Information On Solar Panels

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Information on Solar Panels?

I'm going to pitch an idead to my school about switching to Solar Energy. What are positive and negative effects of the solar panels?
Also what is the cost for installing them into a highschool?
How much would the electricity bill decline afterwards?

These are all questions that nobody can answer without evaluating your location, building square footage, solar siting, and energy needs. You'd need to get a solar installer out to really evaluate what it would cost for your application. Don't forget though that there are ways you can make the money back faster. There are federal and often local tax incentives for solar installations, and utility companies in many states have net-metering programs in which you essentially sell your excess power back to the utility company. For a school application, you may not have very much excess power to sell back, but it would at least reduce your draw.

I would look at the US Green Building Council's website, and check out their LEED for Schools certification track. I would also call a rep there and find out what kind of funding is availalbe either through grants or loans, for school applications.

I would say as part of this project you should really push for a renewable solar energy contract with your school's utility provider as well, so that the supplemental energy that solar panels can't provide is also coming from renewable sources and not petroleum.

Also as part of this project, I would recommend looking at ways to reduce your lighting power draw in the school. Lighting power is typically the biggest energy draw in any building, schools being no exception. If you could look at daylighting options in each classroom either through light shelf applications on windows, or solatube skylights, you could greatly reduce your lighting power draw. Minimally I would look at switching over to LED lights in each classroom, and installing occupancy and/or daylight sensors in each space. LED lights are expensive up front, but they are easily able to pay for themselves over the course of their lifespan (which is much much longer than fluorescent or incandescent) both by reducing maintenance costs, energy draw costs and by keeping your cooling costs low. It's something that solar panels can't do. Daylight sensitive controls are controls that monitor the level of daylight in a room and adjust the electric lights to provide supplemental lighting if and when they're needed. Occupancy sensors are much more common, they sense when someone is in the room and they shut the lights off automatically after a minute or so if the room is empty.

Bringing down the power load in the school would be really advantageous in a lot of ways, and would really make a stronger case in my opinion for solar panels. A major solar application then would provide them with enough free energy to run the remaining energy systems with the potential for excess energy to be sold back to the utility.

Of course they should also closely examine how well-insulated the school is. They could be wasting a lot of energy on heating and cooling (probably mostly heating for normal school days) if the school is not well-insulated.

Solar Energy


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