Professor Robert Thomas has been working on some of the nation's biggest energy issues for nearly four decades. His interests include large-scale power system stability, nonlinear control systems, and much more. But the project on which he advised several M. Eng. students in 2007-08 focused on the small scale: generating, conserving and distributing power for Palamanui, an inventive sustainable community on the Big Island of Hawaii. Bob Thomas sees it as a harbinger of a major cultural change. "Not many planned communities of this type have been built yet, but the seeds are being sown. The notion that individuals will take much more ownership for their own energy consumption represents a whole new paradigm. This is the cutting edge for where we're headed nationally for our energy systems."

How did Thomas and his students wind up half a world away from Ithaca, working on a development project? Cornell alumni Dr. Matthews Hamabata, Executive of the nonprofit Kohala Center, and developer Alan Ong, President of A&M Developments Inc., sought out Professor Thomas along with Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Assistant Professor Max Zhang. "They already had their architects and contractors." says Thomas. "What they wanted from us was to see whether we could make the Palamanui development greener. It seemed like a great learning opportunity for all of us."

So Thomas and Zhang, along with Professors Martha Bohm in Architecture and Marc Miller in Landscape Architecture, assembled a multi-disciplinary team of 13 students and engaged them in mapping out a program of work. All of the students undertook discrete, specialized projects, but they also worked in close collaboration with one another. The integration of their knowledge and ideas was essential to the success of every part of the project, and their teamwork provided excellent real-world experience. "Most engineering jobs these days are multi-disciplinary," says Thomas. "The days when engineers owned their own problems are over."

Jason Christopher, who completed his M.Eng. in 2007, stayed on for an extra semester as a Palamanui project manager. His M.Eng. project on the integration of wind energy into Hawaii's electrical grid led him to take a fresh look at the issue of energy storage. His recommendation: plug-in hybrid electric vehicles (PVEHs). "Sixty percent of Hawaii's automotive fleet is rental cars," he says. "If the rental companies were to adopt PVEHs, the portable batteries could become a very robust, reliable system for energy storage."

Enter Bjarni Jonsson, who undertook more detailed research into PVEHs for his M.Eng. project. He developed a rationale and a simulation showing how these batteries could become part of a community-wide system for storing energy and making it available during afternoon peak load times. Chimaobi Onwuchekwa helped to design a small electric microgrid to manage the community's generation and consumption of electricity. A large part of his work was aimed at determining ways to detect faults in the ring network he and the team designed.

Now, Christopher, Jonsson, and Onwuchekwa are building on what they learned in three very different settings. Christopher works for the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, looking at whether proposed projects have built in sufficient reliability. Jonsson works for Jacobs Engineering Group in New York City on projects involving programmable logic controllers for big power equipment. Onwuchekwa just entered a Ph.D. program in energy systems at The University of Texas at Austin, where he plans to focus on power electronics and its applications in renewable/alternative energy and distributed generation.

All radiate excitement about the Palamanui project and gratitude for their Cornell M. Eng. experience. Now they're taking their knowledge and passion out into the world.