Mechanical engineering students and faculty installed solar panels on the roof of their building Tuesday.
The installation marks the last step in a sustainability project that has been on the department's agenda for more than 20 years.
Professor Andrea Mammoli said the panels were installed alongside ones the department purchased in the 1980s in an effort to conserve energy in the building.
"A good fraction of the cooling and the heating (in the building) is going to be replaced by solar energy," he said.
Heat from the sun is absorbed by the solar panels and transferred to water pipes, which circulate to six storage containers beneath the building. The hot water then goes on to heat the building, Mammoli said.
He said original plans for the building allowed for solar panels, but they were never installed.
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"This building was designed with solar in mind, but then it was abandoned, so this isn't necessarily a retrofit - this is a refurbishment," he said.
Plans for the building were developed after the 1973 oil crisis challenged America's dependence on oil, department chair Juan Heinrich said.
A group of UNM professors at the time proposed to make the building energy efficient so it would use less fossil fuel, he said.
"But then gas got cheap again, or relatively cheap, and there was no commercial incentive," he said. "The interest in this faded very quickly, and so it became unsustainable."
The solar panels that were purchased in the '80s were stored in the building's basement until last year when they were finally installed, Heinrich said.
He said the latest energy crisis has once again made the advancement of sustainable energy technology more commercially viable.
"This is very capital-intensive," he said. "Basically, what you are doing is buying all your equipment up front, and a lot of businesses have been reluctant to do that."
Mammoli said his next challenge is to convince students of the importance of researching sources for sustainable energy.
"I think we have a big problem, and it is probably the biggest problem that we are facing right now, and we have to do something about it very soon," he said.
Mammoli petitioned the state for a grant in 2005, and in 2006 was awarded $200,000 to purchase the panels. He said the department also received support for the project from the Department of Energy and the Physical Plant Department.
