My name is Gwen Lau.
I'm a mechanical engineering major,
and I'm a member of the SUN Delegation.
My name is Riya Milan.
I am the president of the SUN Delegation,
and I am a mechanical engineer here at UMD.
I'm Craig Hill. I am an assistant professor in
the Mechanical and Industrial Engineering Department and
the faculty advisor for the UMD Sun Delegation.
The Sun Delegation is an interdisciplinary group of
students who are interested in
renewable energy and promoting
renewable energy on campus.
Currently, we have five solar sources that UMD uses.
There's the Malosky Stadium solar array,
the Bagley Nature classroom.
Uh, the HCAMS building,
which is the Heikkila Chemistry and Materials
Science Building and also the Oakland Aspen apartments.
Those are the ones on campus.
We also have purchased
100 kilowatts of solar from a community solar garden.
SUN Delegation was the driving force
for the Oakland Aspen Apartments.
It was student led, student run,
and finally, student completed.
I think it would be super cool to see
our campus covered in solar panels.
So I want to help
advocate and speak up to make that happen.
I think it's important that we move
towards more sustainable sources,
and solar makes up a big component of that.
Rewable energy is incredibly
important for a couple of reasons.
I mean, one, we certainly want to
try as a community and as a nation
to step away from such a reliance on fossil fuels.
Um, it's not going to be
one specific renewable energy source
that is going to offset that demand.
And that's where we
have to look at all of these different options.
I think UMD as a campus can contribute to that a lot.
Many people think that we live in a northern climate.
We have some pretty extreme winter conditions.
But that doesn't mean that solar is
not a viable resource for this region.
And so I think across campus,
we could expand our use of solar,
whether it's on top of buildings
like you're starting to see now,
or if we buy into more off-site solar energy farms.
I think it's really important for
students to speak out if they have
interest in renewable energy on
campus because we have
the power to make a change on campus,
if we have something we're passionate about.
If we want to see our campus
have more solar panels, we can make that happen.
We just need to say something and advocate for it.
It's important for students to be conscious
about the energy that they
consume during their day to day life,
like turning off lights when you leave
and not using unnecessary energy.
Even though those aren't
the electricity bills that you're paying.
It's still important to be conscious about
the energy and how it's affecting the environment.
Students have the power to change campus.
As evident from the past,
the SUN Delegation was completely student run,
and we finally got
45 kilowatts of power on Oakland Apartments.
So that being said,
we can do, we can push for more,
we can advocate for more.
It's all up to us with the help of faculty and staff.
So we can make UMD solar powered.
I think the best thing for UMD students to do is
really just show your enthusiasm.
You know, it's renewable energy is,
it's the direction that
our electrical grid and industry is heading.
We need to focus more and more on it every
day and that starts with UMD students.
If you show your enthusiasm,
it brings out our enthusiasm as faculty,
and we can start to build more momentum across
the community to bring more solar on campus,
have the UMD campus as a whole
invest in other renewable energy technologies.
And I think it's
an entire community movement
that the more students we get involved,
um, the better we are as a campus community.
Go solar.