On Friday, December 11th, Seacoast Consulting Engineers (SCE), in partnership with Revolution Energy and Provident Bank, began installation of New Hampshire’s largest solar PV system on the roof of Exeter High School.

Several students assisted with the massive project, which by next spring will be producing up to 110 kilowatts of energy for the school.

The installation is one in a series of projects in the works for SCE and Dover-based Revolution Energy in conjunction with the School Administrative Unit (SAU) 16, a group of Southern New Hampshire public schools. The team will also be installing a new 65 kilowatt microturbine at the Seacoast School of Technology, as well as a state-of-the-art natural gas boiler at the Tuck Learning Center, also in Exeter. Both are slated to be online within the coming weeks.

According to Lee Consavage, engineer and principal with SCE, the system is a win-win for the high school. “Our intent was to provide the school district with options to replace inefficient equipment with better systems at no cost to the schools,” says Consavage. “Basically they will be paying Revolution the equivalent of a monthly heating bill – which will be less than what they were paying before – and after a certain time they will own the system outright, and will then be getting free energy for the remainder of the system’s life.”

This unique financing option is one that could be a model for businesses and municipalities going forward – a model wherein the energy recipient, in this case the Exeter School District, actually gets tangible returns right from the get-go.

“What we’re trying to advance is a new and innovative type of finance structure that allows people to avoid large up-front costs,” says Mike Behrmann, principal at Revolution Energy. “So at day one, you’re starting to save money. That’s really the beauty of this kind of structure; it’s sustainable both environmentally and financially.”

The actual build day may have gone exactly according to plan, but how a key component of the system got to Exeter in time for the Friday installation turned out to be a far more dramatic story. While the roof was built to buttress significant weight – primarily in the form of snow – the engineers never planned on it having to shoulder the burden of nearly 500 solar panels. To mitigate this, the crew needed a special kind of mounting rack. Unfortunately, the closest manufacturer was in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Not wanting to spend in excess of $10,000 to have the racks shipped, Revolution flew Behrmann and this writer out to Albuquerque, where we rented a Penske truck and drove the panels across the country in a three-day sprint to meet the Friday deadline.

Despite an initial scare in picking up the racks, and the constant trials of driving through a rainstorm for more than half of the nearly 2400 mile trek, the equipment made it safely to the Exeter High School parking lot that Wednesday night.

For Behrmann, the trip wasn’t so much a hassle as it was a challenge. “Above all else we knew we had to have all the equipment ready for the Friday raising,” says Behrmann. “If that meant driving across the country, eating at Waffle Houses, drinking twelve gallons of Red Bull and spending thirteen straight hours in a monsoon, we were going to get the equipment to New Hampshire safe and sound.”