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How green is my Cole? Answer: very |
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Wednesday, 18 March 2009 |
BY ABBY FOX
The new Cole Middle School is going to be “solar-ready,” in other words, built to accommodate solar panels on the roof, and secondly, the school will make use of rainwater harvesting, so that the fields and about half of the toilets, will get their water from the rain.
These decisions were reached at a joint school building committee – school committee meeting Wednesday night at the high school library, after architect Ed Frenette told the committees that they had to come to a green energy decision that night, to keep the timetable on track.
The rainwater harvesting is estimated to cost $100,000, while making the school “solar-ready” would take $10,000, and if the school district receives any grants, a 50-kilowatt panel system could be installed on the roof before the project is complete.
Members debated whether to go full bore and spend $150,000 more, or a total of $250,000, to do a complete rainwater harvesting program, where all the toilets would be flushed with rainwater. The final decision was that spending that much this early on, would be taking too much money “out of the building,” in other words, away from the nuts and bolts of the project.
Frenette’s firm, SMMA, estimates the payback from the rainwater harvesting to be in about 37 years, while the solar panels, which are estimated to bring in just one to three percent of the school’s energy, could take that long, especially if the school doesn’t get any grants. So, Frenette and Project Manager Jon Winikur emphasized, the point of these projects, at least in the short run, would be more to educate students and be environmentally friendly than to save a lot of money.
Besides committing to these projects, the committees learned that SMMA is committed to reaching the goal of 40- percent energy-efficiency at the school, which will give the school district a four-percent reimbursement from the state for their energy work. SMMA is reaching this threshold goal by doing many things. First, by putting in a highly-insulated roof, windows and window-frames, above what the code requires, tons of energy are saved and the heating equipment, like boilers, can be smaller. Then, SMMA is also intent on installing many modern technologies such as natural ventilation; daylight harvesting, which is optimizing the sunlight coming into the classrooms; light sensors, so that lights near windows are only turned on when necessary and lights are turned off automatically when people leave rooms; a computer to regulate energy by turning it on in stages and shutting it off in stages, rather than using a thermostat; and low-flow toilets, probably with flushing sensors. The planners have also decided to only air-condition the library, the computer labs, and the administrative offices, that will be used more the year-round than the classrooms.
Interestingly, the standards being used to meet the school, based on the New England Collaborative for High Performing Schools, are in some ways even more stringent than the well-known LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) standards, said Frenette and Wil Yoder, a Rhode Island School of Design professor who has taught architecture, engineering and building green.
While some members were more cautious about the district’s ability to pay for things like solar panels, such as chair Jay Gowell, who said the question for him is “what does it cost to get us there,” others, like professor Yoder, said “we need to look not only at the initial cost, but the payback,” the point when the technology saves enough energy that it’s paying for itself and saving money.
What’s not happening
Not surprisingly, wind turbines are not coming to Cole, mainly because there’s little wind here; in fact, the Kent County area is ranked worst for wind in the state because it’s so far inland, Frenette said. Other issues like the lack of land area for construction and the inconvenience of transportation come into play, SMMA said.
The other no-go of the night was geothermal heating and cooling. As Frenette quickly summed up the next day, there are no incentives, because grants are generally unavailable.
“Although it has the potential of reducing energy costs, there are two things working against it,” he said. “Grants are normally not given out for it, because it drives your electrical bill up – you still have to pump the water -- and one of the biggest sources for grants happens to be the electrical suppliers.” Plus, since only a part of the school is going to be air-conditioned, and geothermal is known to be “far more efficient saving energy for cooling, than for heating,” school officials didn’t see the point.
The up-front costs for geo-thermal weren’t encouraging. A test well to see how it would work costs about $60,000, SMMA associates said, while the cost is easily about $3 a square foot, just to cover the heating and cooling for the administrative buildings, and the payback is estimated at a little less than 20 years.
In contrast, going for pholtovoltaics was considered a no-brainer. As SMMA said, “where there’s sun,” there’s potential for energy savings; there are grants available to take the sting out of cost, and the panels require hardly any maintenance.
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