UH-Hilo dabbles in ‘energy science’

In a bid to attract more students and better prepare them for the careers of the future, the University of Hawaii at Hilo is developing an energy science course.

Currently, the campus is offering a few “experimental” classes on the subject, said physics professor Philippe Binder, who is part of the team working to get the energy science initiative off the ground.

“We’re just testing the waters right now,” he said. “There are two courses being offered this semester on biofuels.”

But in the fall, the campus plans to expand its offerings, providing students the opportunity to obtain a certificate in energy science, something you can’t get anywhere else in Hawaii, said UH-Hilo Chancellor Donald Straney.

“We’ll have several courses packaged together where you can get a certificate added on top of your degree,” he said. “And our hope is to … expand that into a degree program.”

The certificate would ultimately help students stand apart from the pack when applying for work, Straney said.

“What it signals is you know about current issues, current approaches to managing energy,” he said.

“If your degree is in business and you have a certificate in energy science, it makes it easier to be competitive for certain types of positions. So if you’re an accountant and you have that degree, it’s easier to get a job with an energy company, because you know what the lingo is, what the business is. If you’re a biologist and you have that degree, there’s certain types of companies and graduate programs you can get into on biofuels, for example.

“I’m looking at it as a way for our students to focus attention on what is one of the leading issues, not just in the state, but the world,” Straney added.

Energy science is a specialized field that has seen a great deal of interest in Europe, Binder said, but is just now starting to take off in the United States, and the new program would help UH-Hilo get in on the ground floor.

“It’s really what we have to do to survive as an institution,” he said.

“We have to make our programs as attractive as possible to as large a group of students as possible.”

Luckily, the campus finds itself in a unique position on an island that stands at the forefront of a variety of alternative energy industries, he added.

“The island is in a situation where it is very isolated,” Binder said.

“We have no native sources of fossil fuels. Coal and gas, we have to import. It’s expensive, it’s dirty. But at the same time, we have all this sun, water, wind, rain, all these wonderful things all around us. People have been installing photovoltaic cells for decades in their homes.

“There have been efforts to go geothermal and wind. There’s starting to be critical mass. … It’s a place where there are lots of opportunities and the incentive to move away from fossil fuels is very large.”

The chancellor agreed.

“Hawaii Island has so many different sources of energy, and it has an electric grid that has to integrate them all in a way that works,” Straney said. “It makes the perfect laboratory to make people understand how to manage energy, its production and transmission.”

The university is currently working to partner with energy producers on the island to offer future students opportunities like field trips to visit energy plants, or even internships, he said.

“This would be a program that, as we put it together in its full form, it would train a new generation of people who understand energy, not just as something that happens when you flip the light switch, but who can fix it, make sure it works, and who can develop some new ideas about how we manage energy,” Straney said.

Email Colin M. Stewart at cstewart@hawaiitribune-herald.com.