The Solar Future

After more than four years of planning, solar power is a reality on campus.
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The Athletic Center kilowatt hours per year in electricity. Some 180,000 kW will now be supplied by solar power. Courtesy of Industrial Roofing Companies

On May 10, during their annual spring meeting, the Williston Northampton Board of Trustees took an important vote. Their decision was unanimous. The Athletic Center and Hockey Rink, which were being reroofed with new shingles, would be the sites of the school’s first solar power installations.

The vote was the result of over four years of planning, research, and advocacy by the Physical Plant staff and Chief Financial Officer Charles McCullagh.

“This has been like crossing the Sahara,” Mr. McCullagh said recently. “But we’re in a window of time right now where you have to take your best shot.”

The first hurdle that school officials had to overcome was a financial one. Although solar technology has been around so long that Jeff Tannatt, director of the Physical Plant, remembers studying the subject during his college years in the 1970s, the panels have required prohibitive upfront installation and equipment costs until relatively recently.

“We’ve been looking into solar for probably four years,” Mr. Tannatt said. “For us as a school to go out and buy a system…the cost of the system com-pared to the energy it generates did not make it feasible.”

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