During the past summer I couldn’t help noticing that a large portion of the roof on High School South was being replaced. That’s the school on Clarksville Road between Route 571 and Penn Lyle Road, in case you didn’t know. Since I go by that site nearly every day for some reason, I can’t help noticing things like that. Besides that, two of my children graduated from it, so it’s hard to drive by it and not even look at it.
Back when the school was built in the 1970s, the portion that is still closest to Clarksville Road was part of the original building and it had what was called a shed-style roof. That is a sloping roof that covers a large portion of the building with slope all in one direction. In this case each sloping portion was broken up into sections separated by what are called standing seams. This design was considered very efficient at draining water from the roof since there were no flat areas.
The metal used was called terne, a steel sheet coated with an alloy of lead and tin. In our case it was then painted a tan color. Such a roof is supposed to last for a very long time. In our case, I recall that it had to be repainted after a few years. But then it was decided to replace part of the terne metal itself not long after that.
That project caused a bit of trouble. Soon after the replacement roof underlayment of plywood was installed over the steel rafters we had a rain storm, and all the new plywood got soaking wet. Some of us warned that the contractor should wait for the plywood to dry before installing the metal over it. But the contractor didn’t get the message — or did and didn’t think it mattered — and installed the metal over the wet wood.
It took a year or two, but, as predicted, the roof started to leak as some of the metal began to rust because of its constant exposure to the wet wood under it. It leaked a lot right over some of the busiest areas in the school, and some areas had to be temporarily shut down. The contractor denied any fault, but when the roof was inspected from underneath, there was no doubt that the wet plywood was to blame. The contractor was liable for providing another new roof where the wet one had failed.
That job was done with provision for keeping the plywood deck dry. The resulting roof lasted a long time. And even though it had been maintained by painting a couple of times over the years, its time for replacement finally came this summer. I should also mention that as additions were built to the school, other sections of the roof were replaced.
With that roof story in my background it may be understandable that I kept watching while the new one was being installed this summer. Once, I even stopped by and went over for a close look at what was being done. It looked like they were installing galvanized sheet steel over the deck instead of the terne metal of many years ago, but the standing seams were still there. However, the new roof has been covered with a material I do not recognize. I am confident it will last at least a long as the terne did.
While I was looking at the new job, I noticed one area of the roof that was covered with solar power panels. That got me wondering to what extent solar panels are used as a supplemental power source in our schools. Thanks to Assistant Superintendent Larry Shanok I was informed that High School South has a solar generating capacity of 170 kilowatts. In addition, High School North has a 50 kilowatt system.
On learning of these solar panel systems, I was reminded that some years ago I was told about the system of geothermal energy use that had been installed at the Grover Middle School. That system taps into water deep in the ground where in the summer it is cooler than the water at ground level, so that its use in air conditioning requires less energy for cooling building spaces. In the winter the same water is warmer than that which has been exposed to the ground level temperature in a water main and thus takes less energy to heat. Year round, using geothermal source water saves energy.
Recently the new addition to the Village Elementary School has also had a geothermal system installed. This is the new headquarters of the WW-P schools central office. The staff recently moved there from the building in Dutch Neck that had once been the municipal office complex and, before that, the West Windsor Public Library.
Speaking of alternate energy sources — that is sources other than fossil fuels — it is worth mentioning that the West Windsor-Plainsboro area contains a high concentration of solar energy generation facilities. One of the largest is one that few people have ever seen, but for the past four years it is right here to the south of Washington Road and east of Lake Carnegie on the land owned by Princeton University.
Because of the flat area it occupies, the 25-acre installation is not visible at ground level from the road. This solar collector field supplies 5.3 megawatts to the university through its 16,500 photovoltaic panels. This is a substantial fraction of the university’s total use of electricity.
Another solar panel installation in West Windsor associated with an educational institution is that off South Post Road on the campus of Mercer County Community College. This consists of 45 acres of solar panels on the 67-acre area of the campus in West Windsor. Because of the proximity of a portion of the panels to nearby residences, there have been many complaints about their appearance. But it appears that the installation has proceeded and is here to stay.
There are many other solar panel installations in this area, but those appear to be the most significant. Of course there are also many individual houses where solar panels have been installed by the owner. Over all, New Jersey is the second largest state in the entire country in the consumption of solar power. Only California exceeds it. The next three states are Arizona, Colorado, and New Mexico. When it comes to other sources of power in New Jersey, the leader is natural gas, followed by nuclear. Solar power is a tiny fraction of the total.
In one of the leading states in the use of solar power it is encouraging that our local schools are contributing to the saving of fossil fuels to generate electricity. Now, with all the open land owned by Howard Hughes, it would seem logical that power generation with solar cell panels is yet another of the many possible money-making ways to develop the area without building energy-consuming buildings.
