The Raleigh City Council will vote today whether or not to close Hillsborough Street for the Hillsborough Street Renaissance in March.

The Renaissance is a student-organized event, which Joe Heil, a senior in textile engineering, said would showcase renewable energies and technologies.

“If the City Council doesn’t give us approval, we will very quickly decide whether or not we can take any alternative venue, but we’re not excited about that prospect,” Heil said.

Legacy Event Planners, a student-led group, is organizing the event, and Heil said several members of the council have already expressed interest in supporting the event.

The Renaissance will be focused on tents set up on Hillsborough Street that display students’ renewable energy projects.

“Engineers without Borders is working on solar panels and wind turbines,” he said.

Students are creating an electrical engineering senior design project to redesign filaments inside lanterns, according to Heil.

Heil and other organizers are still relatively new to event planning, and Matt Stevenson, a sophomore in technology education who is doing web design for the event, said this could inspire other students to plan large events.

“It’s just a big start for what’s to come hopefully,” he said. “If this goes really well it can lead the way for a lot of other projects.”

Heil helped organize a Guitar Hero tournament last year for Engineers Without Borders, and he said it helped show him how successful certain events could be.

“We got a little over 1,000 people to come through,” he said. “We were definitely excited about this one. There was plenty of room to grow.”

There were thoughts to repeat that event this year, but Heil said the group thought it could do something bigger.

“When summer started, we realized that we could just blow the lid off and do something crazy,” he said. “Hillsborough Street immediately came to mind as a venue.”

To succeed in hosting a large student-organized event like this, “it would be a testimony to what students can do when they put their minds to it,” he said.

Mitch Danforth, an alumnus who works with the Hillsborough Street Partnership, said this is exactly the kind of project the street needs.

“The whole idea is to bring life to Hillsborough Street, so events like this are what we hope to encourage for Hillsborough Street,” he said.

To help attract more people to the event, it would also include live music all day, according to Heil. The Brooks Wood Band, Inflowential and the Ameteurs have signed on to play.

“It keeps people entertained while they’re taking in the rest of the event,” he said.