Nearly 100 students from 11 universities recently participated in New Mexico State University College of Engineering’s 34th annual WERC Environmental Design Contest, held from April 7-10 at the New Mexico Farm and Ranch Heritage Museum.
Ginger Scarbrough, WERC program manager, highlighted the focus on engineering challenges addressing environmental justice issues, stating, “Three of the five tasks addressed environmental justice concerns. The tasks were stormwater management for community resilience, sodium sulfate for a circular economy – community-based solutions, and modular carbon dioxide removal for community integration.”
The contest saw a total of $37,000 in awards being presented, with winning universities including NMSU, Northern Arizona University, Michigan Technological University, University of Arkansas, University of Idaho, University of Mississippi, and Washington University in St. Louis.
NMSU was recognized with the Energy, Environment and Sustainability Award for task two, focusing on net-zero—distributed energy resource management systems for the electrical grid. Scarbrough commended NMSU’s solution, which involved complex power usage scheduling on the electrical grid, a challenge crucial for electric companies in the transition towards clean-energy sources.
Furthermore, NMSU received an invitation to publish in WERC’s Conference Proceedings in the IEEE Xplore, a digital research database.
The sponsors for the 2024 contest included notable organizations such as the New Mexico Space Grant Consortium, El Paso Electric, Freeport-McMoRan, Chevron Corporation, and the Department of Energy’s Office of Fossil Energy and Carbon Management, among others.
For more details on the winners, awards, and tasks, interested individuals are encouraged to visit https://werc.nmsu.edu/teams-winners/2024-teams1.html. To learn more about the WERC Environmental Design Contest, visit https://werc.nmsu.edu/index.html.
The article was accompanied by a cutline featuring New Mexico State University team members Adithya Nair and Aparna Jayakumar Nair engaging in a peer discussion with University of Idaho students Nick Knowles and Grace James during the contest.
