Testimonial Shlagha Thapa

The Electrical Sustainable Energy Systems (ESES) minor has been a very interesting experience for me. My bachelor’s background is Applied Earth Sciences, so doing a minor from the electrical engineering faculty put me in a completely new situation. However, all the recent talks about being more sustainable sparked my interest in learning more about the field of sustainability. Prior to joining this course, I had asked my study advisor for his advice on this minor because I was worried that the course would be too different from my background, but he told me not to worry and that the minor would be doable.

In the first quarter, I took courses on introduction to power engineering, sustainable energy technology, introduction to wind energy and a project course. These courses were perfect for someone with no prior knowledge and helped me to get an overview of the kind of subjects that someone who studied sustainable energies would have to deal with. For example, the introduction to power engineering course which gave us an overview of the basics of electrical engineering. The sustainable energy technology course was a particularly interesting course for me as it covered problems relating energy for example, heat loss from a building or a country’s energy balance and taught us to quantify the energy input and output through simplified calculations. Although the calculations were a bit over simplified for scientific uses, it gave me the confidence that I would be able to tackle even the more difficult questions. The same was for the wind energy course. As with every energy technology, measuring the efficiency of the process was a very important part of the project and this was covered in the project course where we did practicals involving hydrogen fuel cells, solar panels and making our own circuit boards.

In the second quarter, I did an in-depth course on solar cells, energy efficiency, more power engineering and yet another group project course. My favourite parts of the second quarter was the field trip to a TenneT substation and the energy auditing project from the energy efficiency course. Both activities gave me a lot of insight to the working world in the energy sector. All in all, I think I made the right decision to go with this minor. I am happy that I got to learn about new energy technologies and to raise my awareness on the importance of leading a more sustainable lifestyle. I think that this is a great minor for someone who is interested in sustainable technologies or is considering to take the Sustainable Energy Technology masters in the future.