BYRON WASHOM

Director, Strategic Energy Initiatives at UC San Diego

The microgrid at UC San Diego has the largest and most diverse energy technology portfolio of any university worldwide. As Director of the university’s Strategic Energy Initiatives, Byron Washom runs it.

Byron and UCSD are excellent examples of how unexpected industries can collaborate for mutual benefit. Byron works in partnership with the military, the local sanitation department, and the transportation system to develop new technologies and apply them to the private sector.

“The easiest way to describe the strategic energy initiatives at U.C. San Diego is we looked to bring quantum innovations in the generation, consumption, storage, and utilization of renewable energy resources.”

One of the most unique examples of this is Strategic Energy Initiatives’ partnership with the sanitation department. They collect methane from human waste and use it to generate electricity. Byron’s work not only saves methane - a powerful greenhouse gas - from being released into the atmosphere, it repurposes it for greater use.

Another pioneering innovation he shared was the use of electric vehicles to store electricity. If there is a power failure, the electricity from the car batteries supplies energy to the grid. UCSD is one of the few places in the world using EVs as grid batteries. This is the future. Just like Mary Powell distributing Power Walls, the grid could share the power in our EVs to avoid burning fossil fuels when intermittent renewables aren’t producing. We can retire “peaker plants” if we use storage, including the storage on wheels, electric vehicles.

Byron is yet another champion of collaboration. “The issues facing us with respect to climate change are so complex that they require the best and the greatest minds that are available and in a wide variety of disciplines. We cannot solve this problem by individuals working solo.”