Churchill Generates Electricty.
How did it start.
In November 2007 the Elected Mayor John Harrison threw down a challenge to all Secondary School students in North Tyneside. “Design me a house for a family of four which will be Carbon Neutral and cost no more than £80,000 to build”.
Never one to shirk a challenge Churchill Community College entered a team of ECO students to pit their brains against the best the other schools could muster.
To launch the competition the teams attended a 2 day conference on sustainable housing. During this event they had access to a range of experts to help answer their questions and point them in the right direction.
After that they had 5 weeks to research, design and build a model of their Carbon neutral house.
Their design which included straw bales for insulation and solar photo voltaic panels to generate renewable energy lifted the winner’s trophy and a cheque for the college for £200.
The winning team was:
Robert Blakey, Christopher McBeth, Liam Nash and Daniel Todd.
Elated by their success 3 of the students asked the obvious question “Why can’t we make this actually happen?” One answer to this question was what do you think you would get for £200! A better answer was how could we get the £20,000 needed to install a working Photo Voltaic Solar energy system?
So now joined by another ‘ECO Warrior’, Thomas Robson, the group started to look at funding sources. They were put in touch with a company Solar Century who special in this field. They drew up their plans and submitted these together with ariel photographs of the school building and were eventually successful in gaining a £10,000 grant from BarclayCard Pure, one of only 15 grants awarded nationally last year. The other £10,000 will eventually come as match funding from the governments ‘Low Carbon Buildings Programme Grant’. We had a minor panic last week on hearing the news that the Low Carbon Buildings Programme Grant was no longer going to fund Solar Panels. However we have since heard that our bid had already gone through.
The installation was completed last week and already the system has already saved the planet over 30kg of Carbon Dioxide
So What Have We Got?
On the school roof is a network of 21 Photo Voltaic Solar panels. These convert energy from sunlight into electricity which is fed into the school’s distribution board via an inverter which converts direct current to alternating current. A visual display in the school foyer shows the power in Kilowatts being generated at the time (the more the sun shines the greater the power) together with total energy generated in Kilowatt Hours (1 KWHr = 1 unit of electrical energy) and perhaps most importantly the mass of Co2 gas being saved by not having to burn a fuel to generate the electricity. The school will also be provided with an educational kit which includes mini solar panels to power LEDs, buzzers and fans, a poster and lesson plans.
The system will provide financial savings to the school worth about £600 a year. The electricity generated should save about £350 whilst from next year the school could expect to earn around £250 as a green energy generator. We estimate these financial savings based on a current electricity price of 11.5p per kWh and the selling of renewable obligation certificates (ROCS). All renewable electricity generators are entitled to receive ROCs, which are awarded by Ofgem. From next year, two ROCs will be awarded for every 1,000 kWh (1 MWh) of renewable electricity generated which can be claimed on an annual basis. This gives them a market value of approximately 8p/kWh. At this rate the system would take over 30 years to repay itself but it is expected to last at least 50-60 years.
Where Next?
Already the team are thinking of what the next steps should be to create a ‘Greener’ Churchill Community College and have their sights firmly set on Wind Generation. With young people like these around there is every chance that the planet can be rescued from the mess the older generation seems to have made of it!
.