Thankfully, everyone from small businesses to large universities are jumping on the bandwagon to make their practices more green and energy efficient. One recent project was done by Cal Tech at their campus in Woodland Hills with solar panels. They decided to switch over to the natural energy source and set a goal of how much power they wanted to generate from those Woodland Hills solar panels. You’ll never believe the results they got!
Students and professors at California Institute of Technology in Woodland Hills had solar panels in mind when they were discussing the college’s future years ago. They wanted to be ahead of the trend for universities who supplied or supplemented their energy usage with natural energy sources. California had wind, water and sun to choose from when picking the different options available to them, but what would work best? Their answer: to install solar panels.
The campus didn’t go about this is a small way, either. Their goal was to have a system that produced 1.3 megawatts of power by the year 2010. Well, they were able to finally launch that new solar powered system in October and it hit 1.1 megawatts of solar power right away. School officials and green living experts are considering their project a huge success.
The project in Woodland Hills had solar panels placed on the roofs of seven different buildings. Those buildings were very large surfaces and included the athletic center, two parking garages and residence halls. The total number of solar panels installed – 4,500.
What else did they accomplish by installing all of those solar panels? Since they can generate so much electricity, the university’s energy consumption from outside sources dropped 2%. 2% might not sound like much if you were a regular household, but when you are talking about hundreds of acres of a college campus filled with electricity using students, that’s a whole lot of energy.
This project worked so well, they plan on expanding the system to generate more energy by installing more solar panels. They expect that by the year 2020, the system they have installed will reduce their greenhouse gas emissions to levels they were thirty years earlier, or the level they were at in 1990. Many universities in California and along the Sunbelt States are looking at the system and deciding if they can try and adapt it to work for their schools with equal success.
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