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American high school student touts renewables as alternative to district austerity measures

Vatsal Gandhi was troubled. A student at Eastern Regional High School in Voorhees, New Jersey in the US, over the course of his school years, the seventeen year old had seen first hand how a struggling economy was directly affecting public education in America.
American high school student touts renewables as alternative to district austerity measures

As the global financial crisis of 2008 and 2009 proved stubbornly resistant to recovery, the school district had pulled back on student programs and had also decided to lay off 34 teachers.

“Surely, there must be some alternative,” Gandhi remembers thinking to himself as his walked between classes.

And then it came to him: The lights of his high school burned all day long.

“I had been thinking about the situation a lot, and what I recognized was that anytime I went to the school building the lights were on, so I thought that’s where some pretty significant cost savings might be found, plus I already had some interest in renewable energy,” he told Renewable Energy Magazine.

“It was really just a matter of putting those two things together,” he added.

With the end of the 2010-2011 school-year fast approaching, Gandhi went to his principal, explained what he’d been thinking and said that he was going to o an energy analysis of the high school over the summer.

With the principal’s help, he came up with a ballpark figure for the building’s annual energy costs, and then, with a few calculations, homed in on a fairly exact calculation of the school’s yearly grid electricity expenditures: $714,127.

“As summer break got under way, I spent about five hours a day, every day, reading up on where we currently got our energy form and how it was delivered to the school, and also read up on a wide variety of renewable energy technologies,” he said.

As Vatsal is the son of an advanced systems manager with First Solar, it might seem natural that he’d immediately seized upon solar power, but he said it wasn’t that way at all.

“I wanted to find the most savings that I could,” he said. “So I let my research guide me. I didn’t want to come to an arbitrary conclusion, and when I finally concluded for myself that solar was the best solution, I asked my Dad to get me some information on solar panels.”

What followed was a month of writing, editing and revising, that sharpened Gandhi’s thesis and his calculations.

“What I found is that with the use of renewable green solar energy systems, the electricity bill would be reduced to $69,900, saving the school $644,220 annually, while also benefitting the environment,” he said.

Since he finished the paper, Gandhi’s work has been reviewed by several high school and university science professors, and others, to universal applause.

At the start of his senior year, this past September, he also gave it to the district superintendent and the head of the school’s science department. While the paper hasn’t resulted in the adoption of renewable energy at Eastern Regional High School, Gandhi was philosophical rather than disappointed.

“It seems to me that no one wants to be the first to do it, and that people are put off by what they see as high upfront costs,” he said. “However, what I tried to do with this paper is show that if you break the cost solar power down over the life of the solar panels, the ultimate cost is minimal compared to power from traditional sources.

“I guess you can say that my main message is, before you cut teachers and staff that are important to students, you ought to look at alternatives in areas that you might me taking for granted during the decision-making process – light the cost of keeping lights on all the time,” Gandhi continued.

“The electric bill for Eastern Regional High School was clearly excessive and the efficiencies of renewable energy could have made a huge difference,” he added. “These teachers didn’t have to be laid off. We could have done something about it.”

Despite his intensive work on his renewable energy paper, Gandhi said his goal is to go into medical research.

“I enjoyed learning about renewable energy, but medicine is something I’ve been set on for several years,” Gandhi said. “My grandmother passed away about eight years ago from a rare, but preventable bacterial disease, and ultimately, the only reason she died when she did was because she was still in India and didn’t have access to treatment.

“That’s why I want to pursue medicine. Hopefully, when I become a doctor I’ll be able to go to third-world countries and treat people for preventable diseases,” he said.

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