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This summer, the Champaign-Urbana Mass Transit District
maintenance facility got something really cool to go on top of its roof—a big
photovoltaic system, more than 1200 panels.
According to Jane Sullivan, whose title at MTD is
Grant Manager and Sustainability Planner (and who is a 2012 graduate of the UI
School of Earth, Society, and Environment, where I teach), it’s the biggest
solar array currently operating in central Illinois.
It will generate 350,000-kilowatt hours of
electricity over the course of a year, which translates to about one quarter of
the electricity used there. (The maintenance facility is a busy place,
operating 24/7 when the U of I is in session and providing full service
maintenance for the District’s fleet of 102 buses.) Sullivan said the
investment in solar is in keeping with the broader environmental mission of the
District. “We’re interested in finding as many ways as we can to reduce our
environmental impact, and reducing greenhouse gas emissions is an important
part of that.”
The motivation for a solar array that went online
at the First Mennonite Church of Champaign-Urbana this summer was similar.
Holly Nelson, a member of the congregation’s
“Green Team” who helped to instigate the project and see it through,
characterized it this way: “We had taken smaller steps toward being more
sustainable and caring for creation, including reusable dishes and a community
garden. This was something bigger for us.”
The 32-panel array at the church is of a different
scale than the one at MTD, but so is the need it serves. It generates the
equivalent of roughly two-thirds of the electricity used to run the facility
over the course of a year.
[Photo by Jason Hawksworth. Holly Nelson on the roof with solar panels at First Mennonite Church of Champaign-Urbana.]
About forty percent of the money invested in the First
Mennonite project was covered by a rebate from the Illinois Department of
Commerce and Economic Opportunity. (If you’re wondering about solar for
yourself, your business, or a nonprofit, you can look into this incentive here.) But the majority of the
funding came from donations by the congregation dedicated specifically to the
project. To Nelson, the congregation’s enthusiasm for the project was evident
in how quickly that money came in. “It’s the biggest investment our church has
ever made,” she said, “and we raised all of it in a month.”
You may remember from a commentary last year that
Champaign resident and U of I physics professor Scott Willenbrock had installed
solar panels on his family’s home in a quest to achieve “net-zero” energy use;
that is, to generate as much electricity as the family used at home.
That’s an ambitious goal for a house built in
1929. But when we spoke recently, Willenbrock reported that in the first
six-month period for which he had data (January 1 to July 1 of this year) they
had achieved it. On top of that, they did so even with the demand for
electricity added by an all-electric car they bought in April.
You can learn more about Willenbrock’s project,
which has applications for anyone interested in conserving or generating energy
at home at http://physics.illinois.edu/outreach/zero-net-energy-house/.
In terms of conserving and generating energy, no
building in town—or in all of the U. S. for that matter—is more ambitious than
the new home of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the U of I. You can
visit there and learn more about it at a public dedication ceremony tomorrow
afternoon. The building is located at 306 North Wright St. and the ceremony
begins at 1:00 p.m.
