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 

17th Ebola Outbreak Reporting

Epidemiological & Operational Situation Report: 17th Ebola Outbreak (Bundibugyo ebolavirus)

• ⁠As the Ebola outbreak places mounting pressure on health services in eastern DRC, RENEW postdoctoral researcher Samuel Miles and his team have published a new data brief tracking the evolving epidemiological and operational situation.
• ⁠The analysis builds on RENEW’s longstanding work in North Kivu, where Miles and Kammen’s recent work has focused on powering hospitals with renewable energy to improve resilience during humanitarian crises.
• The briefing synthesizes official updates shared through the WHO Health Cluster in Goma via local NGO RCHA (Research Center for Humanitarian Aid), translating field documentation into an accessible strategic overview for researchers and partners.

Systemic Resilience in the 17th Ebola Outbreak Report