RESEARCH

SWITCH-Kenya

• SWITCH (Solar and wind ener­gy inte­grat­ed with trans­mis­sion and con­ven­tion­al sources) is a lin­ear pro­gram­ming mod­el­ing plat­form used to exam­ine least cost ener­gy sys­tems designed to meet spe­cif­ic reli­a­bil­i­ty, per­for­mance and envi­ron­men­tal qual­i­ty standards. RENEW PhD student, Xi Xi, is developing modules for emerging energy technology in the East African Power Pool.

Powering the Blue Economy

• The goal of our ‘Pow­er­ing the Blue Econ­o­my’ project is to assess the opti­mal grid inte­gra­tion of off­shore renew­able ener­gy tech­nolo­gies (wave, tidal, wind) and their poten­tial for advanc­ing the blue econ­o­my. Through this project, our team is holis­ti­cal­ly eval­u­at­ing wave ener­gy and wind-wave co-locat­ed ener­gy in terms of the near-term and long-term mar­ket poten­tial and val­ue to the elec­tri­cal grid and blue econ­o­my, as defined by the U.S. Depart­ment of Energy’s Water Pow­er Tech­nolo­gies Office report: Pow­er­ing the Blue Econ­o­my (PBE), and dis­sem­i­nat­ing this infor­ma­tion wide­ly to stream­line device design and deploy­ment strategies.

• Katy Zhen, 2025 Amer­i­can Fish­eries Soci­ety Hut­ton Schol­ar and RAEL/RENEW Vis­it­ing Stu­dent, wrote a blog series doc­u­ment­ing her sum­mer work­ing on this project. You can read her work here.

Health Facility Electrification

• Monitoring Technologies  – Installed remote power loggers at 25 health facilities across North Kivu Province, eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo in 2022, and monitoring with health department and electricity regulators ever since.

• Mortality Reduction Pilot RCT – Installation of modular power systems + monitoring at 20 facilities across 3 provinces in DRC, along with analysis of DHIS2 health system data