Pomona College
IN-3: Innovation 3

SolTrain mobile solar generator “Soltrain” is Pomona’s mobile solar station, consisting of three photovoltaic solar panels adding up to 1kW of electric power. These panels, an inverter, and two batteries are mounted on a wheeled trailer, which can be hitched to a vehicle and transported across campus. Funded by the President’s Sustainability Fund, the station was designed and built by students, staff, and faculty over the period of a year. As a liberal arts college, the initiative taken to design, build, and administer such as system is quite innovative, and has served as a model for similar proposed systems on other campuses. SolTrain (named by a community competition at the City of Claremont’s annual Earth Day Festival) serves as a renewable power source for the Pomona College Farm, and can be used to power campus events and activities. The system showcases the capacity of renewable technologies; it has powered entire parties with lights, sound systems, and amplified instruments; an audio-visual exhibit in an art gallery; and lights at a student-run fashion show. On a more frequent basis, it powers laptops, cell phone chargers, and the occasional cooking device. This project recently won the Excellence in Innovations for Sustainability from the Association of American College Unions International (ACUI).