Field of solar panels will help power Sharon Center

SHARON — Sharon Center School will soon get a field full of solar panels at no cost.

The solar array will be paid for by the Connecticut Greenbank and built and managed by Kingspan Energy. 

The panels will provide electricity to the school at a fixed cost of 14.2 cents per kilowatt hour. The school was paying 17.5 cents this year. The cost is locked in for the next 20 years, which will be very helpful to the school during its annual budgeting process. 

“You never know exactly what electricity will cost from year to year,” said Sharon Board of Education Chairman Doug Cahill. “The only thing you knew for sure is that the cost would go up.”

Over the next 10 years, the panels are expected to save the school an estimated $66,144. Over the next 20 years, those savings are estimated at $203,018.

The school will be allotted 35.9 percent of all the energy produced by the panels. The rest of the electricity will be sold back to the regional electric grid; the money made from the sale will go back to Connecticut Greenbank.

Other schools in Region One that are participating in the program are Salisbury Central School and Housatonic Valley Regional High School. Those schools will have roof-mounted panels, Cahill said. That configuration wouldn’t work on the roof at Sharon, he said, so the panels here will be built at the far end of one of the lower athletic fields. A security fence will be constructed around it. 

“This will be a top-of-the-line, state-of-the-art system,” Cahill said. “And we don’t have to pay for any of it, not the construction or the permits or the maintenance. And as the technology advances, the system will be upgraded, because of course the investors want to generate the maximum possible amount of energy.”

The permitting process has nearly been completed. The solar arrays are expected to be installed this winter. 

Once the panels are in place, students will be able to use the system as an educational tool, Cahill said. 

“They’ll be able to watch a live data feed of how much energy is being produced each day.”

Also important in terms of education: “This generation needs to see that we’re doing something to be more energy independent.”

And for the larger community, he said, “We want the taxpayers to know that we are doing everything we can to lower costs at the school.”