Transitioning Montana to a Renewable Energy Future: The Social and Economic Impacts

Montana is home to the second-largest coal-fired power plant in the West, the Colstrip Generating Station. The value and demand for coal both domestically and globally is quickly diminishing, while the renewable energy industries of wind and solar are booming. As utilities in the Northwest transition their investments from coal to renewable energy, Montana faces a critical decision on the future of its energy system that will impact the lives of generations of Montanans to come. This five-part report aims to aid in the discussion and decision-making process by reviewing the most up-to-date economic data on renewable energy; discussing the social and economic impacts of the Colstrip community’s transition out of the coal industry; and highlighting the perspectives of some of the most directly-impacted stakeholders in Montana’s energy industry. Part 1 is a summary of Montana’s vast renewable energy potential and the urgent need to invest in these technologies for its long-term social and economic wellbeing. Part 2 is an analysis of the economic benefits of investing in a renewable energy economy, particularly the technologies of wind and solar energy. Part 3 is a discussion of the current trajectory of the Colstrip Generating Station in Colstrip, MT, and the social, environmental and economic impacts of plant closure on the local community. Part 4 is a literature review of recent academic literature (2010-present) on the economics of solar and wind energy. This is section is separated from the data presented in Part 2 to maintain a distinction from industry-based information. Finally, Part 5 of the report respectfully provides suggestions for its target organization, 350 Montana, for moving forward in the push for the statewide energy transition

Annual Report Of Research and Creative Productions By Faculty and Staff, January to December, 2015

Annual Report Of Research and Creative Productions by Faculty and Staff from January to December, 2015

Combining Solution Reuse and Bound Tightening for Efficient Analysis of Evolving Systems

Software engineers have long employed formal verification to ensure the safety and validity of their system designs. As the system changes—often via predictable, domain-specific operations—their models must also change, requiring system designers to repeatedly execute the same formal verification on similar system models. State-of-the-art formal verification techniques can be expensive at scale, the cost of which is multiplied by repeated analysis. This paper presents a novel analysis technique—implemented in a tool called SoRBoT—which can automatically determine domain-specific optimizations that can dramatically reduce the cost of repeatedly analyzing evolving systems. Different from all prior approaches, which focus on either tightening the bounds for analysis or reusing all or part of prior solutions, SoRBoT’s automated derivation of domain-specific optimizations combines the benefits of both solution reuse and bound tightening while avoiding the main pitfalls of each. We experimentally evaluate SoRBoT against state-of-the-art techniques for verifying evolving specifications, demonstrating that SoRBoT substantially exceeds the run time performance of those state-of-the-art techniques while introducing only a negligible overhead, in contrast to the expensive additional computations required by the state-of-the-art verification techniques

CIRA annual report FY 2016/2017

Reporting period April 1, 2016-March 31, 2017

Annual Research Report, 2010-2011

Annual report of collaborative research projects of Old Dominion University faculty and students in partnership with business, industry and government.https://digitalcommons.odu.edu/or_researchreports/1000/thumbnail.jp

Lawrence, Fall 2019

https://lux.lawrence.edu/alumni_magazines/1114/thumbnail.jp