Students create unique solar EV chargers at college that power campus as well

A group of college students in the US has created four innovative charging stations for electric vehicles (EVs) powered by a solar energy collection system.

The team at Hope College in Michigan installed the system in the summer and and went live earlier this month.

The charging infrastructure is designed in a way to provide benefits even when vehicles aren’t connected to the chargers.

“It’s tied to the grid, so it will all go right into the building. If students aren’t charging their cars, the energy that the system is generating will be used elsewhere on campus,” said Michelle Seppala Gibbs, director of the office of sustainability at Hope College, in a statement .

With such projects, the college aims for students to gain these experiences not only as seniors on the brink of graduation but also as first-year freshmen in their introductory engineering course.

Driving campus innovation

The new EV chargers installed on the college campus are not the first. However, they are the first to be powered by solar energy.

The College East s o lar energy gathering system joins two other on-campus systems designed by engineering students.

The method used to recharge the battery-powered golf carts and other equipment used by the groundskeeping and physical plant workers to maintain the 200-acre campus and its facilities was created in a previous beginning course.

Senior engineering design students created a solar energy system for Kleinheksel Cottage, a college-owned building that was constructed in 1892 as a family residence and has been extensively renovated to serve as a model “green cottage.”

According to officials, staff members of the college or outside companies finished the installation.

“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,” said Jeff Christians, associate professor of engineering, who taught the fall 2022 course that led to this summer’s installation.

Student-alumni partnership

The students were divided into around twenty small groups and worked in various lab and course sections. Each team developed an idea and calculated the expected cost, benefit, and technical requirements.

After sharing their ideas with one another, the students voted for their favorites based on factors including effect and viability. The top vote-getters were then given more scrutiny and refinement before being selected as the winner.

The three-story structure selected has a large, peaked roof with a south-facing side, perfect for a huge number of solar panels to be put without trees blocking the sun, and an adjacent parking lot. However, its location a few blocks from the campus center was one of the trade-offs.

The funds for purchasing and installing the solar panels and chargers at College East were donated specifically by Hope alumni for student-focused sustainability efforts rather than drawn from the college’s operating budget.

According to the college, it will collect data on the energy produced by the solar panels and monitor the use of the new charging stations, treating their availability as an experiment to evaluate the level of demand and understand the relationship between supply and demand.

“It’s a little like the chicken or the egg: do you have a demand for EV charging and that’s why you put them in, or do you put them in and, by increasing the infrastructure, make electric vehicles a more viable option?” said Nick Duthler, Hope’s Physical Plant project manager.