e-Edition
Sign up for email newsletters
to submit an obituary
Please email obits@citizensvoice.com or call 570-230-4917. Please include your name, mailing address, and phone number along with the copy and photo.
Sign up for email newsletters
e-Edition
TRENDING:
HANOVER TWP. — A new energy project is coming on the horizon for the Hawkeyes.
The Hanover Area Board of Education is scheduled to vote Tuesday on a project to install solar panels on the roof of Hanover Area Junior-Senior High School. Hundreds of thousands of dollars of state and federal subsidies will go toward supporting the project as the district seeks to obtain cost-savings with clean energy.
Business Manager Keith Glynn discussed the solar project with the school board at its Buildings & Ground Committee meeting May 26. In a presentation he delivered over the phone, Glynn told the school board that the significant government subsidies made the project feasible, but stressed it was unknown exactly what cost savings the project would deliver.
“I think there’s some long-run benefits and there’s some long-run uncertainty,” Glynn said.
If the project is approved, the school board would be contracting the firm Spotts Brothers to install the solar panels at a price of $1.32 million.
To offset this cost, Glynn said the district is receiving $500,000 in federal subsidies to help fund the project. Those subsidies expire the first week of July, with Glynn telling school board members that they must approve the project at its June meeting to make use of them. (While Glynn did not mention the specific federal subsidies in question, the One Big Beautiful Bill legislation President Donald Trump signed into law July 4, 2025 moves up deadlines related to some federal clean-energy inventive programs up to this July 4.)
Further subsidizing the project is a $400,000 grant from the Solar for Schools program, which the state Department of Community & Economic Development awarded Hanover Area last year. The funding is part of $22.6 million of Solar for Schools grants the department disbursed to school districts statewide in 2025. These grants were issued pursuant to the Solar for Schools Act, which passed in a near party-line vote in the state House and a bipartisan vote in the Senate in July 2024.
These government incentives leave between $300,000 and $400,000 in residual, upfront expenses the school district will have to pay for itself, Glynn said.
“It’s very front heavy,” Glynn said of the project’s costs.
Glynn said the solar panels would cover the entire roof of the high school except the area over the cafeteria and gymnasium. While he said he believed the high school roof could support the panels, Glynn recommended that the district order a roof inspection before installation to estimate its lifespan. The solar panels themselves would have a long lifespan, citing research that indicated the panels retained 80% of their energy capacity even 30 years after installation (though Glynn said data was scarce on their viability after 40 years of installation).
“If you’re looking at potentially 8 years left on your roof, you might want to do your roof before putting these on and take the funding ahead of it,” Glynn said.
There was brief discussion at the May 26 committee meeting about mounting the solar panels to the ground instead of the roof. Glynn told the school board that if it were to opt for ground-mounted panels, it would warrant additional, time-consuming environmental review.
“The hurdles you would have to jump through from the environmental side would become bigger,” Glynn said. “That is one reason most people are opting for a roof mount, because the environmental stuff is a little less hazardous.”
While giving the district heavy upfront costs, Glynn said solar-power technology was sufficiently developed to likely reduce energy costs for the school district in the long-run. He said these savings could be particularly important as data centers drive up energy rates from power off the grid.
“Solar panels are now pretty mature and we know with this market that we’re going to have savings, because the data centers are coming here and that’s chewing up a lot of your electricity capacity,” Glynn said. “That’s definitely a plus there.”
Glynn cautioned, conversely, that the savings the solar panels would generate for the district was only an estimate based off only projected increases in energy costs.
“You have to be aware that they may or may not come true,” Glynn said. “There’s no guarantee.”
The school board’s meeting Tuesday is scheduled for 6 p.m. in the high school auditorium.
Copyright 2026 Wilkes-Barre Citizens' Voice. All rights reserved. The use of any content on this website for the purpose of training artificial intelligence systems, algorithms, machine learning models, text and data mining, or similar use is strictly prohibited without explicit written consent.
