Students Enlightened by Solar Power Systems in ESF Schools

Solar Systems Installed in Eight ESF Schools

The English Schools Foundation (ESF) – the largest English-medium international school organisation in Hong Kong with 22 schools, 1 learning centre and more than 18,000 students – has found a way to support green energy and educate students about energy conservation by introducing solar power systems to its campuses.

A total of over 1,400 solar panels have been installed with a generation capacity of approximately 455 kW across eight ESF campuses by CLPe Solutions in 2020-2021. As one of the largest solar projects in the primary and secondary school sectors in Hong Kong, the green energy generated by the solar panel systems over the course of a year will be enough to meet the annual electricity needs of around 110 four-person households in Hong Kong and reduce almost 280 tonnes of carbon emission.

CLPe Solutions provided a one-stop solar solution to ESF from system design to construction, operations and maintenance. Under the Feed-in Tariff (‘FiT’) scheme of the two power companies in Hong Kong, the solar systems connected to the grid will generate FiT income for ESF.

It also provides ESF with a renewable energy management platform – a cloud-based service that gathers real-time information from the solar systems and allows ESF to continually monitor their performance. The data is collected from on-site inverters and transmitted to the cloud for analysis, allowing school administrators to retrieve information at any time through a customised digital display or even on mobile devices.

Value Created for the Customer

• Supporting Green Power

  CLPe Solutions offers one-stop services for the solar power systems at ESF schools, including feasibility studies, system design, shading analysis, supply, construction, testing and commissioning, operations and maintenance, and even FiT applications. By using solar energy to generate electricity, ESF is able to achieve its environmental and energy efficiency goals.

• Easy Management of Solar Systems

  The renewable energy management platform allows ESF to manage its solar systems anytime and from anywhere. System performance can be assessed by the analysis of the measured inverter data through the management platform so that high reliability of the solar system can be maintained based on timely O&M and fault.

• Educating Students about Renewable Energy

  The customised ESF renewable energy management platform provides real-time performance monitoring of the system, including comparisons with activities that lead to carbon emissions such as flying and driving to indicate the equivalent carbon dioxide reduction as well as the energy conservation achieved by the systems. These features facilitate meaningful lessons for students to easily understand the importance of renewable energy and make the platform a highly effective tool to increase young people’s green energy awareness.