Think Progress/Climate has the good news. Solar installations on school roofs is a no-brainer if there ever was one.
According to a new report by the Energy Department and the Solar Foundation — the research arm of the Solar Energy Industries Association, a solar trade organization — if schools took advantage of their full potential for solar, they would add 5.4 gigawatts to the country’s solar capacity. That’s just over a third of the 16 gigawatts of total capacity America currently boasts. That would be enough to power roughly one million homes, and a carbon emissions reduction equivalent to taking around one million passenger vehicles off the road.
Check out the
interactive map of the nation’s schools from the study, which allows you to identify which school buildings would be the best candidates for solar.
There are currently 125,000 K-12 schools in the country, and 3,727 of them already have solar systems installed. More than 3,000 of those were installed in the last six years — an indication of solar’s swift rise in the United States. After crunching the numbers, the report determined that another 40,000 to 72,000 could also install a system cost-effectively.
Furthermore, the electricity generated by the 3,727 school solar systems already in place adds up to $77.8 million in utility bills per year, freeing up enough money to pay 2,200 new teachers a starting annual salary of $35,672. According to the analysis, 450 individual school districts who currently lack solar could save themselves $1,000,000 each over a 30-year period by installing a solar system.
The advantages of solar installations on US public schools would be enormous; trickle down benefits indeed.