Educating by Example: Avon Central School District in Livingston County, NY

Avon Central School District hosts the largest public school solar project in New York State to generate more than enough electricity to serve the district’s current needs while also reducing its carbon footprint and costs over the life of the project. But more importantly, according to Avon Superintendent Aaron Johnson, Ed.D, the project gives students the “opportunity to learn more about the benefits of sustainable energies, how they’re produced, and the benefits that go along with that,”1 including a pathway to renewable energy as a career.

The Avon Central School District is located in northern Livingston County, NY. It serves approximately 1,000 students and combines the benefits of a tight-knit rural community with proximity to the technology and cultural opportunities of Rochester, NY, just 20 miles to the north.

Avon’s road to renewable energy began in 2007-2008, when the district installed a small, 5 kilowatt set of solar panels on top of the junior high school roof. A couple of years later it placed a 45 kW array on the high school.

In 2015, the school district received NYSERDA grants to switch to LED lighting and install a newair handling system to further reduce its carbon footprint through increased efficiency. The new air handling system, while not air conditioning, decreased temperatures on the second floor of the high school by 10-15 degrees on hot fall and spring days. Recent studies show that hot weather can negatively impact performance, and anecdotal reports from the Avon teachers state that students do seem to be able to learn better now.

At the urging an environmentally aware school board member, the school district decided to explore additional solar power. It worked with New Energy Equity, which provided development, project management, and financing,2 and WGL Energy to install a solar array on a 7 ½ acre site near the schools. New Energy Equity received a $564,000 grant through NYSERDA’s NY-Sun initiative for planning and design of the district’s array. Avon CSD signed a power purchase agreement (PPA) with WGL under which it pays no upfront costs for the array’s construction, but will pay for the energy it produces. Since the project was completed before NYS’s K-12 solarprogram, under the PPA the school board leases the land, WGL owns and maintains the project, and the school purchases the power at a fixed rate.

Before the array was finished being constructed, which took about a year, Avon was paying about 10 cents per kilowatt hour to the local utility, Niagara-Mohawk (owned by National Grid), for 1.4 to 1.5 million kWh of electricity it used each year. Now it pays a little over 9 cents per kWh for about 1.9 million kWh that the array of over 10,000 panels produces each year. This price will increase at a fixed rate annually over the 25 year period of the power purchase agreement.

Buying more electricity than the district currently consumes, though at a lower price per kWh, and banking the credits actually costs slightly more initially, but this will allow Avon room to growin its energy use in the future, save more than $1 million over the life of the project, and explore

1 https://geneseesun.com/avon-central-cuts-ribbon-on-nys-largest-school-solar-field/

2 https://www.newenergyequity.com/project/avon-school-district/

the possibility of selling the excess credits it accrues to nearby municipalities. Knowing for the next 25 years what the district will pay per Kwh, it can better predict its energy costs for a given school year. With stability in pricing, Dr. Johnson says, “we no longer have to budget $300,000, worrying there’s going to be a really tough winter or a spike in electricity costs or anything like that.”3

The two small pilot solar projects have produced 285 megawatt hours of electricity since installation, the carbon dioxide equivalent of displacing 22,151 gallons of gas or planting 5,000 trees. The larger array has produced more than 3,083 MWh of electricity since it came online in spring of 2016, the CO2 equivalent of displacing 236,979 barrels of oil or planting over 45,000 trees. Retired Avon Supervisor Bruce Amey says that one of the goals of having the array was to have students understand the huge tonnage of CO2 that will NOT be put into the atmosphere from using renewable energy.4 Harvesting power from the sun through this array offsets 930 metric tons of greenhouse gases each year, the equivalent of taking 200 cars off the road.

The Avon School Board primarily led the effort to establish the array, which involved the district having to work through the normal town and state permitting processes, including having an environmental impact statement. Some local residents did raise concerns over the aesthetics of the panels and the district considered placing ferns or trees to block them from view. Now two years after the project was built there have been no aesthetic complaints.

One crisis occurred when the time came to contact National Grid to arrange the connection fromthe array to the power grid. National Grid’s initial quote was over $1 million, which would have threatened the feasibility of the project, but New Energy Equity managed to get the interconnection fee reduced to under $200,000 by locating the project near already existing transmission lines.

Students see the array every day on their way to and from school. They and their teachers can log into a website to get realtime information on current and total power generated by the panels, making this a useful educational tool in the classroom that also provides a glimpse into a field they may decide to work in someday. In addition to any financial savings from the project,Avon Central School District has a valuable asset in its solar field, as the panels are a visible symbol of how it leads by example in teaching environmental values and that each person can make choices to live a more sustainable life.

For more information on these projects, contact Dr. Johnson at ajohnson@avoncsd.org.

Photos below taken by a nearby resident, used with permission.

3 http://www.thelcn.com/lcn01/avon-centrals-solar-array-is-energy-educational-asset-20160729

4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TWET7E5Rf0Y&feature=youtu.be

Avon Central School District solar field (Tania Giorgis)

Avon Central School District solar field (Tania Giorgis)

Avon Central School District solar field (Tania Giorgis)

Avon Central School District solar field (Tania Giorgis)