At the start of the school year, representatives of Dominion Resources presented students in Hathaway Brown’s Campus and Community Sustainability class with a check for $3,800 to support the design and construction of a solar-powered charging station for laptops and cellphones.

The goal of the grant, secured by Torrey McMillan ’90 and HB’s Center for Sustainability, is to provide the HB community with an accessible way to learn about energy systems and to enliven a campus-wide conversation about the impacts of our energy use and energy sources.

Students in the Campus and Community Sustainability class are now undertaking a design process to understand how a solar-charging station would be used by the HB community and propose a design for the system. They will also determine the best location and size of a solar array to feed the charging station and will get their hands on the actual construction process. The charging station will include a real-time feedback display, showing actual energy production from the solar panels and energy use from the charging ports. In addition, it will be tied into the weather station that is currently housed on the roof of the Primary School.