Boston University is installing solar panels in the Track and Tennis Center, 25 Buick Street and the Booth Theater as part of the University’s Climate Action Plan for sustainability. The setup for the installations began in early March and the panels will be installed at the start of April.
Sam Moller, assistant director of communications for BU Sustainability, said the sustainability team made sure to look at the Charles River Campus, Fenway Campus and the Medical Campus for possible locations to install the solar panels.
“They looked at over 80 different locations,” Moller said. “Looking at Track and Tennis Center, Booth Theater and 25 Buick Street as the first steps and hopefully additional projects in the future down the road for solar panel installation on campus.”
Moller said various factors were taken into the decades-long planning when considering the feasibility of these locations, including roof flatness, maintenance, roof angles to maximize sun exposure and avoiding potential obstructions of sunlight taken.
The solar panel project is an addition to the Wind Project, which was implemented in December 2020 when BU agreed to purchase 205,000 MWh of wind energy each year from a wind-powered plant in South Dakota according to BU’s website.
“In the Climate Action Plan it recommended that we not only match 100% of the University’s electricity usage with a large-scale, renewable energy project that led us to the BU Wind Project,” Dennis Carlberg, associate vice president for BU Sustainability, said. “In addition, it suggested that we install solar [panels] on campus.”
Carlberg said through the solar panel installations, the University is now contributing to the power grid with its own solar energy.
“What matters here is we’re creating new renewable energy generation capacity that helps everybody, that helps green the grid essentially,” he said. “We don’t need this for the sake of reducing our emissions, we’re doing this for the sake of adding new renewable energy to the grid.”
Moller said the work on the panels is conducted only during the day under a standard construction schedule, so the buildings are not being disrupted by the construction.
“It’s on the roof, so they’re not really having to go inside or do anything,” he said. “If you go by the building, there is just like a notice on the side by the entrance saying there’s active construction going on, so there’s no difference to what’s happening functionally inside the three buildings.”
Kai Miyaki, a freshman in the College of Arts and Sciences who lives in Sleeper Hall, said that the solar panel construction near West Campus has not been obtrusive.
“I didn’t really come from a really busy city back at home, so initially, I was kind of caught off guard with all the city noise, but I feel like the construction kind of blended into that,” Miyaki said. “I didn’t really think about construction as something that’s bothering [me] so much.”
Leeseo Dang, a sophomore in the Sargent College of Health and Rehabilitation Sciences who lives at 1019 Commonwealth Ave., said that construction has been happening in West Campus “every single night for about the past month” and that the noise is disturbing around 3 a.m.
“I would just ask the University to let the students be more aware that this construction is happening so they can maybe plan around it or have it at different times instead of the middle of the night when people are sleeping,” Dang said.
Moller said the solar panel installations are part of the University’s efforts to rely on cleaner sources of energy.
“We didn’t want to copy anybody, we wanted to do [this project] for us,” Moller said. “That’s why we chose to do these projects and hopefully, we’ll do more in the future.”
