Westlake Girls High School - North Shore - 2 kw
Located in Takapuna, Auckland, Westlake Girls High School was the pilot school for Schoolgen in 2006.
Through Schoolgen, Westlake Girls High School has had 12 photovoltaic solar panels installed on the roof of the Science block.
Schoolgen consists of a group of passionate students at Westlake who want to make positive changes to the electricity usage and promote the use of renewable energy that does not harm our environment.
Every month, we are given data on the how much solar energy was used at Westlake. Schoolgen girls, in classes and around their peers, act as the monitors, making sure that energy at Westlake Girls High School is not wasted, but used efficiently. We also organised different inter-school competitions in previous years such as the Mean Green House competition where our own students designed their own solar-powered houses. We hosted our own Solar Cooking demonstration at school this year where the girls built their solar cookers using pizza boxes, aluminium foil, glad wrap and black paper. This solar cooker is able to reach temperatures of up to 80 degrees Celsius on sunny days. It was a way to show students that solar panels are not the only way to use the sun for energy and demonstrate how many people rely on to cook their food and boil water, like mountaineers and many families in developing countries. This was a great introduction for Schoolgen programme and a start of our school-wide promotion of using solar energy.
