Science and Engineering Scholarships and Fellowships Blog

Tennessee Tech University recently received a federal grant from the Department of Energy worth $265,000. The purpose of the grant is to fund research for a wind power storage technology. David Wenzhong Gao, assistant professor of electrical and computing engineering, will lead the project.

The research is meant to address a major challenge of sustaining wind energy: the fact that wind does not blow consistently.

Tennessee Tech research will incorporate “plug-and-play” energy storage modules at different levels of a wind power system — the control center, wind power plant and wind turbine generator. The project will last two years, during which researchers analyze the modules in the lab, create a prototype and test them in the field at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory and wind power plants. One potential demonstration site is the Tennessee Valley Authority’s Buffalo Mountain Wind Power Plant.

The DOE has currently initiated funding for 28 wind energy projects worth $14 million dollars in grants.