Striding Into the Future on Solar Sidewalks
Striding Into the Future on Solar Sidewalks Kamloops, British Columbia, is a radiant place, receiving over 3,100 hours of sunshine a year. So it’s no wonder that in 2016, Thompson Rivers University (TRU) decided to harness all that luminescence and convert it to electricity. If the university’s solar array had been installed on a roof or mounted above ground in a corner of a soccer field, that probably would have been the end of the story. Instead, TRU didn’t follow trends — it set one: It became the first place in Canada to embed solar panels into the ground. By 2017, a 12-meter walkway with 16 solar modules near the campus daycare, together with a compass (sunburst) design of 62 modules in front of the arts and education building, were producing power. By its second summer of operation, the compass produced enough electricity to power an entire classroom of computers at TRU’s arts and education building for the day. For Amie Schellenberg, an electrical instructor at TRU and part of the…
