Five Schools in Missouri Choose to Go for Solar Energy
The fall semester of 2012 will allow the students of five district schools from Saint Louis, Missouri, to experience what it feels like to have their classrooms powered by means of green energy coming from the sun.
Due to the fact that all of these five schools are expected to receive financial aid from the government so as to implement this project, it seems that in the end the schools’ administrations will be faced with an all-gain, no-loss situation.
Thus, without having to set aside considerable amounts of money to see the solar panels they so dearly want up and running, the schools will save around $130,660 (roughly €104,000) throughout the course of the next 20 years.
Naturally, whatever sums will no longer go on electricity bills can be used to further improve on school settings or to offer additional financial support to the students who need it.
As GreenerIdeal reports, the schools had to choose between four solar power companies that bid for the contract, and ended up choosing StraightUp Solar.
Apparently, they decided to settle for this company both because it is a local business and because it offers monitoring and maintenance systems.
School officials claim that these monitoring systems are particularly important for educational purposes: should students be allowed access to them, they can learn by hands-on experience what going green is all about.
What is even more interesting is that the students will also be allowed to observe the process of installing the said solar panels up-close, something that hopefully will also lead to their becoming more environmentally responsible.
These schools are not the first educational facilities in the US to decide to turn towards the sun for energy.
Thus, one of our previous articles reported on a community college in New Jersey, which also decided to have solar panels installed on its rooftops for the very same reasons: to both save some money and educate the youth.
June 12th, 2012, 09:26 GMT · By Laura Sinpetru of Softpedia
