Solar Information Session

When professor Snowden-Ifft first presented his slide show to the solar ambassadors in our class, I was incredibly excited about how fast the solar array would cover its construction costs. At the solar information session yesterday it was revealed, as Maddisen blogged, that Oxy would be forced to incur the costs of retrofitting our hook-ups to the county grid to the tune of $1.3 million. Snowden-Ifft also said that other costs that have only become apparent in the last week bring the total unexpected additional costs of the project to $2.5 million. This makes the project a bad investment(strictly financially)as it won't cover the costs of its installation and make up the amount lost to the endowment within the guaranteed lifetime of the panels. Instead of being solely paid for by the Oxy endowment, it is now necessary for the school to find a private donor(s) who can support us by offsetting these additional costs. The school has previously looked for donors to support a solar array however they never had clear plans or contracts for what the array would look like. Now that we are in the last stages of planning and getting the legal authority to build an array, it would seem that finding a donor should be easier.
If the project gets held up for too long in this stage of looking for a donor, the value of the Department of Water and Power subsidy that we would receive from constructing the array can greatly diminish. Maybe this coming alumni weekend we can find some financial support for our solar project to get it off the ground while we still can.