Fourmies public building Ecole Aragon

Goal

Rooftop PV on public buildings, like a school, with innovative funding.

Description

Solar panels have been installed on the rooftop of a primary school which will serve the purpose of creating awareness for the students and their parents to increase the uptake of solar energy.

The installation with the installed capacity of 98kWp is a typical installation with direct injection into the grid.

This project has been finances at 60% by the European Union through the 2 Seas SOLARISE program. The project has received public participation in the financing through a €48.000 crowdlending campaign, one of the first in the region.

The decision for roof-top installations has been taken to maximize the production and reduce the cost of installations.

The pilot site is situated on the 2 rooftops of a recently rehabilitated primary school “Ecole ARAGON & Mendès France”. The electricity from this installation is directly sold to an energy producer to be further delivered to citizens as renewable energy.

Key figures

Location: Fourmies (FR)

Size: 98 kWp

Energy production per year: 92,3 MWh

Energy use: Direct sales to the energy supplier

Technology: Monocrystalline solar photovoltaic cells with central inverters

Current status

The pilot site was built in September 2020 and is operational from the 27th of January 2021; monitoring is available since May 2021..

The pilot site has already produced 13,72MWh from its inception till 27 april 2021.

Interested to see the actual production? Have a look here.

Attention points / lessons learned

The involvement of citizens from the beginning on created confidence and support. The approach of co-creation allowed to also create awareness in the community about the potential of renewable energy.

This foundation resulted in 2 successful crowd-lending campaigns with enthusiastic participation by 150 citizens.

The pilot project had a great impact on the community, private actors and social landlords. They have confirmed that there is a big solar potential if we think about collective and individual roofs as well as the facades of private buildings.

Fourmies has also shared its experience with other cities of Haut-de-France through a conference dedicate to collective self-consumption.

Useful link

Fourmies has created a video to show you the 3 PV pilot sites and describe the system of collective self-consumption and the crowdlending approach.