Policy Context
Lafayette College is home to many students from very diverse backgrounds and interests. It is a place for people to come from all over the world to study, involve themselves, and interact with education and science in a hands-on setting. With 51 different areas of study among four different academic divisions, Lafayette provides a very broad liberal arts education that involves many interdisciplinary programs to give students the freedom to study their personal interests. Currently, there are not many disciplines that are mutually exclusive, and students can combine many different majors and minors to pursue throughout their college career. Many of these disciplines revolve heavily around scientific and engineering topics, which can help build a more informed and successful curriculum. While already developed, the further involvement of interdisciplinary fields of study can drive Lafayette’s students to improve or further current issues within our society.
Environmental Policy at Lafayette
In order to understand how to take advantage of the solar array to further Lafayette’s energy and sustainability goals, we need to fully understand what those goals are. In 2019, Lafayette College released their Climate Action Plan 2.0, which outlines the college’s standards and future plans regarding energy, carbon emissions, and other important environmental aspects. As previously stated, Lafayette proposed carbon neutrality by 2035, which is an ambitious goal that will take a lot of effort to achieve. Although this goal is a large challenge, Lafayette is well-situated to become a recognized leader in campus sustainability among higher education institutions. The unique identity of Lafayette as a small liberal arts college paired with the school’s robust engineering programs provides Lafayette College with the resources and strategies to be able to achieve these climate goals. Throughout the report, the Climate Action Plan provides a road map for reaching carbon neutrality within the time frame, putting a large emphasis on the initial steps for implementation. The Climate Action Plan 2.0 was split into three different time-based phases, with the first phase starting with immediate opportunities, the second revolving around recommendations through 2021-2025, and finally the third finishes with recommendations for the final years leading up to 2035. Of the College’s total emissions in 2007 and 2017, the emissions associated with purchased electricity and space and hot-water heating were 91 percent and 88 percent respectively (Lafayette College Office of Sustainability, 2021). With the notably massive reliance on purchased non-renewable energies, a large portion of the Climate Action Plan revolves around the utilization of renewable energies on campus and how to involve those technologies within Lafayette’s energy grid.
Understanding these goals helps us acknowledge the need to involve other cleaner forms of energy on campus. It also provides further reasoning to create a clean energy based initiative on campus, as the Climate Action Plan does not look to utilize quick surface level solutions to achieve its goals. Rather, it relies on long term solutions, such as the LCEC, to allow the college to continue building on its sustainable policy, achieve its goals, while providing learning opportunities for students and the Easton community along the way. Additionally, reaching carbon neutrality should increase organizational efficiency and help to attract, retain, and motivate students and employees. The Climate Action Plan 2.0 acts as a guide for involving these climate conscious values and goals within Lafayette’s sustainable efforts as well as involving students and Lafayette’s mission statement within the process. The plan embodies the values that we aim to achieve within our proposal, and showcases the educational, environmental, and community based advantages to Engineering Studies and the Lafayette Clean Energy Center. The goals, values, and methodologies within the Climate Action Plan are extremely important to acknowledge within the creation of the LCEC,
Curricular Policy
Environmentalism also plays a large part within these disciplines, spanning from its own major to involving itself in seemingly unrelated policies. From Environmental Science to Engineering Studies to Policy Studies, many disciplines heavily emphasize the value and necessity of sustainability. Renewable energies, environmental ethics, and environmental justice are all largely important topics within Lafayette’s engineering and environmental curriculum. The Climate Action Plan 2.0 directly states “as the problem-solvers of the future, [students] must possess the knowledge and skills required to help the communities they are members of be able to adapt to and mitigate climate change. We can best serve this educational need of our students by transforming our campus into a living laboratory for sustainability, a key component of which will be meeting our articulated goal of carbon neutrality.” The involvement of students and curriculars within topics such as renewable energies, climate change, and other environmental factors is a large goal of Lafayette’s climate plan, and there are many ways in which the LCEC could achieve those goals.
While there are many areas of study involved within the curriculum, Lafayette can use the Kirby Solar Array to deepen its educational curriculum by broadening the field and including additional topics of study. The solar array provides a massive opportunity to involve all different fields of study within the array, and use that experience to build upon their own education. In addition to interdisciplinary coursework around the solar array and implementation of the solar array with existing courses, we have also seen through the other Solar Capstone section, “Solar FYS: An array of Energy and Education,” the ways in which the array could also serve as the subject of stand alone coursework for students at Lafayette.
The main influence on the decision to take advantage of the educational aspects of the solar array would be Lafayette college as a whole, involving decisions from both individuals and board members. The college and its employees are also the leaders who mandate the curriculum throughout Lafayette. In order to involve the solar array into the curriculum, processes and policies within the school need to be followed, and it is also important to acknowledge Lafayette’s ability to add courses, open locations, and available staff. Although there are a fair number of hoops to jump through, involving Lafayette college decision makers with the input of new departmental and educational policies to include people on campus within the solar array project would be largely beneficial to Lafayette.
Local Community Policies
Currently, many policies exist around renewable energy in Pennsylvania. While policies have continued to be put into place to promote the use of solar energy, according to a recent study conducted by The Solar Energy Industries Association, solar energy projects in Pennsylvania only account for 0.39% of the state’s energy production (Solar Energy Industries Association, n.d.). With recent projects such as the Keystone Solar Project and large retailers recently shifting towards gaining more of their energy production through solar, the Lafayette Solar array can be a model for residents of the Easton area on the possibilities of solar energy.
The involvement of the solar array as an educational tool does not have to end at the edges of campus. The codes and regulations surrounding energy policy throughout local communities such as Easton, as well as state and federal, are big examples of how the solar array can be used to study non-scientific topics. Energy policy is the way the government addresses energy, encompassing laws, regulations, judicial opinions, incentives and strategic objectives at the federal, regional, state, local and utility levels (North Carolina State University, 2021). These ideas are important to understand in order to further our knowledge of solar energy education. Also, this political field of study can prove to be another interdisciplinary resource, in which humanities or social science students can study and learn about the governmental and political implications of clean energy, and how that can be involved within developing communities. Implementing policies towards a center for educational involvement within the solar array would positively impact Lafayette.