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| Borrego Solar completes new PV system  Taking advantage of year round sunny weather, Top of the World Elementary School of the Laguna Beach Unified School District now uses the region's bountiful sunlight as a free and clean source for their electrical power. The school chose Borrego Solar to install their photovoltaic system, a PV array consisting of 200 Sharp modules running through five SMA Sunny Boy inverters that produces 4,500 kWh of electricity per month. To be eligible under the Solar Schools Program, Top of the World Elementary was required to establish a curriculum tie-in plan designed to educate students on the benefits of solar energy and energy conservation.As a solution, Borrego Solar installed a Web-enabled data-acquisition and monitoring system called PV2Web from Fat Spaniel Technologies. The data monitoring system enables students and teachers to monitor real-time and historical data about the photovoltaic system's performance over the Internet. Using a touch screen interactive display in the school lobby, or any network browser connected to the Internet, students can access useful information about their school's solar electric system, such as how much energy the system is producing, the sun's irradiance level, temperature of system cells, and wind speed. The PV2Web program also provides quantitative information presented in educational terms relating to the environmental benefits that result from the system's production of clean electricity. For example, students can see how much their school's use of solar energy is offsetting the environmental impact of greenhouse gases the system has avoided generating, in analogous terms such as the number of cars that would emit the same amount of pollutant gases over a week. Another challenge for Borrego Solar was attaching the system to roofs that were octagonal in shape, where the roof level changed dramatically from one point to the next. Borrego Solar also subcontracted a roofing company to help mount the solar modules, in order to maintain the school's existing roof warranty. write your comments about the article :: © 2006 Construction News :: home page |