Going Solar
on the Sunny Side of the Street
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In a powerful statement emphasizing Berkshire’s leadership in and tradition of environmental stewardship, late this spring the school hopes to unveil a solar field on East Campus that will generate up to forty percent of the school’s electricity. The two-megawatt, eight-acre project is part of an energy master plan developed by students and then presented to and approved by Berkshire’s board of trustees last September. The solar field will generate over 2,300 megawatt hours of clean electrical power in its first year—more than any other school or college in New England, according to PowerPlay Solar, the project’s developer and manager. In making the announcement, Head of School Mike Maher stressed the school’s commitment to become carbon neutral. He added that the project will include a unique educational component: an energy investigations laboratory where students will be able to monitor the output of the solar field, including kilowatt hours of energy production and pounds of carbon savings. And giving the project a pastoral touch will be a herd of sheep that will graze the grass where mowers can’t reach. Berkshire’s new solar field will feature three different solar technologies: fixed-tilt photovoltaic (PV), single-axis tracking PV, and a concentrating solar thermal. The systems will include, respectively, almost 7,000 fixed-tilt PV panels, over 250 single-axis tracking PV panels, and six units of a new solar thermal technology called the PowerDish ™. Unlike the PV panels, which turn the sun’s light directly into electricity, the PowerDish concentrates and converts thermal (heat) energy from the sun into electricity. In the summer, when the solar field delivers more energy than the school needs, “net metering” takes effect, allowing Berkshire to sell back the excess power back to the local utility, National Grid.
BERKSHIRE SCHOOL • 2010 YEAR IN REVIEW
The project’s design, engineering and construction will be managed by PowerPlay’s construction partner, Spire Solar Systems, a division of Spire Corporation in Bedford, Mass. A public company, NASDAQ (SPIR) with four decades of solar energy experience, Spire has designed and installed over eighty commercial PV projects, including the Department of the Interior’s visitor center at Denali National Park in Alaska and the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago. According to PowerPlay Solar, each year Berkshire’s solar field will remove nearly 2,650,000 pounds of carbon dioxide, 1,650 pounds of nitrogen oxide, and 4,400 pounds of sulfur dioxide from the atmosphere—ultimately avoiding the equivalent use of 1.5 million pounds of coal annually.
Geological surveys, including drilling ten feet below the ground to test the soil, were the first step in the solar process.