**Title**: Energy in the North - Dominque Hinds
**Date**: October 16, 2024
**Participants**: Amanda Byrd, Dominque Hinds

00;00;00;21 - 00;00;03;12 [Dominque Hinds] Electricity prices here are pretty high. And so I want to see how I can be able to lower those costs.

00;00;07;16 - 00;00;23;26 [Amanda Byrd] This week on Energy in the North, we speak with Dominique Hinds, a summer intern in a ten week internship program funded by the Office of Naval Research. Dominique's internship was focused on power electronics, the systems used in an electric grid, and especially inverters for renewable energy microgrids. I started by asking what exactly are power electronics?

00;00;29;19 - 00;00;44;10 [Dominque Hinds] It's a field that deals with a combination of analog and digital electronics. By electronics, we just mean circuitry. Circuitry that transforms one type of energy or power and converts it into another form of energy and power.  We have Wenceslao Ruiz, who is working on the hardware, the actual hardware for the inverter, And I'm working on the brains. So once both of us have come to a to a place where it's like, yes, the brains has been fully developed and the body of the inverter, which is the actual hardware, once that is fully developed, we can combine those two together to create a brain with the body. And you know, once you have a brain in a body, it's fully functional. So that's kind of like what the final end product is going to be. It will actually be a legit physical inverter that can be implemented into the larger grid. And then once that is done, we can integrate that into the ETF, the Energy Technology Facility down here at UAF to see how that will interact with a microgrid.

00;01;32;00 - 00;01;36;27 [Amanda Byrd] So it would take direct current power and invert it or convert it to alternating current.

00;01;37;02 - 00;01;39;28 [Dominque Hinds] That is absolutely correct. So, you know, think of like solar photovoltaic, you know, solar PV or maybe you have some wind turbine, you know, we can convert that, whatever that may be, into clean energy for for the electric grid.

00;01;53;06 - 00;01;55;09 [Amanda Byrd] That's at that nice 60 hertz.

00;01;55;10 - 00;01;58;13 [Dominque Hinds] Yes, nice clean 60 hertz that people love. You know, you don't want to give them direct current because you know, you know that you can have lots of power losses over the transmission lines. You don't want to give them dirty AC, you know, lots of harmonics. You know, it just wouldn't look really good. You want to give people very clean. AC And so that's what the purpose of the inverter is to create. Once you give it some, some either dirty AC or direct current, you convert it into very clean, nice sinusoid that people love.

00;02;25;06 - 00;02;32;12 [Amanda Byrd] You really seem so passionate about energy, and it must have been so interesting to work with so many non engineers this summer.

00;02;32;12 - 00;02;35;18 [Dominque Hinds] I'm a, you know, engineer and sometimes you can get stuck in your engineering ways, right? But a lot of my peers were not necessarily in the PSI group have actually helped me explore things outside engineering. And it's been really fascinating, you know, talking about economics and ergonomics and, you know, how that all integrates together to create a better a better Alaska. We've had some very interesting discussions that have really kind of opened my mind to different things that I never really thought about before. So I really recommend it for for everybody.

00;03;03;10 - 00;03;09;04 [Amanda Byrd] Do you think you'll stay in Fairbanks? And if so, what are your hopes and dreams for working in Alaska?

00;03;09;04 - 00;03;13;27 [Dominque Hinds] I hope to stay in Alaska. You know, I would like to kind of stay in Fairbanks if I can. But overall, I would just really like to help out with the
energy problems that we have in Alaska, especially within rural communities. You know, electricity prices here are pretty high. And so I want to see how I can be able to lower those costs, not just for for urban citizens, but also for our rural villages as well.

00;03;35;03 - 00;03;44;14 [Amanda Byrd] Dominique Hinds is an engineering intern at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. And I'm Amanda Byrd, chief storyteller for the Alaska Center for Energy and Power at UAF. Find this story and more information about ACEP at uaf.edu/acep