Current visits at GEC

On September 27, 2019 a delegation consisting of energy experts from Ethiopia, Kenya, Tanzania , Zimbamwe, Zambia and Mozambique visited Glava Energy Center. The visit was part of renewable energy program arranged by LIFE Foundation in Karlstad, Sweden. Each country team consisted of 4-6 experts and each team had a mission consisting of a “change project objective” in order to increase the use of renewable energy.

The target with the change projects were as follows:

·      Increased access to modern energy in rural areas.

·      Increased uptake of renewable and energy efficiency.

·      To provide information for investment in the renewable energy sector.

·      To develop an elaborative guide for integration of small and utility scale projects on renewable energy in the national grid.

·      Increased access to data and information on Renewable Energy

·      Lack of power storage for grid and stand-alone VRE (Variable Renewable Energy

The entire group found the visit to Glava Energy Center very fruitful since the center is filled with different applications making use of solar energy that could be applicable also in the visitors home countries.

Over the years Glava Energy Center has developed a close cooperation with different universities such as Karlstad University, Högskolan Dalarna, Uppsala University and Norwegian University of Life Sciences (NMBU). Each year students of different nationalities that study at these universities come to Glava Energy Center for 1-6 months in order to complete their master thesis. This summer two research students from Tokyo Institute of Technology, Chihiro Kato and Tomohiro Oka spent the entire summer at Glava Energy Center. The aim of their work was to study how a housing cooperative best can make use of solar energy by using a smart control system for charging and discharging of batteries.

The study is part of an internationel project ACES, Adaptive Control of Energy Storage, the aim of the project is mainly to study how batteries best could be used in storing electricity. The project is closely linked to the Interregproject ecoINSIDE2.

Through LIFE Academy in Karlstad Glava Energy Center gets a steady stream of visitors.

 LIFE Academy are focusing on sustainable development. They do projects to encourage development and cooperation and they have an extensive network and many cooperation partners all over the world

This summer Mwaba Matimba and Brian H M Makungo who both work at the Kafue Gorge Regional Training Center in Zambia which provides training in wind and hydro power, solar energy and energy technology in the countries of Southern Africa (SADC) and sub-Saharan regions came to visit Glava Energy Center.

-At KGRTC we strive for a more sustainable operation and maintenance of our solar energy. We see that knowledge and skills from the testing business in Glava would be valuable for KGRTC, says Brian H M Makungo.

A few days later, they made a study visit to Rainpower’s turbine laboratory in Trondheim.

The coordinators of the meetings were Sustainable Business Cleantech and process manager Therese Rosenblad