Ohio University Receives State Excellence Award

Tucked in the corner of Southern Ohio, lays the beautiful campus of OhioUniversity. Governor Ted Strickland announced that OU has been named a Center of Excellence in Energy and the Environment. This recognition came because of the University’s national reputation for energy and pollution research along with the potential of creating jobs in those fields.

OU was one of nine centers of excellence that were announced this week. The centers met state requirements of the Senate Bill 221, an energy reform bill that will help ensure the predictability of affordable energy prices in the future. This is one way Ohio is trying to enhance industries locally, by creating new jobs while protecting existing ones. All public universities were required to participate in the centers of excellence reviews under Ohio’s plan to raise the national profile of its higher education institutions.

OU was one of the first in the state to integrate multidisciplinary work of energy and the related environmental impacts with the Consortium for Energy, Economics, and the Environment (CE3) in 2005.  Since then, researchers have received more than $28 million in external funding, and there has been 38 invention disclosures submitted, 96 patent applications, and nine patents all related to energy and the environment. These have generated $745,000 in royalty fees.

With Ohio moving towards a clean energy economy, the OU Center of Excellence in Energy and the Environment has the potential to create over 1,000 new jobs. The Ohio RiverValley is responsible for almost 40 percent of the nation’s coal-generated electricity; an establishment of a carbon management industry in that region has the potential of growing to one billion dollars by 2020.

Written by: J. Elizabeth Lawrence