Collaborative Field Course in Brazil: January 2015

This course is designed to enable students to get to know course faculty in a way that is impossible during standard, term-time classes. Take advantage of the opportunity. In response to positive feedback from previous course participants, we have given even greater emphasis to site visits this year. We will explore the largest water reuse project in the Southern Hemisphere; the Operational Control Center of São Paulo’s modern, busy, and too-small-for-existing-demand metro system; the Emergency Management Center for forecasting and monitoring of the city’s weather; the University of São Paulo’s Photovoltaic Systems Laboratory; the Cantareira system of five interconnected reservoirs that serve 9 million city inhabitants; and the first manufacturer of large wind turbines in South America.

January 2015 course will commence on the 11th.

 

 

by Antonio Sweet '14

Back at the Ranch…

Passport?  Check.  Notebook?  Check.  Bug spray?  Check.  A backup notebook and extra pens? Check. Before beginning the course, I anticipated that I would gain a lot – information that would reinforce my academic studies, inspiration for class projects in the coming year, and expand my perspective on energy issues beyond my American prism.  While all of these came quickly, they did not scratch the surface on how deeply this program changed me.  Around this time of year as students are attending internship info sessions, I typically sort through the listings by location.  For three summers in a row, my internships have been close to home largely because they offered great experiences and because I couldn’t see myself working anywhere else.  However, this course in Brazil helped me see that breaking out of my bubble, while very risky, can be incredibly freeing and can open doors to incredible opportunities that were not imaginable before.  Visiting sophisticated research facilities, complicated manufacturing plants, and influential government agencies made me realize that my return to Brazil in any capacity was more of a possibility than I expected.  The representatives that we met with – academic, professional, and otherwise – were uniformly hospitable and welcoming, but most importantly, they were encouraging.  Now, I can see myself making the same moves that former students have made by preparing myself to make that leap of faith.  I plan on taking a Portuguese class to reduce the language barrier and I will actively work with the DRCLAS office in Brazil this semester to make this former fantasy a reality.  I cannot thank the DRCLAS and the Brazil office staff enough for making this one of the best experiences of my life and for guiding me through what promises to be a very challenging journey.

by Arthur Sentomo Gama Santos, 3rd Year

After having two weeks of hard work and going to Lectures and amazing site visits through the states of São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro I began to link all of the pieces together. I realized that both countries are facing major problems. Brazil relies on the wet season to fill in the reservoirs and US depends a lot on fossil fuels. Even though there are some problems we saw the solution too. The lectures provided us vast knowledge on many the ways to produce green energy and understand the challenges that the engineers will have to face in the coming years to change the current scenario.

During the course we also had the opportunity to make friends that we will have for the rest of our lives.

José Marcos Bressane, EPE

By Natalia Margarido (Poli-UPS) and Kim Smet (SEAS)

 

Visits to EPE and ONS

After ten days of intense lectures and site visits all the pieces of Brazil’s energy system finally fell into place with meetings at EPE and ONS in Rio de Janeiro. The earlier portion of the course focused on the different power generation sources, providing detailed technical information such as turbine types, capacity factors and efficiency. Today, these individual pieces were constructed into the bigger picture, looking at overall system operation and future planning.
 

At EPE, we had the opportunity to hear about the energy plans for Brazil in the coming decades and were introduced to some of the research that is conducted there. In particular, the future plans to increase wind power generation were an interesting case of complementarity: wind is strongest in the dry season making it a perfect addition to the current hydropower-reliant energy matrix. 

ONS constitutes the day-to-day decision-making agency responsible for running the integrated power system. From a NASA-like control room, engineers use the output of hydrologic and optimization models to provide specific instructions regarding which power sources should be producing energy on any given day and at what capacity. The ongoing energy shortage in Brazil added additional gravity to our visit, raising questions about the future reliability of the system.

Despite only spending 22 hours in Rio de Janeiro, we managed to squeeze in a quick walk on the beach and had some great sightseeing from the bus. So while this certainly was not a long enough visit, we got a brief glimpse of life in this vibrant city.  

Kim is a Ph.D. candidate in Environmental Engineering, Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences

 




Natália is a 6th-year undergraduate student in Environmental Engineering, Poli-USP - Escola Politécnica da Universidade de São Paulo

By Ligia Monteiro

The site visit to Operador Nacional do Sistema (ONS) was in my opinion one of the best experiences in the field course. ONS is a national organization that decides every day how much energy will be generated by each hydropower and thermopower plants. This decision is based on the results of an optimization model that aims to minimize the energy generation costs and, consequently, maximize the hydropower dispatch as reliable as possible.

So far, I think that this visit was the most remarkable. I've been working in an undergraduate research position since 2011 within a project that aims to develop a new programming model to optimize the hydropower dispatch. I've studied a lot about the ONS and how the decisions are made. Therefore, the opportunity to finally be there, visit the operation center and ask questions was really important to me. Now I feel that my research, expected to finish next February, is almost complete!

Lugia is a 4th-year undergraduate student in Environmental Engineering at Poli-USP - Escola Politécnica da Universidade de São Paulo.

By Jason Smith ‘15

This course has truly been an incredible experience on so many levels. As my first time out of the country, coming to Brazil has taught me so much, not only about Brazil, but about the United States as well. Every presentation we have seen, and every site visit has been directly applicable to environmental and renewable energy technology, and I have been soaking it up as much as possible. Perhaps even more important has been the opportunity to build lasting relationships with so many new people. Surrounded by some of the best faculty in the world, I have been able to have fascinating conversations with professors on everything from hydrogen electrolysis to climate change from agriculture. The network of students I have met has brought me much closer to some of the ones I already knew from Harvard, and created a new group of friends from Brazil that are not only valuable as educational connections, but as meaningful relationships as well.