Renewable Energy Education at Merrimack College

This paper describes recent, ongoing and planned Renewable Energy (RE) education at Merrimack College.The primary RE education efforts have been through the department of Electrical Engineering (EE), with involvement from the department of Civil Engineering.In summer of 2009 the college installed a solar hot water (SHW) system in one of its student townhouses.The subjects of the advanced EE elective "Energy Measurement and Display" in summer 2009 were the selection of sensors to measure energy delivered by this SHW unit, and the uploading via Ethernet of real time data to a central server.The EE department requires all students to take "Embedded Controller Design", and as a sequel a PIC based independent study focusing on sensing and evaluating energy consumption is presently under way.A number of Energy Savings and Power Quality independent studies have taken place over the past several years, with students developing embedded applications for measurement and assessment of donated Power Quality /Energy Savings systems.