Q. What is UW SOLAR?
UW SOLAR is an interdisciplinary team of students at UW that are working towards making the UW campus more sustainable by providing clean and sustainable power production to reduce reliance on outside energy resources.
Q. What do we do? Where can you find some of our installations?
UW SOLAR develops solar facilities from plan to power genertion for UW buildings and buildings across the Greater Seattle Area. We have installed solar arrays on Alder, Elm, Maple Hall & Mercer Court Apartments to name a few. In West Campus Housing alone, solar installations of 140kW+ have been installed.
Q. What was my role?
In my most recent role - as the Campus Planning Lead, I was responsible for looking at various buildings across the University of Washington, Seattle campus and checking whether installing solar arrays on their rooftops would be feasible. I did this by assessing solar capacity for a site, drafting solar panel layout and by performing solar shading analysis.
I was also responsible for outreach and helping new members get comfortable with the tools we used.
One of the coolest project I had worked on was the Husky Stadium Project.
UW SOLAR Team Visits The Husky Stadium For Rooftop Solar Panell Installation Analysis.
Q. All of this is cool. Tell me more.
Back in 2017, Elon Musk had propularized the concept of thinking from first principles - where concepts are broken down to the most fundamental truths and then reasoned up from there instead of reasoning by analogy. This helps in getting to the root of the issues and finding least complicated and most effective solutions.
This approach was particularly helpful in the Life Sciences Building project taken up by UW Solar where the front facade of the building was initially designed to have metal fins to provide shade during sunny days and reduce air conditioning costs during summer months.
At UW Solar we explored the idea of transitioning from metal fins to glass fins that incorporated Building Integrated Photovoltaics (BIPV) instead. This proved to be innovative and cost-effective over the long term. Our joint proposal was accepted, marking the Life Sciences Building as the first BIPV-equipped structure on the UW Campus.
This helped save thousands of dollars and raised awareness about BIPVs on campus.
Currently 12,260 kWh of energy is being produced by the BIPV fins alone.