subject: Neighborhood College Leads Solar Power Initiative [print this page] Developing 20 homes 14 wellness applications operating 24/7, a bookstore, a stream of traffic that would make New York City envious, and 272 photovoltaic (PV) panels on its roof poised to turn sunshine into electrical energy. The panels' architecture is such that the installation did not even penetrate the roof's membrane, and no developing permit was needed.
It undoubtedly outshines that of nearby Technology Park, exactly where three years ago the school place in the first 33-kilowatt solar array.
In spite of its status as the only technical college in the state, STCC did not have a lot of dollars lying close to, so it funded the newest project with a $407,000 grant from the Massachusetts Technologies Collaborative, the state's economic development agency for renewable power, the innovation economic climate, and e-wellness initiatives.
This decreased the expense of the project to $256,000, which the school financed by issuing a like quantity of zero-interest, clean renewable power bonds, or CREBs, from the Internal Revenue Service.
This newest solar installation will conserve the school about $19,000 per year in utility fees, or 1.7 percent of the total outlay required to run the school, which has a far more than one particular-million annual power bill, but as STCC President Ira Rubenzahl observes, it is a step in the proper direction on a planet faced with increased global warming as a result of fossil-fuel power plants emitting carbon dioxide.
The system will pay for itself in 18 years (or less, if electrical energy costs continue to rise), but also adds worth to the school's academic plan, considering that the earlier installation in Technology Park supplied only restricted access to students interested in pursuing a career in solar power style, manufacture and installation.
Probably a lot more very important, the solar array on Building 20 feeds directly into a Web-based databank which students can access to monitor the system's overall performance, such as ambient temperatures, energy output, and accumulated energy production, and students can use the accumulated records - stored more than five years - to evaluate output, savings and solar effectiveness figures year-more than-year.
This input is useful to school programs that deal with constructing style and construction, offering students the opportunity to see very first-hand how solar arrays relate not only to installation techniques but, down the road, to architectural parameters and civil engineering specifications like roof loads and stress factors.
Sitting on a all-natural elevation, with tall buildings equipped with flat roofs, the STCC campus is an ideal location for solar power arrays. Which suggests, of course, that the school has plans for additional solar, the next units likely equipped with solar trackers or involving concentrating solar energy through parabolic mirrors.
Equivalent solar initiatives, backed by ARRA, are popping up all more than the country, major a large number of renewable energy professionals to conclude that 2009 may possibly be the year in which solar makes an indelible mark on the energy sector - an opinion not supported by Forbes Magazine, which sees renewable power as acquiring had its heyday from 2006 to 2008, when such massive economic institutions as the now-defunct Lehman Bros. financed renewable power in exchange for tax credits.
