Sources of Electric Power to Meet Demand and Reduce Carbon Footprint at an Urban University Campus

Regulatory bodies are setting targets for companies and institutions to be more energy efficient, moving toward becoming carbon neutral. Wentworth Institute of Technology (WIT), in Boston, MA, USA, has a historically developed power system of supply, generation, and consumption. The purpose of this project was to investigate and document the currently existing electrical supply and demand on campus, and to explore possible expansion of renewable energy on campus. The supply for the existing system had an electrical input from the utility grid, a natural gas supplied cogeneration plant, and a small solar array on the roof of one building. The campus was supplied with 62% of electricity from the utility grid, 38% from the cogeneration plant, and less than 1% from the existing solar array. A goal was to explore whether more of the campus electrical demand could be supplied by renewable energy generated on the campus. For this study, a proposed new canopy solar array over an existing large parking lot, and another solar array on the roof of a gymnasium were explored. These additions would bring the amount of renewable energy generation on campus up to roughly 24% of the demand, reducing the amount of energy supplied by the utility. This proposed system would reduce the carbon footprint of the campus and help move towards the carbon neutral targets.