In 40 years as a computer and telecommunications professional, Jon Rickman, longtime vice president for information systems at Northwest Missouri State University, has used a lot of electricity.
And, like the rest of us, he's watched more than one power meter turn in its relentless cycle, counting up the kilowatt hours so the utility company can mail out its equally relentless bill at the end of each month.
But for the last couple of weeks Rickman has been treated to a novel sight — watching a digital electric meter run backwards while recording the amount of energy produced rather than the amount used.
In late November, Northwest installed an array of 10 solar energy panels on the south wall of the campus' Jon T. Rickman Electronic Campus Support Center, and for the last couple of weeks, those panels have been silently gathering pristine, pollution-free sunlight and turning it into enough power to load software onto thousands of student and faculty laptop computers.
There's even enough power left over to charge up a new all-electric cart that Northwest's Electronic Campus staff uses as a maintenance vehicle.
Purchased from the Energy Savings Store in Lenexa, Kan., for around $20,000 the solar array is capable of feeding about 2,300 watts of AC current back into the power grid, depending on cloud cover and the angle of the sun at various times of the year.
That's not an incredible amount of electricity, and Rickman admits it could take a decade or so for the school to get its money back. "But that's not the point," he said. "The point is that it's the right thing to do.
Besides cutting down on the amount of fossil fuel-generated electricity used on campus, which, like the rest of Maryville, runs mostly on power produced by burning coal, the array offers many opportunities for faculty and student research that compliments the university's historic emphasis on alternative energy sources.
In the 1980s, Northwest began generating most of the steam energy used to heat and cool campus buildings by burning recycled paper, cardboard and animal waste. The university has also conducted wind-power experiments on the R.T. Wright University farm north of Maryville, and is currently positioning itself for the implementation of academic programs tailored to meet the needs of the region's growing wind-power industry.
"The thing I'm so excited about is that this really gives Northwest a very comprehensive and wide breadth of energy sources for students to learn about," Rickman said.
He added that the array of "poly-crystalline silicon photovoltaic modules" consist of "the most efficient solar cells available today to the general consumer." A similar system 10 years ago, he said, would have produced only about 160 watts of power, and the technology continues to improve.
Over the past two weeks, the solar panels have generated about 185 kilowatt hours under cloudy, winterish conditions. That should add up to more than 4,800 kilowatt hours a year, or about half the electricity needed to run a typical American home.
Perhaps more importantly, the system's digital meter estimates that 315 pounds of carbon dioxide, one of the main substances believed responsible for global warming, have not been vented into the atmosphere.
But environmental considerations aside, the engineer — and perhaps the homeowner — in Rickman can't help chuckling over the amount of electricity going in instead of going out.
"The meter is going in reverse all the time," he said. "Professionally I've been using electricity for 40 years, but this is the first time I've ever made it. It may not be enough, but it moves us in the right direction, and we didn't kill any trees to do it."
Maryville, Mo. —
