Dartmouth, Dartmouth, Doing Right
The College has a chance to devote heart and solar to future building design.
On top of the Murdough Center, down Tuck Drive toward the river, glittering in the sun, there sits an array of solar panels. Twenty of them stretch across the level roof. They're big; each one can make 225 watts of electricity. They're also clean. That electricity is entirely free of pollution.
Unlike hydro, it's also free (well, almost free) of eco-interference. Not one salmon is prevented from swimming upstream by the existence of solar panels. No green valley got flooded when the Murdough array went into place; no whitewater rafter finds her favorite stretch of river blocked by an enormous dam.
Dartmouth needs more arrays like that. It's wonderful to have the one, but right now it's more symbol than serious energy source. By my calculation, it produces about one fivethousandth of the electric ity the College uses.
So why don't we have more? There are two reasons. One is cost. The Murdough electricity costs well over double what electricity from a coal or oil-fired power plant does. In parts of the country where electricity is cheap, it costs four times as much. Of course I'm counting on actual production coststhe figures would look a bit different if you included the externalities, such as the numerous costs of dealing with power-plant pollution.
The other reason is inertia. Most architects (one glorious exception is Bill McDonough'73) are not yet thinking about ways to make roofs hospitable to solar panels. Most building committees at colleges and universities are not thinking about solar energy at all. As theory it gets discussed in the classroom; as something you could actually use, it seldom gets considered when a new dorm is being designed.
That's what makes the new Berry Library at the College such a fascinating opportunity. Berry is still in the planning stage. It can be built as a conventional late 1990s building, that is, with a zillion electric outlets inside for a zillion electronic devices, and nothing on the roof to power even one computer/ printer/fax machine/copier/reader/ work station. Or it can be built as a partially self-sustaining structure.
About six months ago, the entire Environmental Studies staff—full professors down to parttime lecturers—sent a joint letter to the Committee on Libraries urging... not what you'd expect. We didn't ask the College to spring for more solar panels now; we know how expensive they are. We also know they have been getting steadily cheaper, and will continue to. So we merely asked that Berry be designed so that it can accommodate panels later. That means making sure there is plenty of good southern exposure on top, and possibly designing the exterior walls so that someday the south-facing ones can receive solar panels and wear them handsomely. (This can be done, all right. I know of one factory in America that has installed a thousand panels on one wall.) It even means designing the plantings so that no shade will fall on future panel sites. Ornamental fruit trees on the south front, not lofty oaks.
This idea has some strong support in the college. Provost Lee Bollinger, for example, supports it. So does Gordon DeWitt, director of facilities planning. "The installation at Murdough works well," DeWitt says, "and I think we should consider if more could be installed on the roof of Berry."
It also inevitably will provoke strong resistance. Dartmouth has a beautiful campus. Who wants to spoil it? Passionate believer in clean energy though I am, I would fight to keep solar panels from being plastered on the front of Dartmouth Hall or on Wentworth or Reed or any of the existing gorgeous copper roofs. The new library is another matter.
So which side will win? It's too soon to say. I've talked to one of the architects at Venturi, the Philadelphia firm responsible for Berry's exterior. He is well aware of the proposal. But he says they're still at the conceptual stage, and won't be thinking nuts or bolts or solar panel sites for awhile yet.
If Dartmouth alumni are as environmentally concerned as I take most of them to be, and as eager to see the College lead, right now is a really good time to speak loudly in favor of a potentially power-making Berry Library.
