By: Amy Chiang, student at the University of Michigan, the 2015 EDF Climate Corps fellow at General Motors
I was already level with the roof on a ladder when my General Motors supervisor pointed out the irony of my situation. As an Environmental Defense Fund Climate Corps fellow, I was destroying the homes of the young maple tree seedlings trying to grow in the rain gutter of a Detroit home. I’m all for trees, but not when they take up residence in a rain gutter.
But how did I find myself on a roof in Detroit? Partly because my answer to the “are you scared of heights” question was “no,” but also because I was embedded for a summer in GM’s foundry division as part of my EDF Climate Corps fellowship.
With a background working in clean, renewable energy resources, I did not expect my next project would be on sustainability at an aluminum foundry – where raw metal inputs are melted down and cast into the desired part. However, it turns out that foundries actually consume the most energy in the vehicle manufacturing process – second only to paint – with 50 percent of the energy consumed in the furnaces used to melt and hold the metal. To assist in future energy reduction, this summer I developed a matrix to help GM compare their furnaces and aluminum foundries to realize energy savings. Read More
Each month, the Energy Exchange rounds up a list of top clean energy conferences around the country. Our list includes conferences at which experts from the EDF Clean Energy Program will be speaking, plus additional events that we think our readers may benefit from marking on their calendars.