
The University of Vermont will receive a green energy upgrade, as the school will become home to a new research center called the Center for Energy Transformation and Innovation.
The new green energy center will be built as a part of a three-year, $15 million commitment by Sandia National Laboratories, the U.S. Department of Energy, the state of Vermont and the university, with the DOE, the school and Vermont committing $6 million each and Sandia investing $9 million.
"We want to be integrating as much renewables as possible onto the grid, both solar and wind," Rick Stulen, vice president of Sandia, said to VPR News. "With those technologies comes an intermittency that we have to figure out how to manage. If both the state and the country is to achieve greater than 30 percent renewables we have to understand a way to manage that so everybody has all the power they need all the time."
In addition, Stulen stated the center will focus on providing enough capacity for "electrifying the fleet," in preparation of an increase in the number of electric vehicles being produced.
Vermont offers multiple incentives for clean energy usage, such as the Vermont Solar & Small Wind Incentive and the Clean Energy Development Fund, according to the organization Renewable Energy Vermont.

