Secured to one corner of the Graham Hall roof, a set of solar panels keeps the lights on inside the University of Delaware’s Center for Energy and Environmental Policy.

But if you walk around campus, you would be hard-pressed to find other examples of efforts to go green.

A different story is playing out inside UD’s laboratories.

Professors and students are engaging in potentially groundbreaking work in environmental technology and research, including a clean-energy bus powered by hydrogen fuel cells, solar panels that set a world record for their efficiency and hurricane-resistant roofs made from a composite of soybean oil and chicken feathers.

Recently, campus leaders decided to begin eradicating the disconnect. As part of a sweeping new strategic plan, President Patrick Harker called for taking researchers’ innovations out of the laboratory and putting them into practice on campus and beyond. Harker is hoping to tap further into a billion-dollar industry (renewable energy and energy-efficient technology businesses alone brought in nearly $970 million in revenue nationwide in 2006, according to a study by the American Solar Energy Society) and turn the university and the region into a place where students want to study and businesses want to relocate.

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