Schools today are hosting the solar energy systems that will become commonplace tomorrow in public buildings, homes, and businesses. This publication serves as a guide to how schools are using solar energy, listing scores of schools currently using the sun for lighting, heating, and cooling, as well as highlights on innovative programs to expand the use of solar and a list of resources for further exploration.

Bringing solar to schools is an important first step to increasing the use of solar energy in the community at large. Schools make an excellent showcase for the benefits of solar photovoltaic electricity, solar thermal energy, and passive solar. Changes and improvements at schools are highly visible and closely followed. As has been the case with recycling programs, which were introduced to many communities by schoolchildren educating their parents, students can carry good ideas from the fringe into the mainstream.

Demand for energy continues to grow worldwide, but sources of the combustible fuels we depend upon, such as coal, oil, and gas, are finite. In addition, the increased burning of fossil fuels raises concerns over global warming and, where controls are lax, air pollution.

Solar energy, clean and limitless, can meet new energy demands. What is needed is more widespread use of solar technologies, both to get people familiar and comfortable with solar and to achieve the economies of scale needed to bring manufacturing prices down.

The Million Solar Roofs Initiative, announced in June, 1997, by President Clinton, has helped give solar a public boost. The Initiative calls for the U.S. government to partner with the private sector — communities, utilities, manufacturers, and others — to install solar energy systems on one million rooftops by the year 2010.

Physically, schools are an ideal place to use solar energy. The energy demand in school buildings is significant and concentrated during the daytime, when the energy from the sun can be used to maximum benefit. The value of solar is multiplied when using different solar technologies in concert and in combination with other new and efficient uses of resources, including low-wattage lighting, heat pumps, and better insulating windows, walls, and roofs.

Schools are choosing to go solar to solve a number of energy needs, from powering school zone flashers and safety lights to heating hot water to bringing natural daylight to classrooms to reducing consumption of fossil fuels. Utilities site solar photovoltaic systems on schools as a part of “green pricing” programs (voluntary programs where consumers pay a little extra to support renewable energy use) that offer customers an affordable means of supporting the use of solar power. State governments promote a variety of solar school programs with an eye to developing new energy resources to reduce public expenditures.

In many of the cases where schools are using solar energy, they are also studying the benefits and output of the solar technology, often as a formal addition to science classes or after-school programs.

Article originally printed in “Schools Going Solar:Volume 1” produced by the Utility PhotoVoltaic Group, 1999.