Sustainable Energy Hp
Grads Of Accredited Distance Learning Degree Programs Have The Skills Needed By Green Energy Technology Fields For Our Future
California visitors can, among other activities, tour an area university’s environmental center and research village. University students have retrofitted a 1920s fish hatchery where novelist John Steinbeck worked to serve as their interactive environmental center. They’ve also restored wetlands, or marshes, that they research and have opened them to the public.
The university isn’t alone in its environmental research progress. In the last year, a minimum of 71 institutions throughout the nation have plans for or have opened sustainability-themed research centers, according to the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Education. It’s part of a sustainability movement where campus buildings are becoming more environmentally friendly. Sustainable academic programs, including one in economically profitable sustainable alternatives, also are being offered.
Government money shortages in Arizona, for example, are affecting the Departments of Environmental Quality and Water Resources, according to a July article in the Arizona Republic. “We don’t have sustainable water supplies. . .” Water Resources Director Herb Guenther was quoted as saying. “We’re going to burden our great grandchildren with a (water shortage) if we don’t do something.” In Sacramento, Cal., government workers are reading “The Green Collar Economy” and the California university’s graduate management school dean is serving as a team leader in “green and clean technology” as part of a yearlong community-wide green initiative. “. . . you can’t have the ecosystem without a great research university – it doesn’t happen”, Steve Currall was quoted in a July Sacramento News & Review article as saying.
The governor of Texas recently noted that a technical school in that state is integral to helping the country become independent in terms of energy, according to a College Media Network article. The university, the article announced, was along with a renewable energy institute being awarded an $8.4 million renewable energy research grant. Much of the country’s wind energy is produced in West Texas, the College Media Network item reported.
Research efforts at a Montana University, where an Energy Research Institute was established in 2007, have covered everything from harvesting transportation fuel from algae, creating biofuel from seed crops and storing carbon dioxide deep underground, the university reported in July. Many companies and academic labs are working on similar efforts with algae, according to a July article in The New York Times. In Wisconsin, researchers at a university were, along with an architectural firm, recently awarded a $1.3 million U.S. Department of Energy grant to reduce hospital energy use by 60 percent, the institution notes. Researchers there intend to base their work on contemporary Scandinavian hospital designs that usurp one-quarter to one-half the amount of energy their American contemporaries do, according to the university. Part of the effort is to involve increasing use of natural daylight, the university reports.
In America, energy produces the most harmful gas emissions, according to the U.S. Energy Administration web site. While fast food restaurants consume the most energy, hospitals and health facilities come in second, an architecture professor at the Wisconsin institution. Hospitals and health care facilities, according to the professor, account for four percent of the energy used in the United States.
While many students who participate in research at colleges, universities and technical schools take classes on campus, it’s possible for distance learners to get hands on environmental experience as well. Some online college, university and technical school programs might assign independent research projects. An online degree offering in New Jersey incorporates a five-day residency component into the mix.
Online environmental degree and certificate programs particularly allow professionals to update their knowledge base and skills, making them more marketable in an area where job growth has occurred and is expected to continue to expand. The number of jobs in a clean energy economy grew 9.1 percent between 1998 and 2007, which was 2.5 times faster than job growth overall, according to information from the Pew Charitable Trusts cited in a July article in suburban Chicago’s Daily Herald newspaper.
Incorporating new technologies and new information is a ongoing part of environmentalism and combining a passion for “green” with the knowledge and technical know-how that comes from distance learning college degree programs is a smart way to go. Student keep up with the latest information through online universities while pursuing their dream of having a better world to live in.
HP Fort Collins Research Center
