Clean and sustainable energy was a hot topic at the 2019 New Mexico Legislative Session. At least four bills and two memorials that passed are relevant to the NM SMART Grid Center research and associated education and workforce development components.

The November 2016 issue of the National Science Teacher's Association (NSTA) journal The Science Teacher features an article co-authored by Becky Bixby, one of our Bioalgal Energy component co-leads. Together with Molly Sultany, a high school science teacher in Portland, Oregon, Becky emphasizes the importance of including diatoms in lessons for students in biology, chemistry, and environmental science.

Dr. David Hanson, Bioalgal Energy co-lead for Energize New Mexico recently received two grants that fund collaborative efforts in energy and biology. These two grants alone will bring $1.2 million over 3 years into Dave's lab specifically, and a total of $3 million into New Mexico. Both grants were facilitated by EPSCoR.

If you are a research scientist or a graduate student, funding is probably often at the top of the list of your concerns. In the clean energy research sector, it's often difficult to find funding outside of government sources. But fear not! A new initiative promises to bring over $1 billion to clean energy projects. Microsoft Founder Bill Gates hopes to change that with his recently announced investor-led fund called Breakthrough Energy Ventures (BEV).

Geothermal Energy component co-lead Mark Person and his colleagues recently had their research review on groundwater reserves published in Nature. "Offshore fresh groundwater reserves as a global phenomenon," by Person (NMT), Vincent Post (Flinders University), Jacobus Groen (VU University Amsterdam), Henk Kooi (VU University Amsterdam), Shemin Ge (University of Colorado), and W. Mike Edmunds (University of Oxford), was published in Volume 504 of the magazine earlier this month and discusses the large amounts of groundwater found below continental shelves.