GRAND RAPIDS, Mich. — Taking a stroll through Calvin University's Ecosystem Preserve & Native Gardens on a warm, summer day kind of makes you forget you're just a few hundred feet away from the heavy vehicle traffic of the East Beltline. Soon the school hopes to offer further proof of its commitment to the environment.
Calvin has entered into an agreement with Sun FundED, an Indiana-based company whose primary focus is to "make solar energy easy for you and your school, enabling you to dramatically cut your operating expenses while supporting sustainability."
Over the next two months, Calvin and Sun FundED will work together to come up with a solar energy plan for campus.
"They're looking at our campus. They're looking our electricity usage. They're looking at where they could potentially place panels and how much they think they could offset," said Tim Fennema, who serves as the university's Vice President of Finance and Administration.
"We would obviously work with them on the placement of the panels as well, whether it be rooftops, or ground, or even potentially carports solar panels on them. We're working with them on all those different types of options."
Because Calvin is a private, not-for-profit college, it cannot take advantage of tax credits that are available for renewable energy investments. However, investors can. Sun FundED connects schools with those investors through a model called "Solar-As-A-Service."
"We obviously pay them a fee over a period of time is how the arrangement would work for that, with the expectation that our utility costs would go down and our carbon emissions would be reduced," Fennema said.
"It means a lot, I think, to the university to be able to do this and to really kind of help pave the way and show what can be successful in higher education, specifically, with private institutions."
Calvin would be the first university in Michigan to use the "Solar-As-A-Service" model to reduce its carbon footprint.
"As a faith-based institution, it's part of our calling to actually protect the planet that that was created, and that this goes towards that effort," Fennema said.
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