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Spotlight: Energy for the future

UC Davis is engineering a sustainable future: Let us count the ways

By Sylvia Wright

Our energy initiative

UC Davis has launched an initiative to foster greater collaboration among the more than 60 faculty members working on energy-related problems and solutions.

Named Energy for the Future, it is led by the College of Engineering.

It will add 12 new faculty researchers and an administrative home to build on the university’s established strengths in three major areas:

  • reducing energy use (conservation)
  • increasing the benefits of energy used (efficiency)
  • developing lower-emission energy sources (alternative fuels).

You will be living a more environmentally friendly life in the future. Here’s how.

In 50 years, we will look back at 2007 as the Year of Carbon Consciousness, when Americans stopped debating whether we were changing the climate and instead started changing our ways.

Here at UC Davis, researchers have worked for decades to help keep planet Earth from losing its ecological balance. The campus is an international leader in many aspects of environmental research and education — particularly sustainable agriculture, energy efficiency and conservation, and advanced transportation technology and policy.

Here is a time-traveler’s look at the possible future of energy as influenced by UC Davis activities — a preview of everyday life as we might experience it five to 50 years from now. The scenarios are not at all fanciful; in fact, some of these energy revolutions are just around the corner.

Sylvia Wright writes about the environmental sciences for UC Davis News Service.