A Message From: Team SOLARetriever

1) Please provide a brief summary of your proposal.

We are campaigning to get solar tables on campus to allow students to charge their laptops and other mobile devices with 100% renewable energy.

In 2007, President Hrabowski signed the Presidents Climate Action Plan with the overall goal of making UMBC carbon neutral by 2075. As of spring 2015, UMBC is about 14% carbon neutral, with the aim of being 15% carbon neutral by the end of the year. We want to help give that final push to UMBC’s goal, while giving something new, exciting, and useful to the UMBC community. Currently 20% of UMBC’s energy comes from wind and solar sources, which is a great start, but we can do more to increase our renewable energy usage. Not many students know or even care about how much energy comes from renewable sources, as long as they have power when they need it. Our idea is to provide a source of energy via solar tables to show students how useful these renewable sources can be. The power generated from these tables will demonstrate the sustainability of an “off the grid” method to reducing our energy usage. The solar tables have up to four outlets and four USB ports for charging electronics. The outlets are powered by a battery which is charged by the solar panel canopy above the table. These solar tables will provide a visual personification of green initiative on campus by letting students directly benefit from green energy. Our long term goal is to generate interest and pave the way for bigger and better renewable energy projects in the future.

2) Why are you passionate about your idea? What motivates
you to work toward your proposal?

Our love for sustainability pushed us to spend long hours researching different solar tables and the optimal variations that would work best with our campus and its students. We want to push towards a carbon neutral campus and will do what we can to spread our green message around UMBC.

3) What pushed you to get involved with Prove It! ?

The idea started with the American Society of Mechanical Engineers solar team. We wanted to create a retrofit solar umbrella to add to the existing umbrellas outside on The Commons Terrace. After finding out that we would not be able to retrofit out design to the umbrellas due to various concerns expressed by Commons Operations. Working hard on that project really made us want to find a way to make it a reality so we started to work with Facilities Management, Res Life, and The Commons to see what we could do. They agreed to work with us because of our strong initial proposal for Prove It! and foresaw us doing well enough in the competition to put money on the line for our project.

THIS CONCLUDES THE VOTING FOR 2015 PROVE IT! FINALISTS.

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