Kenyon’s solar power initiative shines light on sustainability

As the seasons grow warmer and sea levels continue to swell, our world faces an evident urgency to minimize its carbon footprint and future damage to the environment. Although the federal government continues to sequester funds directed toward renewable energy, Kenyon remains committed to implementing sustainable infrastructure that will power our school for years to come. This effort is due in part to Assistant Professor of Physics and Scientific Computing Eric Holdener and Jerry Kelly ’96. Holdener and Kelly both teach Solar Power Systems: Science, Policy and Practicum (ENVS 104), a seminar spearheaded by Kelly that is intended to give students hands-on experience designing, planning, installing and financing solar panel systems around Kenyon’s campus. The students in this class are responsible for myriad new solar photovoltaic (PV) systems all across campus, and they just completed their most ambitious project yet — paneling the roof of Gund Commons.

However, this project did not come without its fair share of bumps in the road (or cloudy days, so to speak).  While the first five years of the class saw students complete several successful projects on places such as the Kenyon Farm and the Village Market, design work on the Gund Commons solar panels (which began early in 2020), was thrown for a loop by the COVID-19 pandemic. This did not stop Holdener and Kelly from continuing their pursuit of harnessing the mighty power of the sun. They worked with students and alumni online, and the plans for adding solar panels to Gund Commons were finalized on April 27, 2020, with construction beginning later in 2022.

Their greatest challenges, though, were yet to come. Directly after completing construction on the solar panels in early 2023, Kenyon was awaiting approval to turn on the power grid when it was notified by American Electric Power (AEP) of new regulations concerning large solar projects. AEP, whose power grid Kenyon is connected to, now required an entirely new safety protocol. This warranted the construction of new circuits, relays and a generator. Not only this, but AEP also shrank its solar department alongside these regulation changes, overwhelming its department with paperwork and creating a monumental backlog in the approval process.

 During the long wait, onlookers began to draw their own conclusions about the cause for delay. To students and community members, the panels looked good and ready to go. Many people assumed that it was cheaper for the school to use fossil fuels than to use solar panels, when in reality the only thing keeping them turned off was “bureaucratic buffoonery,” as Kelly put it. He mentioned that in this effort to get the system up and running, “student pressure was key.” A plethora of environmental studies students met with Kenyon’s administration, provided data stressing the benefits of these panels and hunted down the AEP employee in charge of handling Kenyon’s paperwork. A key contributor in this process was alumni Hank Thomas ’24, who brought to the class’s attention the Green Revolving Fund, a grant that funds cost-saving sustainable projects. This new discovery of funding sped up the process immensely, giving the project immediate priority and ending the delays in paperwork. With this roadblock sufficiently out of the way, Kenyon did some final safety testing, and the panels were quietly powered up on Sept. 3. Kelly remarked that it was best to get the panels turned on as quickly as possible, saying, “In the past, we would perhaps get the president of the College there to flip the switch and give a little piece. … We didn’t want to bother anybody on a Wednesday morning. They’re all busy.”

Kenyon’s Solar Power Systems class is one of many opportunities for students to take charge and lead this school to greater horizons; Kelly noted that the class is currently working on powering the Lowry Center with pure solar energy. This would be a momentous step toward the College’s goal of Carbon Neutrality by 2040, all with the help of its students. Kelly concluded by emphasizing what makes this class special: “Among the liberal arts schools we’ve looked at, the distinguishing feature is that we’re building it ourselves. Our students are designing it, and there’s a lot of value in that. We’ve got a lot of students who have leveraged that to get jobs in solar because that’s on their resume.”