Education, Feb 21, 2019
As Corvallis School District Superintendent Ryan Noss finished speaking at a Wednesday afternoon ceremony celebrating the installation of a new rooftop solar array at Corvallis High School, he remarked that the weather would be nice enough for attendees to go outside and look at the array.
“Mother Nature is on our side,” he said.
“‘Mother Nature is on our side.’ That should be on a bumper sticker,” said Julie Williams, a CHS teacher and adviser for the school’s Green Club, following Noss’ comment. She added that the world would be in better shape if more people realized that and tried to act on it through things like building more solar arrays.
At the event, billed as a “Solarbration,” Williams said her students in the Green Club had been working to have the 117-kilowatt array installed since 2007. “12 years too long,” she said.
Students in the Green Club helped raise some of the nearly $266,000 cost of installation. Other funds for the array came from the Energy Trust of Oregon, the Oregon Clean Power Cooperative and Benton Electric, Inc., which installed the array in September and owns the array.