How is a high quality solar power system helping Palmerston College get better student outcomes?

MaryRose Henry from Palmerston College explains how the school has benefitted from installing solar panels as part of the Department of Education's initiative. As a result, the college is now saving around $3,000 a month, equating to $40,000 a year. These savings can be used for improving the college's facilities and investing in student resources such as new computers, furniture and whiteboards.

<br/>By planning ahead based on the savings, the college can use the money more effectively, helping to create a better learning environment for the students.

I'm MaryRose Henry, I am at Palmerston College. We're actually one college but two campuses. And I help maintain the property maintenance, Finance, and Administration and the student support team. We get a fixed amount for our property maintenance side of things, and then we get a sort of variable amount to help with the students. So we have to actually allocate the fixed amount out to all the different services: your phones, your electricity, your power. Yeah, it's just basically look after the money, monitor it and know on historical information where we need to be putting the money budget against what sort of work. There was a certain amount of money that was allocated to the Department of Education, for solar panels to be installed on various schools within Darwin region. Our college was really lucky to be on the first round to get the solar panels installed, it worked out really well. The government actually have covered everything with the installation.

We realise now that we are getting savings of around $3000 a month, and that will equate to around 40,000 a year. And that money can be used elsewhere, whether it's student related which or improvement of the properties, fixing up the gym, more furniture, replace things like our whiteboards and installing more computers. There's lots of things that can be done with these savings. What I'm looking forward to, is to see what our savings are at the end of this year. Which will help me plan for future years and that money that we are saving, I can now put against something else. So with the savings on this solar, I can use the money far better in areas for our students.