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.”
Incentives such as federal tax credits, as well as rebates for residential and commercial systems in Massachusetts, have paved the way for private companies to step in. Companies are able to claim the credits and rebates not available to non-profits, like schools, and in return pay for installation and maintenance costs.
Once the solar panels are in place, the companies can then sell back the power at rates competitive with existing utilities. But the profit margins are narrow enough on solar that companies usually want to go big—really big.
“Most of the people we spoke to originally were looking to put in a system that would supply all the power for the whole campus—that takes eight acres of land,” Mr. Tannatt said. “That just isn’t something that worked for us.”
School officials interviewed nine different solar panel companies, but felt that most of the firms—with an eye on speed and size, rather than detail—were not the right fit. The exception was a family-run roofing company from Lewiston, Maine called Industrial Roofing Companies (IRC). Through its subsidiary, Solar Roofing Systems, IRC recently started working on smaller scale solar projects with schools such as Belmont Hill School and Cambridge School of Weston.
IRC was unusual in that it had an appetite for solar tax credits and planned to both own and maintain the systems over the long term. For the company, partnering with schools only made sense, said IRC Director of Business Development Kurt Penney.
“We’re taking advantage of the long-term nature of solar, as well as the long-term nature of private schools,” said Mr. Penney by phone. With solar such a hot commodity, Mr. Penney has been kept busy on the road, visiting clients. “We’re owning this, so it’s not a short term relationship. We’re going to do it right, and we’re going to do it well.”
Even as they ironed out the final details for the solar project, IRC was busy on the Williston Northampton campus. This past spring, the company replaced the tricky, barrel-shaped roof on the Lossone Hockey Rink.
“The curve is very challenging and the access is challenging,” Mr. Penney said. “It’s a difficult one, but it came out beautifully and we’re proud of the work.”
Once safety measures are in place, IRC will begin on electrical work inside both the rink and Athletic Center, and will install a racking system to hold the solar panels in place.
“That’s where the roofing experience comes in handy,” said Mr. Penney. “No one is worried about the first couple of years, but what about year 14? It’s good to know we’ll be there if any issues arise.”
This summer, the company will install 400 panels on the rink roof, which will generate about 80-90 kilowatts of power. Another 144 kilowatts worth of panels will go on the southeast and southwest sections of the Athletic Center. The system will come with an integrated monitoring package, which will let the company check on the panel output from afar, and will alert technicians if power generation seems to be low. Another monitor in the Athletic Center will let students and visitors also check the arrays in real time on campus.
Nicholas Pattison ’14 (Colby College ’19), who spearheaded many environmentally friendly projects on campus as the recent president of the Sustainable Community Club, was enthusiastic about the project, describing it as “a wonderful initiative that takes us one step closer to being more sustainable.”
“Many colleges and institutions are going carbon neutral now, and it is truly inspiring to see Williston taking steps to help the environment,” Mr. Pattison wrote in an email. “Not only will this help the environment, but students will also have a tangible understanding of the benefits of renewable energy.”
In the fall, the campus solar project will generate about 283,500 kilowatts per year, equal to half of the power used by the Athletic Center and Lossone Hockey Rink or 10 percent of the total 2.5 megawatts used by the school. Wil-liston Northampton has locked in a pre-determined rate for the next 20 years, which will help hedge its bets for future power use. With electrical rates on the rise, Mr. Tannatt said such an agreement will only help the school.
When the buildings produce more power than they use, the meters will run backwards and the school will get a credit from Western Massachusetts Electric, the utility company.
“One of the reasons we’ve been going back and forth on this is because a couple of years ago electrical rates were much better than they are today,” he said. “While [the price of solar panels] have stayed roughly the same, electrical rates have skyrocketed.”
Both Mr. Tannatt and Mr. McCullagh said that they are already looking ahead to what other buildings might make sense for smaller solar panel instal-lations, such as the Schoolhouse. Mr. McCullagh said the school wants to take full advantage of the solar benefits available in Massachusetts.
“We said we’d do this only when it started to make sense financially,” he said. “It certainly makes sense now.”