Background
Using solar technology, energy from the sun can be harvested and used as a renewable power source. Solar energy provides renewable energy without emitting any fossil fuels or having negative effects on the environment. In the past few years, solar energy has emerged and continues to improve as an effective renewable energy source (J. Nicodemus, personal communication, 2017). The functional capabilities of solar energy are proving to be even more beneficial as climate change continues to remain an important global issue. Currently, carbon dioxide levels are at their highest level and sixteen of the seventeen warmest years on record have occurred since 2001 (NASA, 2017). Statistics like these prove the severity of climate change and increase the importance of implementing renewable energy sources.
College and universities have emerged as capable suitors to implement renewable energy, specifically solar energy, on their campuses. As colleges continue to strive to represent model communities, sustainability efforts are a top priority. There are a plethora of examples of colleges across the nation adding renewable energy systems to their campuses. These colleges are not just helping the environment; they are showing their commitment to be sustainable in a visible way. Furthermore, prospective students value institutions that make visible strides towards sustainability and an eco-friendly environment. The following report will look deeper into Lafayette College’s ability to implement solar energy systems on its own campus.
Problem Definition
Lafayette College has made strides towards sustainability and an environmentally friendly campus, however these efforts lack visibility. In the last year, the college hired a Director of Sustainability which never existed at Lafayette before. On top of this, ground has broke on the new Rockwell Integrated Sciences Center. When completed, this building will be one of the most energy efficient science centers in the nation with a LEED gold certification. These major steps demonstrate Lafayette’s commitment to sustainability, but are not visible to people walking around campus. Even when the new science center is complete, no one will know it is LEED Gold simply by seeing it from Anderson Courtyard. Similarly, no one visiting College Hill would know that Lafayette has a new Director of Sustainability without doing any research.
College campuses are seen as model communities, and university sustainability is moving further into the mainstream with each passing year. Because of this, we believe it is important for Lafayette to increase the visibility of its sustainability efforts on campus. One way to do so would be to implement solar energy systems on the rooftops of buildings on campus. Our team performed an energy audit of Lafayette’s campus. The question we hoped to answer is as follows:
Can Lafayette implement feasible and effective solar energy systems on the rooftops of buildings and where?
In order to answer this question in a clear and comprehensible way, we considered four different contexts that are relevant to the problem: social, political, technical, and economic. The majority of this report details our analysis of each of those respective contexts.
Challenges
There are a couple of challenges in adding solar panels to roofs that came up in our analysis. Through discussion with Lafayette personnel, we learned that not every building is capable of having solar panels installed on its roof. Some roofs are not able to support the weight while others are too steep. The challenge of load capacity became an important variable in our technical analysis.
The biggest challenge in terms of convincing Lafayette that renewable energy systems are worth implementing on campus is the cost. We go into detail about costs and estimates in our Economic Analysis, but a recurring theme in discussions with people on campus was that our largest hurdle would be the finances. We understand that solar energy is currently more expensive than fossil fuels in Pennsylvania, but we hope to prove that there is other value besides just dollars that comes from implementing renewable energy systems on campus. Furthermore, just because something is cheaper does not mean it is right. Child labor is a cheap alternative to paying adults a salary, but it is wrong. In this case, fossil fuels are a cheap alternative to adding solar panels to roofs, but knowingly polluting the environment when there are cleaner alternatives is wrong. The school has shown its willingness to pay for sustainability. The Rockwell Integrated Sciences Center is a 75 million dollar project. A percentage of that costs comes from the fact that it is going to be a LEED gold building. Lafayette certainly could have designed a new science center that is cheaper, but it would not have been as sustainable or environmentally friendly as Rockwell will be. The college’s benefits of having a LEED gold on campus rationalized paying the extra money to do so. We believe the same logic should apply when choosing whether or not to implement renewable solar energy systems on campus, and hope that this report can help the school realize that.
Goals
There are several established goals of the following research project. Our first goal is to answer the question we outlined above: can Lafayette implement feasible and effective solar energy systems on the rooftops of buildings and where? The project addresses feasibility from four different perspectives: social, political, technical and economic. The paper will explain where the optimal locations for solar energy are on campus, the type of panel recommended, and the value added from implementing solar panels. The paper will aim to prove to Lafayette College why the school should or should not implement solar energy on campus through analysis of the contextual perspectives noted above.
We realize that the analysis necessary to make fully informed decisions about whether or not to add solar panels to roofs on campus, which roofs are ideal, and how many panels is beyond the scope of a fifteen week project. Because of that, another one of our goals is to lay out next steps. We hope that in the future any group of students along with the Lafayette administration can use our report as a natural starting point for assessing the feasibility of adding renewable solar energy systems on campus.
Section Overview
The first section of the research is social context. First, social context will help to explain why the question of implementing solar energy at Lafayette College is being asked in the first place. The social context section then looks into how implementing solar energy fits into the current society. Social context is analyzed at the global scale, among higher education institutions in the United States, and on Lafayette’s campus. The research goes into how solar energy would be accepted on campus and the impact it will have beyond just the technical aspect of being a renewable energy source.
The political and policy context section of our report focuses on the impacts the environmental movement has on global governments, specifically the European Union’s policies versus the United States’ environmental policies. This section delves deeper into how the global movement affects college campuses across the United States. By analyzing multiple colleges and universities, we are able to see how colleges act as role models for ideal living communities. The end of this section discusses funding considerations necessary to implementing solar panels on campus, as well as relevant environmental policies undertaken by Lafayette College.
The technical context section analyzes the technical aspects that are involved in implementing solar technology on campus. The section analyzes different types of solar power, looking into the photovoltaic and solar thermal. Furthermore, we will derive equations for returns on energy to be able to establish how much energy solar panels can actually supply. Lastly, a technical analysis of potential locations for solar panels will be performed in order to find the optimal location.
The last section is economic context. In this section, the economic factors of implementing solar panels at Lafayette College are analyzed. The section will look into the cost of installing solar panels along with how much its costs will compare to the current energy budget. The economic section will also work to assign value added to qualitative value in order to show the total added benefit from installing solar panels at Lafayette College.
Next Section: Social Context