When it comes to the advancement of solar power, California’s Stanford University certainly walks the talk.
From solar-powered retinal implants for the vision impaired, to busting perovskite solar cell efficiency records, it seems not a month goes by without a new technological breakthrough from Stanford’s high achievers
Now the University has announced that by year’s end its campuses will receive a minimum 50 percent of their energy needs from solar alone as The Stanford Solar Generating Station approaches completion.
Located on 242-acres of desert in Kern County, roughly 480 km southeast of the University, the new plant is set to produce a peak 67 MW of power from 150,000 photovoltaic panels. Once testing is completed, the plant will begin providing power to Stanford by December.
The new solar station is part of the University’s Energy System Innovations program that includes installing rooftop solar panels on sixteen additional campus buildings over coming months. Upon completion they will boost Stanford’s rooftop solar generating capacity alone to an impressive five megawatts.
The completion last year of a high-efficiency heat recovery system for the heating and cooling of campus buildings combined with the new solar resources is set to reduce Stanford’s greenhouse gas emissions by 68 percent, equivalent to removing 32,000 cars from the road.
The Kern County plant plus the additional campus solar panels will produce 53 percent of the University’s electricity. The remaining 47 percent will be purchased from the California power grid, 25 percent of which already comes from renewable sources, resulting in a total of 65 percent of Stanford’s total power requirements being met by renewable energy by the end of 2016.
This figure is only set to rise, according to the University, as California state law mandates a higher renewable energy target to fuel the electricity network – 50 percent by 2030.
“We have been engaged in a major effort to make Stanford one of the most energy-efficient universities in the world, and this expansion of our solar resources will make a dramatic difference,” said Joseph Stagner, executive director of sustainability and energy management at Stanford.
“Clean, renewable energy will become the dominant part of Stanford’s energy mix, and its proportion in that mix will continue to grow over time.”
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