Solar Strand

The University at Buffalo Solar Strand, brought to life by world-renowned artist Walter Hood, reflects the transformative vision that defines UB’s long-range aspirations.

Its approach moves beyond just obtaining carbon neutrality and lessening our environmental footprint. It also welcomes students, faculty, staff and community members to campus through a connected cultural and natural landscape.

Like UB, the strand is multidimensional and cross-disciplinary, merging teaching, learning, art, research, sustainability and community engagement into a complex and powerful resource.

Groups of photovoltaic panels are mounted onto supports that stretch in three rows along Flint Road, creating a new gateway to the North Campus.

The design’s logic is derived from the “strand” concept: a linear landscape formation and DNA fingerprint.

Walkways run between the rows of panels, connecting the array with local roads, the Center for Tomorrow, and naturally regenerated meadows and wetland areas that the public can enjoy.

Gathering spaces embedded in the project include an open-air chamber paved with recycled, concrete sidewalk slabs. The array’s tallest groupings of solar panels form a slanted roof over three outdoor “social rooms.”

At 140 feet wide and 1,250 feet long, the array has a rated capacity to produce 750,000 watts of energy. The project, one of the largest ground-mounted solar arrays in New York State, was funded by the New York Power Authority.

The initiative generates enough carbon-free energy to power approximately 700 student apartments. It also will create natural classrooms for pre-K through post-graduate students.

The 3,200-panel Solar Strand is a work of public art and represents a unique partnership with the New York Power Authority and UB.

With the Solar Strand, UB and NYPA are making a long-range investment in creating a climate for excellence—a sustainable, innovative environment that supports our students, faculty and staff and increases our positive impact on the communities we serve, from local to global.

The project complements a broader scale of development of new and remodeled buildings happening at UB.

This initiative’s success also is due to the resolve and ingenuity of Western New York entrepreneurs. More than 40 regional companies contributed to the Solar Strand’s completion, supporting job creation and pumping revenue into the local economy.

In addition, the Solar Strand advances New York Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo’s commitment to tripling the amount of solar power generated in the state by 2013 and developing clean energy technologies.

Founding principal of Hood Design and professor and former chair of the Landscape Architecture Department at the University of California-Berkeley, Walter Hood was selected through an international design competition.

The competition was designed to ensure that the solar installation would create a visually attractive gateway integrating beauty with engineering innovation and environmental sustainability.

A pioneering urbanist, Hood heads a firm committed to issues that address the reconstruction of urban landscapes within towns and cities.

His concept for the UB project demonstrates his affinity for exploring ways that landscape typologies reinforce and remake landscapes specific to place and the people who occupy them.

Hood’s body of work includes refurbishing local parks, restoring well known memorials and creating new works of public art. His projects include the Center for Civil & Human Rights in Atlanta, the De Young Museum in San Francisco, the California African American Museum in Los Angeles and the Jackson Museum of Wildlife Art in Jackson, Wyoming.

Hood received the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Award for Landscape Design in 2009, and in 2010 was bestowed the title “master of design” by Fast Company magazine.

The 3,200-panel Solar Strand is a work of public art and represents a unique partnership with the New York Power Authority and UB.

With the Solar Strand, UB and NYPA are making a long-range investment in creating a climate for excellence—a sustainable, innovative environment that supports our students, faculty and staff and increases our positive impact on the communities we serve, from local to global.

We welcome and encourage local educators to bring their students to the Solar Strand to experience the site and learn about the topic of solar energy.  The Solar Strand offers students an opportunity to investigate, record and communicate their discoveries.  

Students may use the below links to investigate non-renewable and renewable resources, explore the concept of what solar energy is, and develop an understanding of how solar energy is produced.

UB’s Solar Strand is free to visit and open to the public 365 days a year. The Solar Strand is an unstaffed outdoor space.  Rest rooms are not located on-site. 

Reservations are not required for individual visits.  However, in an effort to avoid potential conflicts organized groups (such as scouts, schools, hiking clubs) must schedule visits. 

When visiting the Solar Strand please remember:

• Pack out what you pack in — please do not litter
• Keep dogs on leash at all times and please take responsibility for cleaning up after your dog
• No alcohol
• UB is a tobacco-free campus

UB has created a hands-on solar kit for area educators.  This kit is available to supplement an on-site visit to the UB Solar Strand.   The kit contains a radiometer, solar bag, solar powered hopping frogs, a solar demonstration kit and solar safe viewing glasses.  Included in the kit are ideas for how materials can be used to reinforce concepts learned in the classroom such as understanding various forms of energy, parallel circuits, encouraging exploration of density, air pressure, buoyancy and convection, forming a hypothesis and conducting simple experiments.  The use of the solar kit is only limited by your creative approach!