Hi, I’m Royce.

I am currently working on a school project regarding why my school doesn’t use solar panels. I started this project at the start of Term 3 and I started this project, as part of Innovat[ED].

However, in order to figure out this mystery, I had to first present some questions to help me work it out. Such as, how workout how much surface area the school has on its roofs to spare, how much the school can afford, how much electricity the solar panels can produce, how much electricity the school uses and how much money the solar panels cost.

Next, I started investigating, and I realised that before I can gather the information from the school, I would have to first workout the problems I can find out myself. So I first decided to work out what the surface area of the roofs are. However, I realised that I should only calculate the North facing roofs, as they will receive the most sunlight. Also, it is not realistic to place solar panels everywhere, as you will most likely generate too much energy.

Then, i have to work out how many solar panels can fit on the roofs, and how much electricity they can generate. I first looked up the size of each panel, when i realised i can just see how many panels can fit on a 20m^2 roof and multiply it by the quotient of the roof area, by 20m^2. And since each panel can geneeate about 1KwH of power each day, so it was about 5600KwH per day.

I then made an appointment with Mr Gale, in order to better understand the schools electricity usage and financial situation. Mr Gale had prepared a spreadsheet of the electricity consumed and the amount of money used on it for every year, with this, i was able to determine how much electricity is needed each day and how much it would cost each day, so  by combining the two information’s together, i was able to find that solar panels will indeed help save money. So why doesn’t the school use solar panels?