Jumping into the Manchester Energy Summer School
Nick Parker, a newly recruited Digital Marketing Officer for the Faculty of Engineering and Physical Sciences, writes about his perspective on the Manchester Energy Summer School.
As a new staff member at UoM, and neither a scientist nor engineer by training, I was excited (and a little nervous) to jump into the Manchester Energy Summer School a couple of weeks ago. Having heard that it was one of the major events on this research program’s calendar, I was hoping to get a good sense of what kinds of community, research, and learning environment this kind of event could foster.
The summer school was held over 4 sunny days in early June, in one large, drum-shaped conference room at Chancellors Hotel in Fallowfield. I was allowed to spend one full day sitting in on the lectures and workshops that UoM PhDs were to engage with.
The opening session’s research summaries covered topics ranging from talks by engineers on energy storage (Dr Rob Dryfe) and multi energy systems (Dr Pierluigi Mancarella), to discussion with social scientists on smart cities (Dr Andrew Karvonen) and Living Labs (Dr James Evans). It was interesting to see how the students were making connections between each of these disparate topics in their questions after each session. They would create links between the efficiencies created with better energy systems and the ways in which the systems could be implemented in our urban spaces specifically, and then how our own university campus can be a testing ground for those kinds of systems.
After a break to reflect on these opening sessions, discussion moved to two sessions that demonstrated the ways in which solving energy problems requires research both at the macro level and micro level. Dr Mike Bowman talked about tracking global energy demand trends, and then Charlie Baker outlined some of the ways that building community energy projects can generate efficiencies home by home. Both of these topics got the students talking about the ways our energy future needs radical solutions for such complex problems.
The largest portion of the day was devoted to an application of some of the ideas that had come up already, in trying to solve very practical problems related to our own University energy footprint. The challenge these groups of PhD students were set seemed (for me, only an interested observer) eye-wateringly complex. This didn't stop any of the students from getting into working on them keenly, and then presenting the solutions they had devised in just a couple of hours to a panel of judges, “Dragon’s Den” style.
I left the students with their challenges eagerly completed, and my challenge began: to try to sum up my day with these students and faculty members, so steeped in their research ideas and buzzing with enthusiasm about confronting the energy challenges we all face. This is not an easy task – even in just one day, I was left with a lot to think about.
As I was leaving that evening, one student I had chatted to earlier on passed me in the lobby. Even after more than 9 hours of the day’s sessions, he said “sorry, I won’t be able to answer your questions for now… I need to get back in there!” and disappeared into the conference room.
Find out more information about this event, including news, research outline videos with students, and interviews at: http://www.energy.manchester.ac.uk/news-and-events/events/summer-school-2015/
