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Leading the Charge: Sunshine Coast’s Schools Go Photovoltaic

Empowered by progress so far, district leaders dream of ‘solar on every roof.’

Sophie Woodrooffe 28 Sep 2018Coast Reporter

Sophie Woodrooffe reports for Coast Reporter. Find her on Twitter @dswdrff.

In the 1970s, Betty Baxter’s father installed two solar panels the size of kitchen tables on their roof. It was an oddity in the grassland town of Brooks, Alberta. “My sister was in high school and she was horrified,” recalls Baxter. Nearly five decades later, Baxter is walking in her father’s footsteps, but the retiring school trustee has been chasing the solar dream at a scale that eclipses her father’s experiment.

Baxter is an athletic woman in her 60s who talks about her father and her role in making the Sunshine Coast school district (SD46) the most solar-friendly in the province, from her eight-acre homestead in the hills of Roberts Creek. An impressive array of solar panels blanketing Baxter’s home pops from across a pasture dappled with horses.

“I wouldn’t consider myself an environmental activist,” says Baxter. Her role in bringing solar to the district tells another story. Since 2017, the district has installed more than 730 panels on the rooftops of three of its 13 schools. Another installation heats a high school’s water and yet another powers a greenhouse. Combined, the schools are expected to generate about 258 megawatt hours annually, or roughly enough electricity to power 24 homes.

While SD46 is not alone — 19 of the province’s 93 districts use photovoltaics — the pace and scale of adoption is unique. The size of SD46’s solar systems hooked into the grid surpasses all other districts. Changes came organically, growing like a seed out of the district’s strategic plan, which Baxter helped cultivate as school board chair.

“There is clear direction in that we’re supposed to be exploring all sustainability options and energy efficiency across the district,” says Rob Collison, the district’s facilities manager who plans and oversees the installations.

Like Baxter, Collison is intensely fascinated with solar — his goal is “to have solar on every roof.” His prized pilot project rests at Langdale Elementary and generates more than 74 megawatt hours annually. The array cost $170,000 but is expected to save the district $7,500 annually over the next 35 years.

After picking our way through the system’s 214 panels, black and soaking in the late summer sun, we climb down from the roof and sit in the shade of the school. Collison, like Baxter, is athletic. He’s a youthful 46 and speaks calmly with a hidden smile.

851px version of RobCollisonSolarPanels.jpg
Rob Collison, facilities manager at School District No. 46, surveys the panels on the Langdale Elementary School roof under Mount Elphinstone. He wants to get panels on every school roof in the district. Photo by Sophie Woodrooffe.

His interest in energy savings arose in the early 1990s at the Vancouver School District, where he worked as a young HVAC mechanic. As he changed jobs and districts, he began specializing in system-wide energy efficiency, and became enamoured of the potential of photovoltaics. “When I came here I thought, here’s my opportunity,” recalls Collison of his 2011 arrival at SD46.

Along with Collison, much of the senior staff, including Supt. Patrick Bocking and Secretary Treasurer Nicholas Weswick, were also hired that year, as were several trustees, including Baxter by acclamation. The new team brought much-needed energy at a time when the district was facing financial hardship because of decreased enrolment.

“Parents were really worried,” recalls Baxter. To rebuild trust and stability, Baxter championed community consultation when working on the strategic plan. “Patrick and I went to every single school, every single parent group, teacher group,” she says. Those meetings provided a wealth of data and into that plan went the community’s desire for sustainable practices.

With the plan in place by 2015, Baxter and Collison had the guiding principles to install solar, though the idea to go photovoltaic was less of a light-bulb moment than the first flicker of greater things to come. Baxter pushed for energy efficiency because she saw the savings potential. That push gave Collison the blessing of the board to seek permission from the Ministry of Education to spend leftover capital funding on solar.

The first attempt came with Langdale Elementary. Collison had already saved tens of thousands of dollars with window, door and roof replacements, but was left with $150,000. “I was sitting in my office and I thought, ‘Solar, I wonder if they’d let me go solar,’” says Collison. The next step was convincing the operations committee, of which Baxter was a part. “Betty of course, was like, ‘Yes, let’s do it.’” The board greenlit the project.

Langdale is now one year into its experiment and projections are on target: the panels produce 93 per cent of the school’s electricity needs. “It’s great,” said Collison when asked what it’s like working with Baxter. “It gives you a lot of motivation to... start thinking outside the box.”

Pender Harbour Secondary may gain the most. Tucked away at the top of the Coast, fierce weather and a lack of stable energy infrastructure means the school is plagued by blackouts. Collison had considered going geothermal, propane or diesel, but none of those scenarios made financial sense, nor did they fit with the strategic plan’s emphasis on sustainability. Solar solved those problems.

Today, the school is known for another kind of blackout — its roof has been shellacked with 324 photovoltaic panels, the most of any school in the province. Pender Harbour uses a net metering system that feeds excess electricity back into the grid and gives the school a break on its hydro bill by generating about 34 percent of its electricity. Not only does the array save money, it keeps the lights on. Collison puts it another way: “It’s books for kids.”

Back at her homestead, Baxter echoes Collison’s words and enthusiasm. She used her inheritance after her father passed away to install the array in 2016, which produces most of her home’s electricity, including a charging port for her 2014 Nissan Leaf. “My dad would have been stoked to the nines to know I had done this,” she says. As she walks me to my internally-combusting Toyota Matrix, she tries to convince me to go electric. I could be convinced.  [Tyee]

Read more: Energy, Education

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