Towards Urban Sustainability: Stormwater Management & Solar Power Potential of Auburn University Campus, AL.

Abstract

‘Sustainability’ is a big concern these days, since it seeks environmental protection, social development, and at the same time ensuring economic development. Now people are more aware of long-term viability of earth, their own survival as well as better future for next generation. Social media is a great source to get sense of people’s thinking in any aspect of life nowadays. Exploring tweets with ‘#sustainability’ reveal that people from all over the world are well concerned about sustainability, talking about other relevant topics like climate change, solar power etc. Among various sustainability measures to improve urban areas, Auburn University (AU) has focused mainly on s focused mainly on stormwater management and solar power potential on campus. on campus (“Auburn Climate Action Plan v 1.1,” 2019). Keeping this in mind, this study targets on these two sustainability measures for AU. The study does a thorough stormwater management assessment for AU using Environmental Protection Agency’s SWMM model. Stormwater management needs attention although major flooding is not an issue on campus on campus, but it causes pollution of nearby waterbodies, especially ‘Parkerson Mill Creek’ through polluted runoff. A risk map has identified areas where water likely flows at higher speed. Among sustainable stormwater management initiatives, bio-retention cell has great potentiality in terms of reducing amount as well as volume of stormwater runoff. Suitability analysis for bio-retention cell identifies potential areas on AU campus where bio-retention cell can be installed for most effective outputs. Auburn has 214 days of sunny weather, so solar power potential maps are created for AU to give an estimation of how much energy savings can be done. For this purpose, LiDAR data was used to extract building rooftop area of AU to calculate solar power potentiality, one of the great sources of renewable and sustainable energy.