It wasn't the government but a boy and his family, committed to reducing our carbon footprint, who have initiated a plan to turn Mona Vale’s Pittwater High School green by the end of 2008.

The plan will see 1,000 solar panels placed on Pittwater High’s roof and will cost in excess of $1.3 million.

When Bill Holland and his family moved to a house in Sydney with a large, north-facing roof, he could no longer ignore his 16-year old son Armand’s request to solar-power his room. The room was a success and inspired Mr Holland to bite the financial bullet and solar-power the entire house.

“I kept saying ‘I will do the whole house, it is just a matter of getting the finance together’. But needless to say, the finance just didn’t come, so at the end of last year I just took the plunge, borrowed the whole amount of money and did the house in a 3.46 kW array of photovoltaic cells. So now the whole house is running on solar. We feed back to the grid anything we don’t need,” explains Mr Holland.

With the house a success, the Holland family began thinking about the bigger picture.

“My wife had a real vision to see all the schools in Australia running on solar and I likewise soon came around to that thought too,” says Mr Holland. “For years, it has been our desire to see all the schools run on solar because schools have a really good opportunity. For a start, you’ve got 12 weeks a year when there is nobody there where they can be producing electricity and channelling back into the grid and earning money.”

Pittwater High’s principle, Ross Cussworth, jumped at the proposal. Having recently set up a student environmental action group, Mr Cussworth is keen to combine the school’s solar project as part of the curriculum.

“I was really excited,” says Cussworth. “We’ve actually developed an environmental statement; it is actually a medium to long-term goal of the school that we have a zero ecological footprint.”

The size of the system required is 165 kW, providing 707 kWh per day and preventing the emission of 755 kg of CO2 per day, or 275 tonnes per year.

“It will mean the school sources very little power from the grid, where most of the power generation is from coal-burning power stations and which generates huge carbon emissions,” Mr Holland says.

“Ultimately, the school plans to generate more power than it needs and will return some power to the grid – further reducing the demands on the nation’s coal burning power stations.”

For the project to be successful, however, Pittwater High must first decrease the amount of energy it uses on a daily basis to approximately 600 kW a day – the amount of energy 1,000 panels can supply.

At the moment, explains Cussworth, the school uses 1,800 kW hours of energy a day, or an average of 1,000 kW hours a day across the whole year. The school is now on a mission to reduce this down to zero through improved energy practices such turning off lights and replacing them with energy efficient ones.

Mr Holland is realistic about the work involved to raise the $1.35 to $1.5 million needed to secure the project’s success. However the project has received a lot of local support with regular meetings between the school, the local community environment group, Climate Action Pittwater and local business taking place to push ahead with their plans.

“We are not going to do raffle tickets for the next 100 years because that’s what it would take to do it. We’ve planned to talk to companies and we’ve had success with that,” he says.

“We say to them, ‘look, you want to offset your carbon emissions? The way you can go about it is maybe not planting trees - believe me we’re all for planting trees, but if you plant a tree, it could be years and years before you see a great difference to the environment.’ Here, if they come on board with a project like this, we can immediately see something happening.”

Mr Holland says he and his family hope to visit a lot of companies in the next few months in an effort to raise awareness, support and funds for the project.

He says many other schools have expressed an interest in following Pittwater High’s lead and that the number is growing daily.

“It is a small step but one that takes us in the right direction,” he says. “We want to lead by example to the rest of Australia. If a school can become energy self-sufficient then so can a hospital, a factory, a multi-storey building, a shopping centre, in fact any power user.”

“We could really be at the forefront of something big – Australia’s first and biggest, community carbon abatement project!”