“We wanted to do something that would have an impact on sustainability on campus.”
Colin Ravin ’24, left, and Chase King ’24 stand in front of Denison’s new Chevy Bolt.
CHARGING TOWARD A MORE SUSTAINABLE DENISON Colin Ravin ’24 and Chase King ’24 team up with Chris Wolfington ’90 to make the case that the future of the college’s vehicle fleet is electric.
BY THEODORE DECKER PHOTOS BY PATRICK DEMICHAEL
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Friends since their first year, juniors Chase King and Colin Ravin decided last fall to put their environmental studies and economics double majors into practice. “We wanted to do something that would have an impact on sustainability on campus,” Ravin says. They brainstormed. Maybe a solar canopy over the parking lot at Silverstein Hall? “That seemed a little too ‘big picture,’ and expensive,” King says. They paid a visit to Jeremy King ’97, Denison’s director of sustainability and campus improvement (and no relation to Chase), hoping he would have some ideas. He did. “I told them, ‘You know, Denison really needs
to look at electric vehicles and electric-vehicle charging,’” he says. “It was something that was so obvious we didn’t really think of it,” Ravin says. Jeremy King also knew a perfect alum to work with the pair. He connected them with Chris Wolfington ’90, who was coming to campus for ReMix, the annual entrepreneurial summit he was instrumental in starting at Denison in 2018. Wolfington’s experience in both energy and transportation ventures led him to start Ground Truth Energy, where he leads a team in the development of solutions to quickly and costeffectively electrify even the most complex of vehicle fleets.
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