Greens Farms Academy is a PreK-12, coed school in Westport, CT

Seeing Sustainability

Seeing Sustainability

By Justin Silver '20

In the first semester of Sustainability Seminar, each student is responsible for a short unit of their choosing. This unit covers four days of class. On the first day, we discuss a reading to prepare us for the unit ahead. On the second day, we plan for a class project which we execute on the third day and take time to reflect on the fourth day. Each student is responsible for planning out the unit, picking a project, leading discussions, and writing a blog about the experience. This is the blog from our fourth student-led unit on Infrastructure by Justin Silver.

A few weeks ago, I was in charge of running the sustainability class and teaching about infrastructure. This was a four-day endeavor that included discussing green buildings and renewable energy, looking into the inner workings of where GFA gets its own energy from, doing some “Beautiful Minds”-esque math, and going around the school trying to see ways in which the school is a green building.

We spent our first day having an in-depth discussion of what factors go into different structures physically and energy-wise. The two ideas go hand in hand, so if a structure is able to hold in heat better, for example, than less energy will be needed to artificially heat the structure. This same idea goes for other factors such as lighting or cooling, which is why it is important to design a building that best takes advantage of the terrain around it as well as its location. When a building takes as much advantage of its surroundings as possible, it can be referred to as being a “green building” since it requires less outside energy.

With that in mind, though, it’s very difficult (though not impossible!) in this day and age to have a building that doesn’t use any energy, so the best solution to this is for the energy being used to be as environmentally friendly and sustainable as possible. This is where renewable energy comes into play, as our class discussed different methods such as wind and solar, and the advantages/ disadvantages of each. 

GFA currently uses solar panels to provide some of the school’s energy, so we thought that it would be interesting to get a closer look as to just how much of an impact they are having. So on day two of our discussions, we brought in Mr. Champagne to come in and walk us through a few spreadsheets that documented some of the different, more complex, factors that apply to our solar energy input. To make complicated data a bit simpler, the school’s total energy input that comes from solar energy is approximately 7% and this has to do with how much energy the school uses in total as well as how much our solar panels are able to collect. 

After hearing about this, we thought it would be cool to try and calculate just how many panels we would need for the entire school to be able to run on nothing but solar energy, assuming that all of the pre-existing conditions were to stay the same. So on day three, we decided to attempt just that. To start off, we found an image of the school on google maps and counted all of the panels on the roof of our school, which ended up being 326 on the main building, and 33 on the garage.

Now this has the caveat that we need space to put these panels. One of the places in particular is the Squash courts roof. Now the way that figured out how many panels could fit on the roof was somewhat crazy. Since we only had so much time, we had to improvise. So we took a sticky note, folded it so that it was approximately the same size as one solar panel on the model we were using, and put that on the squash court roof. As one student put it:

“I particularly enjoyed the lesson where we looked at the solar energy produced at our school. We then used google earth combined with sticky notes to find the number of solar panels that could fit on the squash court roof.” 

We ended up with a number that says that about 134 panels can fit on the roof! It still didn't give us the number we needed to provide the whole school with solar but having more panels would help us increase that 7% number and potentially power the squash building. More on that in the next blog by my classmate Marcus Ng.

For the final day, I had the class look at their own houses and the ways in which their homes are green buildings, and the ways in which their homes could be greener. I think it’s important to take the information we learn in school and apply it to our own lives, so this was a great way to get people thinking outside of the classroom. As one of our classmates said: 

“I felt like Justin’s assignment to go home and look at your house for sustainable and unsustainable practices was very effective because it allowed me to think about my own practices that can be improved.  It was also effective because we were reading about the different ways in the textbook and seeing if my house did any of them.  It also got me thinking about how my house can improve using the techniques we were reading about.”

After this, we walked through the school and did what we did in our houses at the school. We even talked to some people and tried to get them to change their ways, such as turning lights off in areas that didn’t need them to be turned on at that time. 

I’d recommend that you take a look at your own house. Try and see if there are any features about it that make it so you don’t need to use as much electricity or ways in which you could improve upon the current design of your house. Do some research on renewable energy and look up some more general ways to decrease your energy output. A little can go a long way, and everyone doing their part can really help us out!

 

Want to know more about our first three units please read the blogs here.

https://www.gfacademy.org/about/gfa-blog/single-post-gfa-blog/~board/sustainability-2019/post/sound-sustainability 

https://www.gfacademy.org/about/gfa-blog/single-post-gfa-blog/~board/sustainability-2019/post/sound-sustainability-water-edition 

https://www.gfacademy.org/about/gfa-blog/single-post-gfa-blog/~board/sustainability-2019/post/planting-the-seed