St Mary’s is an 11-18 Catholic Voluntary Academy serving North East Derbyshire. A thriving, highly successful and over-subscribed school with a long and well established reputation and an outstanding record of academic achievements and examination results consistently well above the national average.
Overview of the challenge
With over 1,200 students and a school day that runs from 7am to 7pm, the school has high energy demands. As with many schools the budget is tight and they needed to look at ways of reducing their ever-increasing electricity bills.
The school is spread out across a sprawling site and nearly all the roofs were required to reach the generation targets to deliver the best outcome. Installing panels in this environment would impact student access to the playground area due to scaffolding and access equipment.
Our approach
We implemented the project in phases, installing the solar panel system in manageable sections, to reduce any disruption or potential risks to the students.
The initial programme was to complete the installation within three weeks and we successfully delivered a fully commissioned system following a client handover within the contracted period and importantly ahead of the Feed-In-Tariff deadline.
The result
The system will produce enough electricity (240,464 kWh per annum) to power around 65 residential homes per year or power 109 electric cars. After 25 years in operation the project is predicted to have saved 472.4 tonnes of CO2e, an equivalent of 2,444,640 fossil fuelled car miles, 310 fossil fuelled cars off the road and 1890 pine trees planted.
The funded energy model adopted by the school has seen electrical demand from the grid decrease and the savings against energy increase. The school has also been provided with key stage learning tool for all ages of students to learn about solar and other renewable energies.
