About the Project

Within SWEP, the Stanford University Solar Initiative (SUSI) project aims to implement solar photovoltaics and/or other forms of solar energy on and around campus. Several promising initial assessments of the solar availability on campus and favorable roof or foothill areas have been made in past years. The SUSI project seeks to further detail these assessments to provide a complete picture of the solar resource on campus, the best possible current solar cell technologies, the possibilities towards integration with Stanford's network and the economic feasibility of the project.

Project Status

1) A survey of available rooftops shows the potential for over 13MW of solar installation capacity
2) Insolation and temperature data from the Carnegie Institution for Science and the SolarAnywhere dataset has been cleaned and analyzed
3) System modeling in PVsyst shows that a campus-wide solar system could operate with a 18% capacity factor

Current Work

1) Advanced system modeling with assistance from solar industry partners
2) Ranking potential rooftop installations based on cost, electricity generation, installation feasibility and ease of interconnection
3) Economic analysis of various scenarios (e.g. Stanford-owned, PPA)

Join the Team

For this project, SWEP collaborates with Stanford Utilities and Stanford's Sustainability and Energy Management Executive office to determine the most cost effective solar energy solutions with maximum energy output. Due to the multifaceted nature of this project, we are seeking to collaborate with students and industry partners with backgrounds in financial analysis, policy analysis and energy modeling.

Interested? Please contact us!

Project Leader: Dimitry Burdjalov (dburdjal@stanford.edu)

Financial Assessment
Christina Nicole Phillips

Parking Structure Assessment
Amy Weiner
Kristin Landry

Rooftop Assessment
Chris Ling
Torin Herndon

Rooftop Optimization
Nick McIntyre
Tejas Kachru
Yves Meyer

Solar Data Analysis
Julian Gonsalves
Nick McIntyre
Yves Meyer

Solar System Modeling
Dimitry Burdjalov
Hind Kathuda
James Balassone
Laura Vogel