Chris Greschuk, professor and program coordinator of Tyler Junior College's Power Plant Technology program, points out how the new solar component will integrate into their existing program on Wednesday, April 8, 2020.

Tyler Junior College’s West Campus is the hub for technical education in East Texas, offering programs for industrial trades such as welding, electrical and automotive technology as well as small business development. But perhaps one of its best-kept secrets is the power plant technology program, the only program of its kind in all of Texas.

Chris Greschuk, the program coordinator of the power plant technology program, gave some insight into what the program aims to accomplish.

“We train young operators in how to operate power plant equipment, maintain those things and keep the energy flowing for all the hospitals, industries and homes in the country,” Greschuk said.

Recently, TJC had solar panels installed on the roof of its west campus in order to broaden the program.

“When the building was built, we had intended to make it a green building. But as a consequence, solar was the last to come in, and so we’re now adding solar into the program to feed that energy back into the building to take care of certain circuits and things like that,” Greschuk said.

The introduction of the solar panels has a two-fold effect on the campus. Not only does it provide a new learning tool for the students, it improves the energy efficiency of the campus itself. Each of the solar panels has a sensor that provides voltage output data that the students are able to monitor; students can use that information to monitor the solar power consumption of the building as a whole.

“The industry is changing because the primary means of generation of electricity has been coal and natural gas and fossil fuels,” Greschuk said. “But because of the global warming issues and some of the EPA concerns, the community is really moving away from fossil fuel-based energy generation to more renewable type sources such as wind and solar.”

Housed within the TJC West campus Energy Center facility is an entire mock home, complete with separate electrical circuits and heating and air conditioning systems for the students to learn and practice their skills on. A new breaker box has just been added to the home, to tie in the newly installed solar panels. In the race to move to renewable energy, Tyler Junior College is ahead of the game in energy education.

“A lot of students have expressed interest, not only in electricity, but in the green aspects of energy generation,” Greschuk said. “Solar kind of complements what we’re doing with our basic curriculum in that we’re adding the ability to study solar, understand its operations and possibly move forward with the development and operation of solar farms in the future.”