Dale McDaniel Watts
When it was in-built 1891, Agnes Scott Faculty’s Foremost Corridor was an prompt sight. It wasn’t for the excessive Victorian Gothic structure, bell towers or steam-heated inside corridors. The corridor made headlines as a result of it was the primary constructing in DeKalb County to have electrical energy—described as “glowing” for town. The neighborhood would usually collect on the base of the constructing, simply to look at the lights go on.
Quick-forward 133 years, and Agnes Scott Corridor, because it’s formally referred to as, will quickly draw most of its electrical energy from solar energy. The transfer is a component of a bigger, multifaceted renovation that can value Agnes Scott Faculty north of $30 million.
The personal girls’s liberal arts school, which sits on 100 acres of land and hosts a scholar physique of about 1,000, is not any stranger to various power sources. Campbell Corridor and Rebecca Scott Corridor are each heated and cooled by geothermal techniques, and in 2013, the school debuted 5 photo voltaic arrays in numerous buildings as a part of Georgia Energy’s Superior Photo voltaic Initiative. These panels are nonetheless in use; Mixed with the brand new set up, which will likely be up and working in time for college students to return in August, they’ll assist Agnes Scott save $20,000 in annual power prices.
In response to Kimberly Reeves, the school’s director of sustainability, this new photo voltaic set up is discovered not on the roof of Foremost Corridor however on the parking deck half a metropolis block away. The brand new panels will produce practically twice as a lot power because the 2013 set up: 184 kilowatt-hours per yr, sufficient to energy 17 extra American houses for a yr—and to offset 58 p.c of the power utilized by the principle corridor. The arrays will assist advance Agnes Scott’s objective of turning into carbon-neutral by 2037.
The principle corridor is 5 tales tall and homes the workplace of the Dean of College students, the workplace of the President, and three ranges of scholar housing. Surprisingly, one factor the dorms by no means had—till now—was air-con
“It is necessary to know that we’re nonetheless seeing reductions in carbon emissions, though we’re developing with these very giant items [HVAC] tools in,” stated Reeves, who lived in a Foremost Corridor dorm with “quite a lot of followers” whereas in school. “So we’re actually shifting into the twenty first century.”
This text appeared in our July 2024 subject.
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