Donate!

Donors and Donations for ALSETLab

Donating towards our research and education activities is an investment to the future generations of engineers and researchers that are trained and educated @ALSETLab, and to foster continued growth in engineering.

Carrying out research is costly, research funds are normally gathered through funding from grant applications which mostly cover the researchers salaries and tuition, and some other things like going to conferences and publishing papers.

Several of our projects or initiatives that have the potential to be transformative in nature and/or position RPI to be a leader in power grid research do not qualify for funding from traditional research grants. The normal cycle of obtaining funding is long and uncertain, which makes it difficult to carry out long term projects such as those you can see in our Github repositories.

You can support ALSETLab through in-cash or other kind of donations (e.g. equipment, software licenses or engineering services) to provide these efforts with the resources these novel and revolutionary ideas the opportunity to succeed.​

Contributions can be made online or via check/money order as specified below:

• Donate Online , under “Selected Designations”, please specify, “Prof. Luigi Vanfretti at the Electrical, Computer & Systems Engineering Department.”

• Check’s or money orders payable to Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, declared as a “Restricted Gift” with a letter stating:

  • Subject: Restricted Gift to Prof. Vanfretti to be Administered by the ECSE Department at RPI.
  • Include in the body of the letter: ** Your name / company ** ‘s policy/preference is that the funds associated with this gift will not be used to cover institutional indirect costs such as overheads. This gift is being made with the understanding that they will be utilized only to finance direct costs associated with Prof. Vanfretti’s research efforts. Costs may include, but are not limited to, travel expenses, materials and equipment, software licenses, etc.
  • To send your gift, please get in touch directly with me luigi.vanfretti@gmail.com; or if you prefer to do an anonymous donation please send a check or money order to the following address:

    Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute

    Gifts Processing Center

    PO Box 3164

    Boston, MA 02241-3164

    U.S.A.

Below, is a list of our generous donors, contributing to the development of our real-time hardware-in-the loop simulation platform for experimental testing, and our other research & education activities.

We welcome any donations in the form of products, software licenses, services, lab equipment, or your time. See the examples below if you need some ideas of how to help!

Donors

Equipment and Engineering Services

• Dominion Energy has made a substantial donation equipment and engineering time to set up a specialized rack for substation automation and synchrophasor applications. We would like to thank Dominion in general, and in particular, to Dr. Matthew Gardner, Dr. Kevin D. Jones and Mr. Kyle Thomas for making this donation possible.
  
  
  
  

• Schweitzer Engineering Laboratories has made a substantial donation equipment and engineering time to set up a specialized rack for substation automation and synchrophasor applications. We would like to thank SEL in general, and in particular, to Dr. Greg Zweigle and Miss Jennifer White for making this donation possible.
  • Note: Schweitzer Engineering Laboratories has been extremely generous with me (Luigi) since 2011 when I developed the now defunct SmarTS Lab. They have previously donated equipment, software and their time, which was a contribution towards my previous research… we still have and use all of it for our work! This company is a great example of American generosity! Thank you!!!

Contributions towards equipment purchasing

• General Electric through it’s GE Global Research granted us with a substantial contribution for our real-time digital simulation laboratory, which closely aligns with GE’s “digital twin” initiative, on behalf of Nicholas Miller through his 2017 Edison/Edison Pioneer Award. We would like to thank SEL in general, and in particular, to Nick Miller for making this possible. Congratulations for your well deserved award Nick, we hope to support your vision for renewable energy!

IT Services

• Github provides us with unlimited private repositories and users! Thank you and Octocat for keeping our code safe!

• Notion provides us with with their Pro Plan at no cost so we can be organized! Learn about this software/service that materializes a new paradigm in team collaboration through a fully self-supporting digital workspace

Cash Donations

• 2018
  • Michael Henderson, Director Regional Planning and Coordination at ISO New England, and an RPI alum contributed to the cost of software license for Dymola that I personally use for research in power system model validation. Thank you Mike!
• 2024
  • Mitsubishi Electric Research Labs., contributed with a cash donation to support research dissemination activities. Thank you MERL!