Elementary School Solar Power Field -- $1 Million?

      Located in Warren County, New Jersey, Pohatcong Township Elementary School's officials have been discussing and reviewing bids for a $1.05 million solar field that could possibly save the school more than $90,000 annually on electric costs. According to Superintendent Diane Mandry, the ground-mounted photovoltaic field will help provide nearly all of the school's electricity and result in approximately $96,000 in annual savings. "The Pohatcong School District is excited about being able to incorporate a solar field that will produce a significant portion of the district's electric needs for the next 25 years, thus saving a substantial amount in operating expenses," said Mandry.
      The district had went out to bid for the project last month and had received a total of eight proposals from contractors, with bids ranging as high as $1.72 million. The lowest bid, however, was of $1,048,434 from Flemington-based Advanced Solar Products, Inc., although the school board is still in the process of formally accepting the bid. "The project will be funded through the school's district's capital reserve fund," Mandry said.
      "The solar field would be constructed on 2 acres in a field just north of the school and would include 1,694 solar panels on ground-mounted arrays," said Mandry. According to Advanced Solar Products President Lyle Rawlings, those panels will generate approximately 625,000 kilowatt hours of electricity per year. "In addition to the electricity cost-savings, the district stands to gain additional money by selling solar energy certificates to electricity suppliers," Rawlings said. Such suppliers are required to secure a portion of their electricity from solar generators. However, they also have the option of buying certificates to use as credits towards those requirements.
        "The school will be able to sell them and get substantial revenue," Rawlings said. "In fact, the revenue it would generate probably would be on the same order of magnitude as the power itself." Mandry had also noted that based on the average value of those certificates  last year, this project would have generated about $57,000 in revenue.

Pohatcong Township Elementary School

Solar-Powered Computers for Off-Grid Schools

      In 2009, a 19-year-old graduating senior from Hong Kong's International School, Charles Watson, carrying a rudimentary computer, had took off a year from entering a university to travel to Nepal to work on a project he came up with while still in school: to provide off-the-grid schools with solar-linked computing power. "Once I got to Nepal, I was running a blog, taking photos and so on, saying 'We need computers,'" he says. "I did a fundraising run in Nepal and that raised enough to buy 30 computers at $300 each - $10,000 if you include the solar panels."
      Watson, an American who has be raised in Hong Kong, is currently 23 and still is not attending a university, despite being accepted at the University of Illinois, and doesn't plan on attending any time in the foreseeable future. Instead, he is the founder and chief of SolarLEAP, a nonprofit organization company whose computers are often assembled by his parents at their kitchen table, but they are delivering computing power to schools without reliable electricity, or none at all, in countries as diverse as Nepal, the Philippines, Ethiopia, and, he hopes, across the world.
       "As many as 1.3 billion people, a fifth of the world's population, remain without access to electricity," he says. Ten countries--four in developing Asia and six in sub-Saharan Africa--account for two-thirds of those without electricity. Unless further action is taken, it is projected that close to one billion people will be without electricity still in 2030.

Charles Watson and friends

        Watson has since branched out to Ghana, where he has installed 24 computers, each running on solar power in off-grid schools. After the projects in Nepal and Ghana were completed, demand in rural communities began to grow. Within weeks, organizations in India and Ethiopia were looking for unique low-power consumption computers to run in schools without electricity. Furthermore, Watson was looking for a way to continue the work without his direct, on-the-ground involvement, and thus SolarLEAP was born.
        Today, he has installed 200 of solar-powered computers in five countries with funding from non-governmental organizations and anybody he can solicit money from. "The transformation of schools is dramatic," he says. In 2010, after installation of his computers in Canumay School near Antipolo in the Philippines, the school moved from last place to a first ranking in its school district. He provided the first solar-powered computers to any school in India. "One in four people around the globe don't have access to electricity," he said. "More than 100 million children don't have access to education and a large share of students fortunate enough to be in school don't have access to quality education materials."