The Solar Panel Catastrophe

Solar panels are not cheap. They take a while to pay off and require a lot of up front money. Those are just some of the things we learned when trying to get solar panels for the house.

We were requesting money from a few different sources, but our school would have been one of the main providers. If you are a Registered Student Organization (RSO) you can apply for funds from the Student Organization Resource Fee (SORF). We decided to apply for the money and figured we had a pretty good chance of getting the money. Boy were we wrong. It was pretty much a unanimous no for the SORF Board.

We were asking for $50,000 and obviously that is a lot, but the amount was within the rules. The maximum amount of money that and group can request is 10% of the Board's annual budget, which comes out to about $500,000 in total. Clearly it was a lofty request, but we are very serious about being green. Not to mention the publicity this system would get. A frat house being environmentally friendly?

The catastrophe starts more or less as soon as we walk into the room to present our request (we had previously submitted the main requests, but groups asking for large amounts of money are expected to make a short presentation). People were obviously skeptical and didn't really care. We got our 3 mins to give our speech and got cut off at 3:00 exactly.

In the next part the board asks you some questions. Of course we field the question we least wanted to hear: "what will you do with the money saved from the solar panels?" This is a bad question because the Board has a rule that says they will not fund anything that makes the group requesting it any money. Our system would have saved us about $900-$1000. They see that as making money (which it is), but we had good plans for it. The money saved (not made) would have been put back into educating the community about being sustainable and what everyone could do to help and anything left over was going to go back into making our house more green. So that sucked.

When we were answering the question we didn't want to get we got cut off by some ass in the back who said "they already had their three minutes." There are things I would have loved to have said, but when asking for this kind of money you need to be careful.

We got a full "zero funding" from the Board. The reason they gave was that they do not provide equipment for housing. That is one of the rules that the Board is supposed to take into account, but we were under the impression they would overlook it. Why didn't they overlook it? Not sure, but they really didn't seem to take us seriously and obviously at least one kid didn't want to be there.

We are still looking for funding (if you know of any sources let us know) and hope to complete the project eventually. We will move on to more reasonable projects in the near future.

Next article: Upcoming Projects