Student Project of the Year Award

The Student Project of the Year Award honors students annually who are doing extraordinary work in the field of Energy Management and Engineering.  This is a wonderful opportunity for students to be recognized and exposed among industry professionals for their individual accomplishments and dedicated studies.  The winner is announced at our summer forum.

Applications for the Student Project of the Year Award are open! Please submit nominations using the QR Code below. The submission deadline is June 1, 2025.

Past Student Project of the Year Award Recipients

2014 Student Project of the Year

The following article was posted in the Bend Bulletin 

OSU-Cascades engineering students win big

By Tyler Leeds The Bulletin Published Jun 7, 2014 at 12:01AM
 

Three Oregon State University-Cascades students have earned statewide recognition for their plan to help store and utilize clean energy that’s being wasted at a facility in Washington state.

Stephen MacDonald, Chazrick Branson and Daniel Shaw were awarded the Student Project of the Year award from the Oregon Association of Professional Energy Managers on Friday in Portland, a first for any OSU team from Bend or Corvallis.

The students are all enrolled in OSU-Cascades’ energy systems engineering program. As part of the program’s capstone project, the students addressed an issue that arises when energy production from the nuclear Columbia Generating Station and Nine Canyon Wind Project in Washington exceeds demand in the spring and fails to cover needs in the winter.

To fix this, the team proposed the creation of a hydrolysis storage facility, which could store energy produced by the turbines and the nuclear plant by converting energy produced in the spring into hydrogen gas for storage. In the winter, the gas could be combusted to produce additional energy.

“It’s just awesome,” said MacDonald, 31. “It was a unanimous decision by the board, which was a humbling experience.”

Lauren Sternfeld, who works for Dent Instruments in Bend, was one of the judges who selected the OSU-Cascades proposal.

“I think one thing people really liked about it was that it had a good regional scope,” Sternfeld said. “It was a Pacific Northwest project that really could make a difference in today’s energy industry. It was very creative and in-depth, and the analysis they had done was spot-on, which the members really appreciated.”

Robin Feuerbacher, an assistant professor and program lead for the energy systems engineering program, said the project was the result of six months of work.

“We have them focus on real problems that are proposed by the industry,” Feuerbacher said. “The students work on collecting the requirements of the client and researching how to meet them. There’s a lot of heavy report writing, which is also done in the industry. In this case, they also created a computer simulation model to evaluate their design.”

Feuerbacher added he was proud of the recognition earned by his students, but his main concern is getting his students jobs, noting that in the previous year, all 11 of the program’s graduates were placed.

This has also been a focus of MacDonald’s, who during his time at OSU-Cascades, helped found a student chapter of the Association of Energy Engineers, which was just recognized last month.

“There’s this weird phenomena, as OSU-Cascades piggybacks on (Central Oregon Community College),” MacDonald said. “There’s all these students coming up beneath us from COCC, and I wanted to combine everyone into one group to foster camaraderie and a sense of identity, to get us together and talking.”

MacDonald added that the group should help with networking by creating a connection between the students and professionals. MacDonald, who graduates this month, doesn’t yet have a job lined up, but he does have an interview with Energy Northwest, which presented the challenge that became the winning project.

“I guess we’ll see what happens,” he said.

— Reporter: 541-633-2160, tleeds@bendbulletin.com

Original Article

http://www.bendbulletin.com/localstate/education/2139287-157/osu-cascades-engineering-students-win-big

Summer Forum 2014 Presentation

2012 Student Project of the Year

Oregon APEM had several outstanding nominations for the 2012 Student Project of the year award. Each nominee submitted a summary of a project they had completed during their time as a student. Board members reviewed each project and rated it based on how it related to energy management, the depth of knowledge each student acquired completing their project, the complexity, thoroughness, and accuracy of their findings, and how valuable the findings are to the industry or student community.

Tyler Kimble, an Energy Management Student from Lane Community college (LCC) was selected as the 2012 recipient for his outstanding energy analysis of the math & science building on LCC’s main campus. Tyler presented his analysis at the Summer Forum and was then presented his award by Oregon APEM president Elin Shepard.  Congratulations Tyler!

2010 Student Project of the Year

The lunch hour included two presentations from students who were recipients of Student Project of the Year awards. There were winners in both the Student Internship category and the School Project category. Lura Griffiths, a graduate of the Oregon Institute of Technology (OIT) in Renewable Energy Engineering (REE), discussed the work she did while interning at PECI. Ken Peterson, also a student at OIT in REE, presented an energy audit that he, Brandon Little, Lura Griffiths, and John Sifri had conducted as a class project. Both students did a wonderful job and it was great to hear what local students are working on. It appears that the future of energy efficiency is in good hands.