College East Solar Stats

Although the stations and the panels that power them are located at Hope’s College East Apartments on 14th Street, students don’t have to be residents of the building to use them. Instead, any Hope student may purchase a special parking tag from Campus Safety and have unlimited access to the chargers for the entire school year to power their electric vehicle. Not least of all, the system will still yield benefits even when vehicles aren’t connected to the chargers. It’s tied to the grid, so if students aren’t charging their cars, the energy that the system is generating will be used elsewhere on campus.

See the graphs below to see the real-time solar electricity generation of this system.

“We’ve tried in our intro engineering course to provide an opportunity for students to get a little bit familiar with and kind of touch the engineering-design process. Usually what that looks like is some sort of semester-long project mixed with the course and the lab. It’s a really valuable experience for students to see how some of the math and calculations that they do as homework problems help them with these bigger, more amorphous projects. A big piece of engineering is balancing trade-offs and economics and multiple other factors that you’re trying to weigh, where there may not be a ‘right’ answer.”
—Dr. Jeff Christians, associate professor of engineering, who taught the fall 2022 course that led to this summer’s installation