The University at Buffalo (UB) and Buffalo State College will improve green jobs training for undergraduate and graduate students as part of a federally funded program to transform the electrical grid into a smart grid.

The courses, which are expected to be offered by UB and Buffalo State starting in the fall, will be delivered online to students from the other consortium institutions, as well as to industry personnel who register for smart grid retraining.

Mohammed Safiuddin, research professor emeritus of electrical engineering in the UB School of Engineering and Applied Sciences and UB principal investigator says, “The laboratory and faculty resources available at any single institution are relatively small and are not by themselves sufficient to educate a required number of smart grid personnel, but when viewed as a united front, together they provide unparalleled capability and expertise.”

The partnership between UB and Buffalo State, part of a larger consortium headed by Syracuse University that includes the University at Rochester, Clarkson University, and Onondaga Community College. In 2010, the consortium received a $3 million grant from the DOE to implement the Strategic Training and Education in Power Systems (STEPS) program of the United States Department of Energy. The program is designed to quickly train a workforce for smart grid development by reducing redundancy and allowing students to travel between participating campuses for access to the most advanced technologies.

Safiuddin adds: “While this approach is contrary to the traditional model where each institution hoards its own resources, our institutions are committed to overcoming bureaucratic obstacles to help address the expected nationwide shortage of smart grid practitioners and developers.”

Buffalo State and UB pooled their respective schools’ portions of the funding to build a smart grid laboratory at Buffalo State, which will help train students to create and maintain a smart grid. The lab will be used as a major training and experimental facility not just for students, but also for the power system professionals and local equipment manufacturers.”

Ilya Grinberg, professor of technology at Buffalo State and the school’s principal investigator explains, “We need to address existing skills shortages and the aging workforce in the power industry. It is therefore critical that training of the current workforce and the education of a new cadre of power engineering professionals be addressed through a joint effort. This approach optimizes the distributed nature of our faculty resources, with institutions complementing each other rather than duplicating the coursework. To the best of my knowledge, this would be the first time that such a strategy will be followed using as many as six academic institutions, with tremendous flexibility and student choices, making the prospect of developing the new generation of smart grid engineers a reality rather than a dream.”

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