Pitt installs first solar panels on dorm rooftop

Maddie Aiken / Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

For the University of Pittsburgh students living in Ruskin Hall, sunny skies in Oakland won’t just brighten their days — they’ll also brighten their laundry room, fitness center and mailroom.

That’s thanks to the 240 solar panels that Pitt has put on the dormitory’s rooftop.

The solar array, installed this month, will harvest enough energy to produce 155,895 kWh of electricity annually.

That’s enough electricity to light all common areas, including the lounge, laundry room, fitness center, mailroom, hallways and stairwells, university officials say. At its peak, the array could account for half of the building’s electricity.

This is the first solar array on a Pitt dorm building, said Aurora Sharrard, Pitt’s assistant vice chancellor for sustainability. The array is just a piece in Pitt’s Climate Action Plan to achieve carbon neutrality by 2037.

“Cleaning our energy supply, doing what we can do right here directly, is a really important part of [the Climate Action Plan],” Ms. Sharrard said. “We're a very urban campus, so every rooftop matters — every rooftop, we have to make a choice about what it can do for us. When we put solar on campus and feed it directly into a building, we reduce the amount of electricity lost in the system.”

Pitt projects this array, and others on campus, will save the university millions of dollars in electricity bills in the future, Ms. Sharrard said. 

Each panel will last between 25 and 35 years. Pitt is tracking the solar production of each array.

The addition of campus solar panels is years in the making. Pitt began installing panels on campus in 2012, and in 2018 started considering the future of its “solar potential,” Ms. Sharrard said.

In the six years since then, the university has installed panels at the Petersen Sports Complex and academic buildings Posvar Hall and David Lawrence Hall. These projects have been funded through Pitt’s capital budget.

Solar arrays are becoming increasingly popular on college campuses, K-12 schools and government buildings. Carnegie Mellon University and Penn State have both installed panels on their campuses.

Heightened popularity is in part due to federal incentives, Ms. Sharrard explained. For instance, the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 offered investment tax credit for those who installed solar panels.

“The incentives to do so from the federal government are better than they’ve ever been,” Ms. Sharrard said.