NEW JERSEY—The Lawrenceville School, a secondary boarding school located in Lawrenceville, is meeting up to 90 percent of its annual power needs with the use of 6.1 megawatts of solar panels. The panels, manufactured by SolarWorld, are ground-mounted on 30 acres of farmland owned by the School.
Made up of 24,934 panels and mounted on single-axis trackers, the setup is designed to produce approximately 9,264,000 kilowatt hours of solar electricity each year, which is 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 project was developed by TurtleEnergy of Linden. It was purchased in 2011 by KDC Solar of Bedminster, which completed the development and constructed the project. KDC Solar leased the land for the project from the school and owns and maintains all of the solar equipment. Through a power purchase agreement, the Lawrenceville School will buy electricity produced by the array over the next two decades.
“The School community will have access to a wealth of real-time monitoring information ranging from where the panels are currently positioned, to how much power is being generated, to how much energy a specific campus building is using, and much more,” said Head Master Liz Duffy.
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.