Here Comes the Sun

As early as the summer of 2012, Princeton will be looking a little greener.  The University plans to install a solar collector field that would generate 8 million kilowatt-hours per year – that’s enough to power 700 homes, or 5.5 percent of Princeton’s total energy use.The 5.3-megawatt solar field will have 16,500 photovoltaic panels, and it's expected to be one of the biggest single installations at a U.S. college.  It would be significantly larger than the systems at Harvard and Yale, the only Ivies to make The Princeton Review’s 2011 Green Colleges Honor Roll. (Anyone else smell a little competition here?)This won’t be the first solar power system at Princeton.  The Forrestal Campus’s Research Collections and Preservation Consortium (ReCAP) building hosts an array of 5,000 panels installed in 2009, and the new Frick Chemistry Laboratory has 216 panels.  The proposed project, which is an order of magnitude larger, should cut Princeton’s electric bill by approximately 8% per year.A unique funding plan made the more ambitious proposal possible.  Princeton will lease, not own, the system and pay for it by selling renewable energy credits.  Eventually, the University will stop selling credits and claim the carbon emissions reduction, which will help achieve its goal of returning to 1990 emissions levels by 2020.And because it wouldn't be complete without educational value, the field will deliver a continuous real-time data feed from the solar field, which students and faculty will be able to use for research.So where is the University going to put 16,500 solar panels?  The solar field will be on 27 acres between the Dinky line, the canal, Washington Road, and Route 1, although you might not see them since the plan also calls for some new landscaping.  Solar power may be cool, but a sea of rotating electronic panels might be a little too sci-fi for this town.Check out more details on the project here.