Affordable and Clean Energy

Sustainability facculty members Dr. Susan Clark and Dr. Nicholas Rajkovich will be moderators for two upcoming NYS webinars discussing the social and infrastrucutral impacts of extreme heat.

Sustianability Month at UB is about celebrating our faculty, staff, and student work in making progress towards the goals of our university-wide Climate Action Plan. 

Fifteen students from UB have been recognized for their outstanding achievements in leadership, community service, campus involvement, or the arts, earning the SUNY Chancellor’s Award for Student Excellence, the highest student award offered by SUNY. 

SUNY Distinguished Professor Andrew Whittaker is part of a cohort led by TerraPraxis, a non-profit focused on action for climate and prosperity, that is developing a digital platform to repower coal plants using advanced nuclear energy. 

The Center for Industrial Effectiveness has received a $500,000 grant from the NYS Offshore Wind Training Institute, a move that will improve the lives of those who have dedicated their careers to harnessing the power of wind energy.

Clean energy is critical to solving our climate crisis. But we need to consider the full environmental and human health impacts of solar energy generation across its entire lifecycle, including mining, manufacturing, use, decommissioning and recycling. This requires us to identify critical stages in the production process, and how choices in materials and chemicals at different stages of production influence each other.

UB’s GRoW Clean Energy Center is officially open for use as a tour, meeting and event space for small groups.

UB is advancing its climate action efforts by installing 30 new electric vehicle plugs for EV owners on the North and South campuses.

UB has been named a recipient of a $1.5 million grant from the National Institute of Standards and Technology to develop technology to improve on the U.S.'s emerging clean energy economy. In addition to these technological developments, the new Center for Accelerated Innovation through Materials hub will support workforce training and fund graduate student research.

UB researchers have published a journal article quantifying the unintended consequences of New York State’s Plastic Bag Waste Reduction Law and ways to address those consequences.

A UB-led research team has just secured $1.5 million in funding, including $1.17 million from the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), to develop a two-year project that works to produce clean hydrogen, furthering UB's committment to achiveing carbon neutrality across campuses by 2030.

The UB Center for Industrial Effectiveness (UB TCIE) received a $300,000 grant from the New York State Offshore Wind Training Institute (OWTI) for the project "Preparing NYS’s Renewable Energy and Offshore Wind Supply Chain." Its goal is to promote careers in New York’s supply chain workforce for offshore wind and other renewable energy and sustainability sectors such as solar, green building, and nanotechnology.

In a continuation of the university’s climate neutrality efforts, UB will serve as a host site for an innovative battery technology system that uses zinc and air as fuel. The technology, developed by Vancouver-based Zinc8 Energy Solutions, provides a cost-effective solution for energy storage, making clean energy reliable and available as and when required.

A new UB-led research project — funded by a $2 million U.S. Department of Energy grant - is working to cheapen and optimize algal biofuel production through the integration of polyculture farming, artificial intelligence, microscopy, and various other interdisciplinary research techniques.