New Jersey School Offsets 90 Percent of Energy Use With Solar
HILLSBORO, Ore. — The campus of Lawrenceville School, a centuries-old boarding school in Lawrenceville, N.J., is now home to 6.1 megawatts of high-performance solar panels from SolarWorld. The photovoltaic system, ground-mounted on 30 acres of school-owned farm land, is believed to be the largest installed at a United States primary or secondary school. It will generate enough electricity to offset 90 percent of the high school’s annual power needs.
The system features 24,934 SolarWorld solar panels, manufactured at the company’s U.S. headquarters in Hillsboro, Ore., and mounted on single-axis trackers to maximize energy production. The array is designed to produce approximately 9,264,000 kilowatt hours of solar electricity each year, enough to power the equivalent of more than 800 typical American homes, and to offset 6,388 metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions annually, the equivalent of taking 1,253 cars off the road. The Lawrenceville School solar farm is also home to nearly 900,000 resident honey bees, nourished by a special wildflower mixture planted among and around the solar panels.