Energy Academic Group’s NE3T Workshop Tackles DON Energy Problem With Education

By MC2 James Norket, Naval Postgraduate School Office of University Communications

The Energy Academic Group (EAG) at the Naval Postgraduate School (NPS) hosted experts in multiple fields to explore opportunities to utilize education to advance the DON’s operational energy issues during the Naval Enterprise Energy Education & Training (NE3T) Workshop, July 27-30. 

The EAG is an interdisciplinary group of highly diverse faculty that provides energy-focused graduate education, research and outreach. Dr. Daniel Nussbaum, NPS professor and chair of the EAG, said that the workshop was held to discover ways to include operational energy curricula in the Navy’s undergraduate and graduate programs.

“This is a multi-year project,” he said. “Ultimately, we would like to create new courses and maybe build in some energy-related topics to already existing programs.”

Daniel Temple, a Faculty Associate for Research with the EAG, coordinated and facilitated the workshop. 

“The goal of the workshop was to figure out the operational energy learning objectives that officers in the Navy and Marine Corps need to know at certain points in their careers,” said Temple. 

Operational energy is defined, simply, as “the energy, electricity or gas that is needed to complete a mission,” Temple added.

Although NPS has several people who are considered subject-matter experts in all things energy, Temple went above and beyond to get the most out of the workshop.

“We didn’t just want to hear from our own people,” he said. “We wanted to hear from experts in training and education, community research, and acquisition specialists. We wanted to have multiple facets represented during the workshop.”

Temple believes the workshop was a great success and said that multiple ideas were generated during the four-day event. 

“A ton of ideas were brought up that we had never thought of,” Temple said. “We have some really good examples and plans that we can now present to senior leadership in the DON to get everyone to fully buy in.” 

Nussbaum also gave the workshop an “A+” and admitted that he was a hard grader. Interdisciplinary problems call for jointly integrated solutions, Nussbaum said, making NPS the ideal location for this event.

“[NPS] has brilliant academics just like they have at other top-tier universities,” said Temple. “But NPS academics are solely focused on DON and DOD applications. I don’t think you could find a civilian university to solve these problems. You’d be hard pressed to find another school that can do the research, and develop the academic material that NPS can.”