Going Solar!

Straight off the bat from officer elections, the 4 of us decided to quickly take action to make a big difference in our school, and to get our name out there. After going back and forth with a few other project ideas, the idea came up to go solar.

Jackson has an incredibly low price for energy, a measly 5.8 cents per kilowatt hour, making solar projects relatively complicated if the goal is for the panels to fully pay themselves off. Knowing this, we decided not to go directly to our high school building or other schools in our county, but the more public lands that are used by the school. In the summer of 2012, the Teton County School District (TCSD) was updating and renovating the local football stadium. This included removing the old bathrooms and concession stand, which at the time was more like a concession shack, and replacing it with a new, updated, and consolidated building. 

Luckily, this new building had the design that accommodated solar panels perfectly! The roof was flat and south-facing, at a slight angle that allows for the most direct light to hit it. 

We decided that a good project would be to attempt to make a fully-solar-powered athletic field, including the energy consumed by the stadium lights, the scoreboards, and the concession stand itself. Because the concession stand was still being built during this time, we did not know how much energy that it would consume by itself, so we decided to break the project up into two phases. 

Phase 1:

         - Enough panels to balance out the energy consumed by the lights and score board, while monitoring concession stand energy use. 

Phase 2:
        - Add enough solar panels to offset energy consumption of the concession stand (based off of estimate from previous year of use)

     

-Karli