Schools are an obvious place to put solar panels, since they use most of their power during the day and have big, flat roofs. But upfront funding is a problem.
A national database (here) lists 19 New Hampshire schools with installed solar, a couple of them private but mostly public, and mostly high schools. The oldest is, as Granite Geek readers know, Hopkinton High School, with a little 2-kilowatt system that was installed in 1999, before any of its students were born. (I profiled it as the first of my old-NH- solar series, which included oldest school panels, oldest grid-tied panels, and finally the oldest operating solar panel of them all.) The biggest is at Phillips-Exeter (535 KW) and the biggest public school array is at Inter-Lakes school in Meredith (345 KW), but most are quite small, in the 1-to-20 kw range.
Nineteen schools isn’t much, since New Hampshire has 167 school districts and more than 250 school buildings. It’s quite possible that this database isn’t complete, since it requires schools to send in the information. And several schools are in the process of building or designing solar systems, so the number should grow.
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