30 new solar panels have been installed on top of a bike shed at the La Trobe University Bundoora campus, providing power generation and the chance for further education.

Narration:
La Trobe University has taken an important step in becoming a greener university today, with the launch of an array of solar panels. Installed near the Bundoora Campus bike shed, the $49 000 project was an initiative of the Electronic Engineering faculty, and funded by La Trobe University, Sustainability Victoria, and the Federal Government. It was opened by Vice-Chancellor Paul Johnson, who got his first real taste of solar energy.

Vice-Chancellor Paul Johnson:
I have today consumed my first solar egg produced with solar power. It was of course served sunny-side up.

Andrew Mackie:
These solar panels of course convert sunlight into energy at an efficiency of about 14%. And that electricity is DC, direct current, so then it has to be converted to alternating current to be fed into the grid. This facility produces about the same electricity as a household would consume, and because it's completely green it's saving us 8 tonnes of CO2 a year.

Narration:
The facility will not only generate power for the university, it will also act as a leading example to other businesses and a valuable educational tool.

Professor John Devlin:
The solar panels at La Trobe represent a solar power generation system that we're going to be using as part of our sustainability stream in our engineering course. The panels will form a focus for the course to be able to let our students to come and be able to test ideas, do measurements on the system, as well as providing offsets for carbon emissions for the general university usage as well.

Vice-Chancellor Paul Johnson:
Sustainability is important for the university because as a major employer, a major organisation here in Melbourne, we've got to play a crucial part in the climate change challenges that are now impacting on all Australians, indeed everyone in the world. Here at La Trobe, we're taking forward a large number of measures, not just this wonderful new solar generator, but a whole range of other environmental measures to reduce our environmental impract, to make sure we can contribute to producing a more sustainable way of operating the university, and thereby ensuring that future generations have a cleaner and better environment to live and work in. Let me give you an example of some of the things we're doing. Here at the university we have a co-generation plant, we generate a lot of electricity by using gas to both create electricity and then we use the waste heat from that generation to heat water. Also in Bendigo we're installing a lot of water tanks to try and make sure we can address some of the drought issues there. We recylce a lot of water, and particularly here on the Bundoora campus where we have a set of moats and lakes around the campus we do a lot of water recycling, so we can keep a lot of the grass green, so these are some of the issues we're trying to take forward in the university.

Narration:
While the solar panels are proof of La Trobe's ongoing commitment to sustainability, they only generate 0.1% of it's total energy consumption.

Andrew Mackie:
So we've got a long way to go. But every journey starts with a single footstep.

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