Solar Power For Schools
In Washington, Connecticut, the John Door Nature Center recently installed a 35-kilowatt solar rooftop photovoltaic (PV) system. The John Door Nature Center is one of four locations for the Horace Mann School, an independent day school located in New York City serving students from second through twelfth grades.At Horace Mann, students ranging from eight years of age to 18 years of age participate in outdoor and environmental education programs that last from a single day to more than a week. The John Dorr Lab is 265 acres in the towns of Washington and Bethlehem in Connecticut.
The solar array, comprised of 105 SunPower Corp. panels rated at 305 watts each, will provide about 25 percent of the electricity needed at the nature center building. The SunPower 305 ® and SunPower 315 ® panels are made up of 96 SunPower solar cells that, according to the company, deliver more electricity per square meter than conventional panels, with the 315 offering the industry’s best conversion rate of 19.3 percent. SunPower, founded in 1985, is headquartered in San Jose, California and has offices throughout the world.
The system was installed by Sunlight Solar Energy, Inc., a solar electric and solar hot water installation contractor with four offices nationwide, one of them in Milford, Connecticut.
Sunlight recently installed the largest solar PV system in the Ivy League, an athletic conference consortium of eight private colleges and universities in the Northeastern United States comprised of Brown, Columbia, Cornell, Dartmouth, Harvard, Princeton, Yale and the University of Pennsylvania.
The Ivy League installation, on top of Fisher Hall at Yale’s Divinity School, is a 40-kilowatt, grid-tied system that will provide about 66 percent of the hall’s peak energy demand. Sunlight Solar, an authorized dealer for SunPower products, recently announced its solar thermal division, which will provide solar hot water heating systems to businesses and homes in Connecticut.
Funding was provided via grant from the Connecticut Clean Energy Fund, or CCEF, which paid for about half the array.
The array was put in place not only to cut electricity costs but to serve as a “hands-on” demonstration model for a curriculum at the various Horace Mann campuses, where students from the fourth grade and up will learn about solar PV systems, their component parts, and the monitoring system which displays electricity generation in real time.
Glenn Sherratt, Director of the school’s Nature Laboratory, also suggested that the monitor might be connected to another school in New York to allow those students access to the display and the solar education provided from it.
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