It has been an exciting year for the Tyler Lewis Clean Energy Research Foundation. In 2019, more than $20,000 was raised during the Ride for Clean Energy, and for the second consecutive year, three grants were awarded to three very deserving projects. As the Foundation continues to grow each year, we wanted to start 2020 with an update of a past grant recipients, Marten Pape (2017 TLCERF grant recipient). Marten is a part of the ‘Power Electronics Research Group’ at the University of Waterloo, working under the supervision of Dr. Mehrdad Kazerani investigating partial power processing converters for offshore wind farms.

Since being awarded the grant, Marten has been very productive with his research, including publishing papers in peer-reviewed journals, as well as presenting his work at a top international conference. Below is a list of some his project achievements over the past two years:

• Simplified the electrical energy conversion components of an offshore wind farm design by connecting electrical outputs of its wind turbines in series using a novel arrangement.
• Using measurements from a Danish offshore wind farm, Marten demonstrated that the wind experienced by each of the wind turbines is very likely to be similar to that of all the other wind turbines in the farm and proposed the use of electric converters which process the wind turbine output power differences (instead of the entire wind turbine output power, as it is done now).
• The proposed alternative electric converters could lead to an increased energy production through conversion efficiency gains up to 5%, as well as decreased equipment requirements to be installed at sea. This will hopefully lead to a reduction of offshore wind energy generation cost (levelized cost of energy).
• Presented two papers at the 2019 Energy Conversion Congress and Expo in Baltimore (MD) – a leading academic conference in the field of energy conversion (paper proceedings: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/8911891).

Marten will be starting the final year of his PhD and is keeping his options open for what he would like to pursue after graduate studies. In addition to these research milestones, more recently Marten has become a new father! We at the foundation thank Marten for his time to update us on the progress of this exciting project and making us very proud of him and his accomplishments over the few years. We wish him and his family the best of luck as he continues his important clean energy research throughout his PhD and beyond!