After a successful Graduate Training with slightly below 300 active participants in June 2021, we are happy to announce a Second Virtual Graduate Training to be held this year. The Graduate Training for Sustainable Energy Development will take place from Monday, September 5^th to Friday, September 9^th, 2022. Participation is free.

The interdisciplinary program will have contributions from professors, researchers and experts from the various fields and will contain an introduction to the A:RT-D Grids project as well as the different perspectives on sustainability. Therefore, the program covers sustainable energy aspects focusing on sustainable engineering, sustainable community perspectives, sustainable economics, gender and conflict perspectives, didactics and education for sustainable development. In addition, the A:RT-D Grids Team will invite professionals from the field for expert presentations. Furthermore, the A:RT-D Grids project’s current research results will be presented.

Interactive sessions where participants will work together on a designed case including the sustainable perspectives above for establishing a microgrid will also be part of the Graduate Training. At the end of every day, the workshop results will be presented.

With the “Call for Contributions” we invite graduate students and practitioners to share their related current research topic and their relevant professional experiences during the virtual Graduate Training for Sustainable Energy Development 2022. The presentations should be understandable for all participants, regardless of their academic or professional background.

All important information about the entire project can be viewed on our website.

After successful participation, participants and presenters receive a certificate of participation and/or contribution.

New ways to electrify remote regions in East Africa

Experts provide information on microgrids and sustainable energy concepts at virtual graduate training course

Affordable, reliable and clean energy for all - this is one of the sustainable development goals of the United Nations. But people still lack access to electricity. To change this, scientists from the University of Paderborn and the ECOLOG Institute Lüneburg are working with partners from industry in an international project team to develop new ways to electrify remote regions in East Africa through microgrids, i.e., mini power grids that are separated from each other. The first graduate training course, for which more than 300 participants from Africa, Europe, Asia, North and South America as well as Australia have registered, shows how great the worldwide interest is in these future-oriented and sustainable solutions. The aim of the training is to advance the research and development of sustainable modular energy networks to achieve better grid stability in remote areas of East African countries.

2021

The virtual event, entitled "Approaching Sustainable Energy Development in East African Countries through an interdisciplinary project on Microgrids", will take place from 28 June to 2 July. Through training programmes like this, the scientists within the project, which is funded by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF), want to pass on practice-relevant knowledge to young scientists and experts.

For five days, international experts will provide basic knowledge about rural electrification through microgrids. The lectures and workshops will be held and led by project participants from the University of Paderborn, Makerere University (Uganda), the Nelson Mandela African Institute of Science and Technology (Tanzania), the University of the Witwatersrand (South Africa), the PI Photovoltaic Institute Berlin, the ECOLOG Institute and Asantys Systems. The focus is on very different subject areas and ranges from education and social sciences to engineering and economics to the didactics of technology. The focus is on the sustainable development goals of the United Nations, the economic perspective on sustainability, technical aspects of microgrids, but also research topics in the field of sustainable energy.