For over a decade, uninstalled solar panels have been sitting atop Golden Secondary School. The panels were purchased and taken to the roof but never installed as the school board ran out of funding for the project.
On Tuesday, July 11, the solar panels finally came into operation after being hooked up by workers from Golden Electrical Contracting.
The completion of the project was made possible through funding from the Columbia Basin Trust’s Resident Directed Grants program.
The project, which was spearheaded by Wildsight Golden, was originally meant to purchase and install solar panels at Lady Grey Elementary School.
However, once the organization contacted the school district, they learned of the unfinished project at Golden Secondary School.
The money required to finish the old project was “significantly less” than starting an entirely new project, Wildsight said in a press release.
The project was completed by purchasing and installing microinverters for the dormant solar panels.
A microinverter is a device that connects to a solar panel and converts raw energy from the sun into safe and usable electricity.
Unlike a string inverter, which generally serves the same purpose but for an entire group of solar panels, microinverters are connected to individual solar panels which makes the harvest of electricity more efficient and less susceptible to failure.
Excess electricity produced by the school’s solar panels will be redistributed back to the grid and then credited to the school’s next electricity bill.
Wildsight considered the installment of these panels a positive step towards achieving the town’s goal of 100 per cent renewable energy by 2050.
In addition to being more environmentally friendly, Wildisght says that the installation of these panels also improves “local energy independence so towns like Golden can be less reliant on large utility companies for their electrical needs.”
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