Assuming weather conditions in Palos Hills, the town MVCC is located, can provide this appropriate amount of sunlight, the total amount is still limited. There are only 189 sunny days, on average, in the town of Palos Hills [7]. Using these averages, a single solar panel installed on campus can generate 2360 - 3780 kWh of electricity per year. Moraine Valley would need to establish a solar energy plant with 5,160 solar panels with an output of 4kW or 2,064 panels outputting 10kW in order to match the campus’s yearly electricity usage. The average size of a 4kW solar panel is 65in by 39in or 5.4ft by 3.25ft [8]. Given these dimensions, 5,160 solar panels of this size would require 2.10 acres of space if installed flat, side-by-side, and not angled upwards. The solar panels could also be installed in various locations around campus and not all be necessarily congested in a single location. While the initial expense for switching to complete use of solar energy is high, Moraine Valley could logistically make the switch and derive all of its electricity from the sun.

The plant also demands a large plot of land to operate. A geothermal power plant would need up to 404 square miles in order to function [10]. Moraine Valley’s campus is significantly smaller than this required amount, taking up a little less than half a square mile of land. It is not possible to implement this type of power plant on a small community college campus. If a geothermal plant could, however, be used to provide electricity to the campus, the plant’s average output would be 1 GWh or 1106kWh [10]. The plant would also operate at an average efficiency of 12% [11]. The production rate of a geothermal plant would meet 5.13% of the electricity currently used by the college campus.

Each wind turbine must be placed 10m or 32.8 ft apart for safe use [12]. Given that the campus size is 307 square feet and assuming only a quarter can be devoted to the plant, only three to four wind turbines can be safely installed on campus. If the wind turbines operated daily for a full year, they would output an average of 1.05106kW of electricity, making up only 0.011% of the total electricity consumed by Moraine Valley. Even with these values, the wind turbines would be operating at the high efficiency of 30-45% [14]. The limited space on the college campus does not allow for the proper use of a wind-based energy plant. Wind turbines require large spacing for safe function, and MVCC does not have the acreage to accommodate this. The use of an energy plant focused on wind is highly inefficient for the small campus.

The Calumet Sag River was built as a ship canal that carries large barges, meaning the river was designed for single, particular use [15]. Implementing a hydro plant would encroach too heavily into the narrowness of the river, obstructing the movement of the barges that are required to travel the length of the Calumet Sag. In addition to this, hydropower has both positive and negative impacts on the environment. While lowering greenhouse gas emissions, hydropower plants can cause rivers to dry up quickly through a combination of increased water surface area and evaporation, essentially consuming the water supply [16]. With this factor taken into account, a system such as this could be detrimental to the Calumet Sag River as it could result in damage to the necessary travel route. Neglecting these issues, the implementation of hydropower on this community college campus could take on a majority of the energy production needed for full functionality. In dams, hydropower can convert about 90% of the energy from falling water into usable electricity [17]. With an average of about 9.85 gallons of water per kilowatt-hour, it would take approximately 938.7 billion gallons of falling water per year to power MVCC [18].

The amount of energy produced from the sewage created from the college campus would equate to a rough maximum of 4.97109 kWh of electricity [20]. The power plant would be operating at an efficiency of 35-40% to obtain this electricity [21]. If the plant was capable of operating at this maximum efficiency, then a biomass plant could sufficiently supply enough electricity to power MVCC twice over. While this causes the biomass plant to be the best option for an alternate power source for the community college, the issue in implementing such a power plant arises in cost and limitations of space.

Work, power, heat, and efficiency calculations using the ideal Rankine cycle and given condition values of the Abbott steam power plant.