Day in the Life: Chong Vue (Text Version)

This is the text version of the video "Day in the Life: Chong Vue."

My name is Chong Vue, and I work for the National Renewable Energy Lab. I'm actually a research technician, and I'm under the water-powered lab. I work for the waterpower side. I built a research data acquisition system. There's not a how-to-do-it. We are the how-to-do-it, so we build everything from scratch, plan everything out correctly and then we set it up, make sure that the system runs, and we start collecting data.

And these systems that I develop, it's going to be deployed into either water buoy, water turbine, or sometimes a two-three wind turbine. Some days I can be in here drawing, or others I would be grabbing my helmet and climbing up a wind turbine or even a mid-tower. And there's times where I'm packing up to leave out to another project to deploy another system.

Growing up I've always taken things apart, just trying to figure out what detail do they do that I didn't do different, or what design they did that I'm not understanding.

The skills and training to do my job, I would say if you have electrical—as an electrical background, that is a benefit. I do have mechanical system as well. Don't limit yourself. That would be the biggest thing. You think about it, you've got 70% of water in this world, I mean it's endless possibility.

You should continue waterpower industry. It's a new technology, the way how things are evolving around the world. Anything is possible.

The work that I do is important because you've got to think about it as what would be more sustainable, not just for the human population, but for the whole earth. The idea here is to come in into this world and make it a better place.

There's energy all around us; we just need to go and harvest it, and this is a start.

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