Entergy Corporation has joined forces with Coulomb Technologies to fund and donate 16 electric vehicle charging stations at college campuses in and around Entergy's four-state service area. The first two Entergy-funded charging stations have been unveiled at Louisiana State University and will be free to use for LSU faculty staff and students.
"Collecting usage data will allow Entergy and LSU to conduct critical research about EV chargers," said Brent Dorsey, director of corporate environmental programs for Entergy. "The goal is to determine the impacts and opportunities of EV charging, including length to charge, consumer charging profiles, time of day for charging, impacts on electric facilities and other consumer behavior and preferences."
The charging stations were built by Coulomb and donated to LSU through a $160,000 grant from Entergy's Environmental Initiatives Fund. Entergy is currently working with other universities in Arkansas, Mississippi, Louisiana and Texas to donate additional electric vehicle charging stations.
In other green-college news, Butte College in California has become the first college in the United States to go "grid positive," meaning that it will generate more electricity from its solar arrays than it consumes and will deliver power back to the electric grid.
The college, located 75 miles from Sacramento, Calif., estimates that it will save between $50 million and $75 million over 15 years, even after accounting for project costs and interest, by eliminating its electricity bill, getting paid for excess electricity production, and avoiding future electricity rate increases.
Butte College now operates a total of 25,000 solar panels that will generate over 6.5 million kilowatt hours of electricity per year – enough to power over 941 average-sized homes, or the equivalent of removing 615 passenger cars from the roadways.
"I've asked community colleges to become more entrepreneurial and seek out new and innovative ways to generate revenue and to cut operating costs," said California Community Colleges Chancellor Jack Scott. "Butte College dramatically accomplishes both of these goals by becoming grid positive.
"Furthermore, this college's solar arrays will train workers for jobs in the green energy field – an outcome that will help California's economy and recovery," Scott added.
And finally, Duke University’s sustainability office is working to help develop software company SAS's hosted platform for sustainability. Duke will use SAS in areas such as sustainability performance reporting and predictive modeling of greenhouse gas emissions.
For its efforts, the North Carolina college was named as Laureate in the training/education category in the Computerworld Honors Program, run by publishing company the International Data Group.
