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Scientist Stan Atcitty, who is a member of the Navajo Nation, asked a tribal elder about her electricity needs during a visit to her traditional roundhouse. In reply, the woman, who sat in a wheelchair, told Atcitty to open a portable Igloo cooler sitting to his right.
“The ice is almost melted, and she has medicine in there,” Atcitty, an electrical engineer and senior scientist at Sandia National Laboratories, told EE Times. “She said, ‘My biggest need is refrigeration for that.’”
While the conversation between Atcitty and the tribal elder was for a former project the scientist worked on, the need for electrification in the Navajo Nation is something he continues to pursue. Currently, Atcitty is technical adviser for an undertaking with his colleague Victor Veliadis, who is executive director and chief technical officer of PowerAmerica and a professor of electrical engineering at North Carolina State University. They and a team of PowerAmerica members are devising proofs of concept for efficient, clean energy solutions for Native American communities.
Veliadis secured $5 million from the National Institute for Standards and Technology (NIST) to develop new tech, including:
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- Solar-powered, container-based microgrid for on-site field hospitals and refrigeration. Veliadis said the U.S. Navy is also interested in this technology.
- Semiconductor-based, fast-charging system for unmanned aerial vehicles to support rapid delivery for supplies, such as medicines.
- Solar-powered system for supplying critical electric loads in homes.
- Low-cost, energy-efficient air quality control system with pollution-detection and disinfection capabilities.
- Program for education and workforce development to train Native American community college instructors, students and working technicians about clean energy electrification.
“I came up with these concepts when I read about the disproportionate Covid deaths in the Native American community in Covid ‘darkness’ before the vaccines,” Veliadis told EE Times.
Veliadis, Atcitty and the rest of the PowerAmerica team are facing an August deadline to complete the program. If the results of the team’s project are scaled in Native American communities, tribal enclaves may become the first widespread users of clean, renewable energy in the country.
Disparities in STEM
If tribal students were to pursue education and training in clean energy electrification, that would be significant, Atcitty said. Among the graduates of the 37 tribal colleges and universities, most of the degrees are in nursing or business, with a small portion being STEM-related.
“When you compare tribal colleges and universities to HBCUs [historically Black colleges and universities] or Hispanic-serving institutions, they have numbers [of STEM graduates] in the thousands,” he said. “For tribal colleges and universities, their numbers are in the tens. So, having one student interested in a STEM program, it’s a big, big deal.”
The NIST money to develop the education curriculum and other parts of Veliadis’ project is part of its Rapid Assistance for Coronavirus Economic Response (RACER) Grant Program, which is designed to help prepare for future pandemics. Clean, renewable energy should also help mitigate the effects of climate change, he pointed out.
NIST opened bidding for the project to the 16 institutes in Manufacturing USA—a 10-year-old program to help foster emerging manufacturing technologies. PowerAmerica’s tech niche in the program includes the use of the wide-bandgap semiconductors silicon carbide and gallium nitride (GaN).
“Initially, my thought was this is not something that I could get involved in,” Veliadis said. “But then I realized that the communities that were being affected were communities that lacked electrification. So here we are, the United States [in the] 21st century, and there are people in the U.S. that do not have electricity. And I thought that one way to help these people is with some basic electrification.”
What Veliadis includes in “basic” electrification is enough power to refrigerate medications along with a few groceries, and a few LED lights.
Currently, many Native American communities lack utilities, such as electricity and water. They were also hit harder by the Covid pandemic than any other racial or ethnic group in the country.
Targeted by deadly virus
Indigenous people died at more than twice the rate of white or Asian Americans, according to the National Center for Health Statistics data analyzed by the American Public Media (APM) Research Lab.
While the death rate in tribal communities is highest, their true incidence of deaths from Covid may be even greater.
“The CDC notes that Indigenous American deaths are often undercounted, with the latest research suggesting the true mortality rate for this group could be around 34% higher than official reports,” according to APM.
Tribal communities’ deaths may be attributed in part to high rates of poverty, crowded living conditions and limited access to high-quality medical facilities, according to a study from Princeton University.
Clearing the air
To develop the PowerAmerica project’s low-cost, energy-efficient air quality control system with pollution-detection and disinfection capabilities, Veliadis enlisted two co-principal investigators from the University of Colorado Boulder: Dragan Maksimovic, professor of electrical, computer and energy engineering, and air quality expert Shelly Miller, who is a professor of mechanical engineering.
Maksimovic explained that students in his lab used off-the-shelf components to build the unit, which is about the size of a room air conditioner. It uses filtration technology to clean the air of airborne particles. These particles are hazardous and may contain a virus or be from wildfire smoke.
The developers automated the system so it would only turn on when PM2.5 sensors detect particle pollution above a certain threshold and automatically adjust the speed of a fan to clear the air. The unit turns off when its job is done to save energy.
Because the group had a noise target of less than 50 decibels, they used ultra-low-noise computer fans.
One tweak the students made was in a DC-to-DC power converter for the fans. The off-the-shelf converter is based on silicon chips, so to optimize power efficiency, the students custom designed a GaN circuit.
“So, it’s one-of-a-kind right now,” Maksimovic said.
Miller, who has studied air cleaners for almost 30 years, said there has not been much evolution in their engineering. Unfortunately, their use in homes has lagged as well, she said.
“This project has enabled us as a team to work on the improvements of an air cleaner to make it more palatable to be used and to make it more operational,” she said.
While a typical home experiences less than one air change per hour, the RACER proof-of-concept unit provides up to six air changes in the same time period, Miller explained.
“This is the removal rate that the CDC recommends to have indoors for infection control, and improving indoor air quality,” she said.
Air disinfection is accomplished with UVC 254-nm wavelength lamps, which can be harmful to skin and eyes. Necessary safeguards have been engineered into the technology, Maksimovic said.
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