The University of Connecticut has a smaller carbon footprint than it did 20 years ago thanks to long-term investments and its own power plant. Now the University is looking for ways to further reduce this footprint.
The university’s campus in Storrs has added nearly a million square feet of buildings over the past two decades. However, thanks to efficiency measures adopted by the university over 18 years, peak power consumption fell from 45 MW in 2005 to just 27.4 MW during last year’s September heat wave.
But now, as the campus grows, the demand for electricity increases, and the University is looking for ways to meet its heating and energy needs in more sustainable ways. He has multiple offers from both Facilities Operations and a student competition hosted by the Eversource Energy Center.
UConn President Radenka Maric discusses the university’s pledge to be carbon neutral by 2030 at the Global Business Leadership in Sustainability Summit. “We have to concentrate because we don’t have another planet!” He told the audience. Brian Paganini ’03, vice president and managing director of Quantum Biopower, Connecticut’s food waste-to-energy facility, looks on at the panelist. (Nathan Oldham / UConn School of Business)
The institutions made two different proposals. First, cogeneration for electricity and steam heat on the Storrs campus will add two hydrogen-capacity turbines to UConn’s operations, bringing the total rating to 50 MW. Three existing turbines are being upgraded to handle up to 30% hydrogen. The original cogeneration plant was built in 2006 and is quite efficient — much more than power from the general grid — but expanding it would continue UConn’s dependence on natural gas and eventually mix with hydrogen. A second proposal for the facilities would add a grid connection through Eversource’s East-West line, which gets most of its electricity from the Killingly natural gas plant and a smaller portion from the Millstone nuclear plant.
Student offerings are less traditional. They were submitted by UConn’s Eversource Energy Center in response to a competition last fall for students to propose campus, state or regional sustainable energy projects. According to Eversource Energy Center Director Emmanuel Anagnostou, the competition will be an annual event.
A joint committee of UConn faculty and Eversource executives selected the winning project for parking lots covered by solar panels, proposed by graduate students Pranavi Rebala ’25 (CLAS) and Austin Gelinas ’25 (ENG).
After looking at several different options, Rebala, an economics major, and Gelinas, an engineering major, decided that parking lots covered with modular solar panels made the most sense for UConn. Solar panels will be placed on roofs over existing parking lots and paired with batteries to store power for times of high demand on campus. Net metering, which is when the utility gives the owner of the solar panels full credit for every kilowatt they produce (so if you produce as much power as you use, it goes to zero, and if you produce more than you use, you get paid for it), would lower the cost of the project. Placing the solar panels in parking lots as close as possible to the UConn substation means less electricity will be wasted in transmission.
An interior view of the University of Connecticut Co-generation plant showing one of the three high-pressure drums (UConn Photo).
Rebala and Gelinas were extremely specific in their analysis to provide accurate cost estimates.
“We chose a special solar module, special inverters. We modeled it over a 25-year period, changing the variables to see which tilt would be most efficient, which capital expenditures would be more efficient,” says Gelinas.
“There is cash flow with solar energy, we are seeing positive returns. Eventually, we will see profit from this,” says Rebala.
Sun umbrellas over the parking lots were also proposed by Kevin Howson ’16 (CLAS, SFA) ’24 MS, Julie Sandberg ’25 MS, and Jacob Tyler ’24 MS, all graduate students in the Masters of Energy and Environmental Management program. Their analysis showed that the most cost-effective way to reduce the University’s energy needs was to partner with a developer to build a large solar roof. The developer will finance the construction; The university will commit to purchasing the energy generated by the canopy over a period of time. The team suggested applying to Connecticut’s Non-Residential Renewable Energy Solutions program to allow the developer to claim some other benefits that would make the project more financially viable.
Increasing solar capacity will also help graduate students Kexin Song ’25 Ph.D., Haoyi Wang ’26 Ph.D. and was the focus of undergraduate Paul Zambrzycki’s ’24 (ENG) project. But instead of proposing specific solar installations, Song, Wang and Zambrzycki scaled back by looking at the current solar generation capacity of the nearby cities of Willimantic and West Hartford. They predicted how solar capacity could be intelligently increased to improve the continuity of energy supply in those areas without straining the grid.
“When you install a lot of solar panels in one area, they produce a lot of energy and raise the grid voltage very high,” says Wang. His research focuses on network topology. “We need to develop resilience,” he says.
The team looked at maps of existing solar panels in Connecticut and found them to be inaccurate and outdated. Song’s research uses remote sensing data to pick out interesting details from publicly available aerial images, which he thought could improve solar maps. So the team created a map of actual solar coverage and then projected future growth in solar production based on income, irradiance, and the ability of the grid to operate more efficiently in specific locations.
“Our project can create a tool to better connect suppliers and customers and maintain system sustainability while achieving more clean energy,” says Song. Their map can be updated regularly, and Eversource has expressed interest in maintaining it as a useful tool.
Efforts for greater energy efficiency at UConn include innovations such as the solar-powered STEAM Tree. (Photo by Sean Flynn/UConn)
Three more proposals were also finalists of the competition. Undergraduates Kevon Rattigan ’25 (CLAS), Malik Francis ’24 (ENG) and Malachi Denton ’24 (ENG) explored the options and found hydrogen fuel cells interesting. They proposed putting hydrogen fuel cells on the roofs of buildings like Pharmacy that need a lot of electricity for 24 hours. Fuel cells will provide baseload power, reducing the amount that buildings will require from a cogeneration unit.
“Fuel cells on top of buildings would reduce the footprint. We also discussed using fuel cell heat to heat buildings,” says Francis, similar to how a cogeneration natural gas plant now produces steam heat.
Another team, engineering students Dev Barochia ’25 (ENG), Hasan Nikkhah ’27 Ph.D. and Francesco Rouhana ’25 (ENG). Part of their proposal displayed the energy consumption of UConn buildings on a TV screen in the buildings’ lobbies and asked questions to find out if people were aware of the buildings’ environmental footprints. They surveyed students and staff at UConn to find out what people want and are willing to do to reduce UConn’s energy consumption.
The second part of their proposal would increase UConn’s energy production using local resources.
“We proposed an anaerobic digester that converts animal waste and sewage sludge into biogas and electricity,” says Rouhana. The team calculated that this way they could get an extra megawatt of energy into the UConn grid and produce fertilizer that could be sold as a byproduct. The survey results suggested that the UConn community would relish the opportunity to compete to reduce the energy consumption of its buildings.
The sixth team also proposed an anaerobic digester and inter-campus competition to reduce energy use. Teammates Anietie Williams, a chemistry doctoral candidate, and Faith Wariri, a computer science and engineering doctoral candidate, were amazed at the Eversource data showing UConn’s energy use month by month, because Connecticut’s climate, though very different, was similarly high — and most of the buildings it looked empty in the summer.
“Obviously there is some low-hanging fruit where energy use can be optimized,” says Wariri.
Both teams that investigated this suggested that the campus community could be mobilized to significantly reduce energy consumption.
UConn’s Eversource Energy Center plans to host student-led workshops this spring to discuss the grid, decarbonization and sustainability. Students who submitted sustainability proposals last year will be invited to share their experiences and advice with future teams. This year’s challenge will focus on clean energy challenges at the city and community level.
And the benefits of competition should extend further, starting with Wariri and Williams. Although their proposal was not funded, the team intends to return home to Nigeria. Large parts of the villages there are not connected to the wider electricity grid.
In Nigeria, “most agricultural residues and livestock wastes are either burned, causing pollution, or dumped, resulting in poorly managed landfills. “I think if it’s managed properly, we can get biomass as a major energy source and solve our energy problems,” says Williams.