovery.

"One of the key reasons ConocoPhillips plans to locate its new global technology center and corporate learning center in Colorado is the exceptional research talent pool in close proximity to our proposed campus," said Stephen Brand, ConocoPhillips' senior vice president for technology. "As a long-time collaborator with CU-Boulder, and member of the RASEI Leadership Council, ConocoPhillips is committed to making this new institute a world-class success."