Solar Panels

Our solar panels have now been up for almost 6 months.  We finally have the "Splash Monitoring" system properly installed so that you can see what sort of energy we are generating at any one time.  If you're interested in taking a look, you can visit our site at:

Maungaraki School Solar Panel Monitoring

I particularly like the graphic in the bottom right where it gives comparisons to the cumulative energy we have generated… At the time that I wrote this post, we had generated 5125KWh (Kilo Watt Hours) of electricity since the panels went up, this is the same as:

• boiling 215 thousand cups of tea
• making 273 thousand pieces of toast
• driving a car 6ooo Kilometers
• powering a house (for 3 people) for 25 weeks
• preventing the release of 2.7 tons of CO2 into our atmosphere

WOW!  That's a lot of electricity!  It's great to see the panels are doing their job so efficiently.  I know lots of the classes are studying energy sustainability this term - so hopefully this new monitoring system will help us all learn more about solar power.

Mr Rathbone (from the Dynamis project) made a documentary for Enviroschools about the solar panels that are going up around some Wellington Schools.  Here is a compilation of some of the Maungaraki School learners who contributed to the documentary: