Some Big Changes at Hampshire

ALF
Thu, 29 Oct 2015 17:06:35 +0000

Hampshire just announced that they are planning to become the first college to generate all of its own electricity, from two fields of solar panels: https://www.hampshire.edu/news/2015/10/28/hampshire-plans-to-be-the-first-us-residential-college-supplying-100-percent-of

I’ll be interested to see how it all works. As in most of these electrical power-sharing agreements with local utilities, all the electricity generated by the solar array is dumped into the regional power grid, as opposed to strictly powering things on the campus. This makes some sense because otherwise the college would have to invest in a storage system to power the campus when the solar array isn’t generating enough electricity. So, really what they are talking about is the solar array generating more power than the college uses from the regional utility grid.