Club Updates

We are anticipating the arrival of our inbound exchange students at the end of summer. If you know of anyone who is interested in hosting an exchange student, please let our Rotary Youth Exchange committee numbers know.

Our Afghan refugee family will be moving to their new house on Saturday. Call Carol Swart if you can help.

MSU Bioeconomy Institute (MSU BI)

Dr. Tom Guarr was with us to talk about MSU BI. When Pfizer shut down their Holland manufacturing plant, they donated the portion that was a pilot plant to MSU in 2007. In 2009 the university created MSU BI. Their mission is to provide manufacturing capabilities, incubator space for startups, and research. In 2016 a location in East Lansing was added to the MSU BI organization. The Holland location concentrates on specialty chemicals while the East Lansing location specializes in fermentation.
 
MSU BI has run more than 600 commercialization scale-ups for companies. The facility has a wide range of reactors, dryers, and other equipment. All environmental permits are kept and there is a fill-time safety officer.
 
MSU BI runs an internship program to allow college students to learn about working in research, to tour local industries, and to learn about business operations such as patents. They have had about 70 interns from 20 different schools. The interns go on to graduate school or into industry after completing their internships.
 
The research is concentrated on "green" technologies. In the last few years there has been a dramatic decrease in the cost of solar and wind generation. These technologies are now the least expensive ways to generate electricity. The challenge is to develop methods to store the energy until it is needed. Worldwide about a billion people have no reliable access to electric power. Energy can be stored by mechanical, thermal, chemical, or electrical methods.
 
MSU BI has concentrated on flow battery technology. In this type of battery, the chemical fuel moves through the cell to maintain the storage capability. Flow batteries can be scaled up to very large sizes for municipal use. The technology being pursued uses biological elements to replace the usual toxic and rare components. MSU BI has created a commercial venture called Jolt Energy to market the batteries.