By Jim Cavan

Last August, Sierra Magazine released its third annual list of “Cool Schools“, ranking the nation’s top 20 green universities. The University of New Hampshire, which had never cracked the list, placed #12 out of 135 schools.

Citing “energy” as one of UNH’s most impressive strengths, the Cool Schools rankings only validated what many on the Seacoast community have known for years: that their flagship state university has been and will continue to reside squarely on the cutting edge of green technology, policies, and initiatives.

But beneath the no doubt impressive clean and green facade -- the bio-diesel buses, ever-growing organic gardening club, and myriad green energy initiatives, just to name a few of UNH’s sustainable pillars -- some nitty gritty technology is helping that cause.

Back in 2003, one of UNH’s first major overhaul’s to its infrastructure -- contracted through nationall-renowned Emcor Energy Services -- involved replacing their old-fashioned boiler plant with a state-of-the-art co-generation system, which is capable of producing both electricity and heat from a single source. That’s where TVC Systems, a decades-old Portsmouth-based firm specializing in cogeneration system design and maintenance, stepped in, devising a system allowing the school to generate much of its own power from a single location -- a novel concept for any university at the time.

Then in late 2008, Emcor and UNH came back to TVC for help in converting the five-year-old system to allow it, after slight modification and combining it with pure natural gas, to run on methane generated from a Rochester landfill. The project was so successful that, soon after, the University added a second turbine, this one capable of running solely on methane, without the aid of a “cleaner” gas.

Paul Chamberlin, Assistant Vice President of Energy and Campus Development at UNH, who worked extensively with TVC, recalls first working with the company, and the incredible challenges they faced -- and overcame. “Technically the first project was incredibly complicated,“ recalls Chamberlin. “Trying to retrofit an existing system in this way -- to get it to be able to take methane from the landfill and blend it with a cleaner gas to render it usable -- was something that hadn’t been tried in quite this way before.”

For TVC President Linda Tyring, the project at UNH, while “average” in terms of size, remains a unique source of pride for the firm. “What’s made the UNH system so special for us is that it’s local, in that we all live and work in the area,” says Tyring. “And adding the landfill turbine certainly sets it apart for other systems like it.”

Instead of feeding the school’s electricity needs, surplus energy produced by the second turbine will instead be sold back to the local power grid, which is administered through PSNH. Doing so will help UNH pay down its initial investment and, eventually, make money for the school.

What’s more, the entire system -- in essence the nervous center of UNH -- can be viewed online, by anyone, 24 hours a day.

Truth be told, the whole idea for the system was based on a desire to streamline the generation and distribution of power on campus. Luckily for UNH, that was precisely TVC’s specialty: designing systems to be controllable from one location, where literally everything can be monitored.

“Even before the latest turbine, with the original system, it had to be capable of generating reports that showed how much electricity it was generating, how much they were using, what the emissions levels were, so that all of that could be provided to the EPA,” explains Tyring. “And we‘re trying to assure that all of this information is open to the public, so that people know and understand what this system is providing to the university and the community as a whole.”

But for as much as TVC acts locally, they’re also thinking -- and acting -- globally. Indeed the company’s expertise extends far beyond New Hampshire, having done projects for Harvard University, the University of Massachusetts, Amherst College, as well as companies and organizations as far flung as Africa and Ireland.

Indeed, While making it on Sierra Magazine’s list only emphasizes UNH’s entering the vanguard of green universities, such high profile accolades only help to shine a brighter light on local companies like Tyring’s TVC, who provide the under-the-radar know how to make it all possible.

For his part, Paul Chamberlin hopes the future finds such technologies becoming the standard. “Seeing how incredibly complicated the whole project was really shows how badly we need kids going into these fields -- be it engineering or businesses entrepreneurship -- and how important it is to invest in renewable technologies,“ says Chamberlin, with no lack of enthusiasm. “If we’re going to deal with these challenges as a school and as a country, we’re going to need smart people and smart engineering, and this project with TVC fit perfectly into the campus green ethos.”