To many of Tufts' thousands of Arts and Sciences students, Anderson Hall is strange, uncharted territory. A freak recitation or a wrong turn on the way to Brown and Brew might bring a non-engineer into this building, where they would find the walls adorned with mysterious equations and photographs of intelligent-looking graduate students.
One Tufts student, however, is leading a small and innovative team of students that come from both domains, combining talents garnered in Anderson, Eaton and East to create Emergent Energy, a multidimensional wind energy business.
Freshman Greg Hering, who plans to major in mechanical engineering and quantitative economics, founded Emergent Energy shortly after arriving at Tufts. He had been independently researching alternative energy sources since the beginning of his senior year of high school, but was looking to do something more.
"I had always liked the environment and the concept of clean energy," Hering said. "And I just stepped back to see where I could help."
Hering noticed the rising importance of wind power as an energy source, and began to examine the process of wind energy production. Wind energy, he said, revolves around one simple question: Where's the wind?
"I knew a hard way to answer that question," Hering said, referring to a complicated data-point analysis process that might calculate wind forces. "After thinking about it a bit, I found an easy way to answer that question, and that's what we're doing."
And thus, Emergent Energy was born. Hering formed a team that includes freshmen Daniel Enking, Nina Birger, Leo Franchi and juniors Michael Easton and Jared Rodriguez.
Composed of international relations majors, an English major and mechanical and civil engineers, the group, under the leadership of Hering, is building a company with a threefold mission: to do wind-energy consulting for firms and communities, to build its own wind farm by 2011, and to work in tandem with the newly formed non-profit group Action for Clean Energy (ACE) to increase awareness and application of newly developing wind-energy technology.
The group's ability to do all of this hinges on its development of unique technology.
"We take hard-to-use data and build 3-D graphical models," Hering said.
Essentially, Emergent Energy has figured out how to impose a three-dimensional model of a wind stream onto a three dimensional terrain model. They have also developed their own way of downloading data off of the Internet, which involved Franchi altering a code he had previously used to download pictures.
In addition, the group has developed an algorithm that indicates where on the map a windmill should be placed to yield maximum energy production.
The success of Hering and his team in doing all of this may stem in part, Hering said, from their youth.
"We're taking a fresh, young-blood approach to wind energy," he said, remembering how older professionals he had asked had referred to Emergent Energy's technological developments as being "too hard."
Hering sees incredible potential for wind-energy in today's energy landscape. "During the Internet age of the late 1990s, [the Internet] is where the action was," said Hering. "Now, the action is in energy, and will be for a very long time."
Hering displayed extensive knowledge of the many technical innovations currently in development to further refine the production of wind energy in which Emergent Energy intends to play a significant role. The group has already begun wind-energy consultations with clients, having received a great deal of guidance from Hall Wind Farm in Massachusetts and its co-developer, Andrew Stern.
They continue their work in pre-product development for their own wind farm and will also be playing a very important role in Stern's Action for Clean Energy, a non-profit group intended to unite Boston's college-aged clean-energy activists.
"Our project handles the engineering side of [Action for Clean Energy]," said Hering, who will contribute his innovations to "aid developers and municipality trying to get on track [with wind energy]," he said.
Over the next few years, ACE will attempt to bring wind energy technology to communities, firms and college campuses throughout the area.
These lofty goals will certainly keep Hering and his team busy between now and the projected completion of their own wind farm on 2011.
Hering will spend this summer with a Career Services Entrepreneur Scholarship that will allow him to spend the summer working with Stern on ACE.
He plans to keep leading Emergent Energy throughout his years at Tufts, where he is a member of the skiing and sailing teams as well. Although he expects that graduate schooling may eventually pull him away from the company.
Hering looks with excitement towards his own future and that of Emergent Energy.
"We'd like to be at the helm, ensuring that the project does not fail," he said. "The whole market is charging forwards, and it's so exciting to be a part of that."
