Efforts to make Ball State University's campus more green are being focused on the Architecture Building as the Center for Energy Research, Education and Service looks to harness solar electricity.
Robert Koester, director of the energy center, said the center is searching for funds to fit the building with new photo voltaic panels, which will produce solar electricity for the building.
PV technology has been financially possible for the past decade, he said. The center has been researching it for a few years. PV panels are made of silicon and use the sun's energy to create electricity, he said.
"It's a fact of nature that if you put silicon into sunlight, it will produce electric power," Koester said.
Investing in PV panels would take a significant amount of money, he said. It's difficult to predict how much or know if it would cost more than the evacuated-tube solar water heating collectors, which are the current solar panels. They have the potential to save a lot of money because they have a life expectancy of 30 years.
Thaddeus Godish, professor of natural resources and environmental management, said solar power's biggest advantage is that it's clean and has no harmful emissions.
The disadvantage of solar power is its ineffectiveness the farther panels are from the equator, he said. Muncie is on the edge of the line between practical and not, he said.
Its cost is also an issue, Godish said. When using cheap coal power, it's hard to switch to solar power because it's more expensive. Solar power has to have a competitive price before it's possible to be the main source of power, he said.
"At present, it's not feasible to switch to solar power - not within this decade," he said. "We've made a lot of progress, but we're still not there yet."
Koester said the PV panels would replace the current solar panels which heat water rather than produce electricity.
He said he didn't know when a renovation project could begin.
The Architecture Building's water heating solar panels were installed in 1982 and have not been used since 1994, he said. The dean of the architecture program and the center for energy had to reconfigure the interior space of the building and the pumps for the solar panels were taken out. That space is occupied by a computer lab, he said.
The pumps for the water heating panels moved a mixture that collected energy from sunlight to heat water, Koester said.
The solar-powered water heating panels functioned well before they were decommissioned, Koester said. The only problem was their demanding maintenance schedule. They saved a minor amount of money on utility bills, he said.
The energy center has not been aggressively looking for funding to relocate the pumps, he said. It is not a priority to set aside money, but energy center employees have been keeping an eye on the budget for excess funds, he said.
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