Label would enhance Stony Brook
The new Advanced Energy Research and Technology Center at Stony Brook University Credit: Newsday/John Paraskevas
To store energy from sources that are not always available, such as solar and wind, we'll need better battery technology. To move power efficiently, we'll need a smarter electric grid. Both are among the core projects at Stony Brook University's Advanced Energy Research and Technology Center. In the legislature's closing days, Albany can help meet those goals and more.
Sen. Kenneth LaValle (R-Port Jefferson) and Assemb. Steven Englebright (D-Setauket) are sponsoring bills to designate the Stony Brook facility as another of the state's elite centers of excellence. It would be the second at Stony Brook. The first is the Center of Excellence in Wireless and Information Technology. The other five are in Albany, Buffalo, Rochester, Syracuse and Binghamton.
The energy center already has some significant designations. It hosts the New York Energy Policy Institute, for example. It's also a federal Department of Energy frontier research center on batteries. So the addition of the center of excellence designation would affirm Stony Brook's place as the center of energy research in New York, working with Brookhaven National Laboratory.
The designation would get the energy center a slice of the $6-million budget for centers of excellence. And it would add prestige and boost Stony Brook's efforts to recruit high-level researchers to help invent the state's and the nation's energy future here on Long Island.
LaValle's bill has passed; Englebright's is in committee. Before the Assembly finishes, it should give Stony Brook this jolt of power. hN
