New Director Assumes Leadership of the UAI Center for Energy Transition
New Director Assumes Leadership of the UAI Center for Energy Transition
January 28, 2025 Rodrigo Barraza, Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering, Appointed Director of the Energy Transition Center (CENTRA) at Adolfo Ibáñez University Rodrigo Barraza, Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering, has been appointed as the Director of the Energy Transition Center (CENTRA) at the Faculty of Engineering and Sciences of Adolfo Ibáñez University. CENTRA conducts and transfers interdisciplinary research, enabling society to progress toward an energy transition…
Elastocaloric Technology Promises to Revolutionize Current Heating and Cooling Systems
December 3, 2024 In its report “The Top 10 Emerging Technologies of 2024”, the World Economic Forum (WEF) highlighted that elastocaloric technology is a rapidly advancing field, noting that “heat pumps using elastocaloric materials such as nickel and titanium are proving to be more energy-efficient than traditional heating and cooling systems.” The same report warns that as global temperatures rise, the demand for cooling…
Review of Supreme Decree 13: Thermoelectric Plants on Alert
November 28, 2024. Drawing a parallel with those considered undesirable, coal today is regarded as an “unwelcome” fuel due to the high pollution load generated by its combustion. This is why there is a state policy, with a defined roadmap, to eliminate its participation in the national electricity matrix before 2040. In fact, the decarbonization plan (whose ongoing update includes 45 measures) has already made…
Generating our own energy – Opinion column by Rodrigo Barraza
October 15th, 2024 Generating our own energy is not an illusion. Research is advancing and today we can talk about Peer to Peer (P2P) systems, which operate under a scheme of homes that can act as prosumers, with the capacity to generate their own electricity, either with solar panels or as electricity consumers. To be able to implement this technology, a certain degree of…
GENERATOR SET EMISSIONS STANDARD What is its scope?
July 11, 2024 A generator is a system for generating electricity by integrating an internal combustion engine that normally uses Diesel as fuel and that drives an electric generator. Generators are used in industries, commercial buildings and residential buildings to provide a secure power supply to critical equipment in the event of a power outage. In addition, they can be used to reduce costs…
Chile must promote the benefits of heat pumps to encourage their use
July 11, 2024 The transition away from coal and other types of thermoelectric power generation and toward boosting the penetration of renewable sources is a solid first step toward decarbonizing a country. The other important pieces of the puzzle — energy efficiency, electrification, and sustainable transportation — could be more complicated, given that the goal is not a couple of power plants but rather…
Challenges for proper energy management go along the lines of implementing Big Data and AI.
In this interview, Rodrigo Barraza, academic and researcher at the Energy Transition Center (CENTRA) of the UAI School of Engineering and Sciences, and SERC Chile, addresses the crucial relationship between energy efficiency and competitiveness in copper mining, and explores how fluctuations in energy prices impact the sector, the specific challenges faced by mining energy management compared to other sectors, and the growing importance of renewable…
Solar Energy Research Center (SERC-Chile)
The overall aim of SERC Chile is to build a solid base of knowledge on solar energy. For this second stage (2017-2022), four strategic focuses were defined for the development of solar energy in Chile: 1) Massive integration of large-scale solar energy to the electric interconnected system, 2) Solar energy based mining in Chile, 3) Development and widespread adoption of small-scale solar solutions and 4)…