Clean Energy on the Way

This intricate interactive display featuring iconic campus edifices — among them Old Main, Arizona Stadium and the Stevie Eller Dance Theatre — celebrates the University of Arizona’s clean-energy partnership with Tucson Electric Power, formed in July 2021. Creative Machines, a local firm that also designed and built playful, instructive public art at the Children’s Museum in downtown Tucson, authored the installation, which will be transferred every six months to a new stopping point along the route for prospective-student tours.

In the display, golf balls in Wildcat red and blue roll along steel tracks, symbolizing clean energy flowing from TEP’s Oso Grande Wind Farm in southeast New Mexico and its Wilmot Energy Center solar-plus-storage system south of Tucson. The clean-energy agreement is expected to cut the university’s carbon footprint by a third over its 20-year duration.