School (Flash photo 90/ Avshalom Sassooni)
The residents of the small, peaceful town of Wilbraham in the state of Massachusetts have been complaining for a year and a half about a strange problem: they suspect that their tax dollars are being wasted on exorbitant electricity bills for Minchog Regional High School, because the lights are on non-stop, 24/7. including vacations.
In a conversation with CNBC News, Aron Osborne, assistant superintendent of finances at the district educational director of the towns of Hampden-Wilbraham, admitted that “we are very aware that this is costing the taxpayers a significant amount of money, and we are doing everything in our power to solve the problem.” He added that “I would say that the bottom line is an impact of thousands of dollars every month on average, but not tens of thousands.”
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It’s not that the school enjoys wasting electricity. On the contrary: during the construction of the building, in 2012, they specifically hired a company to install a smart and “green” lighting system, which was based on a combination of economical fluorescent and LED bulbs with control software that turns them on, off, and dims as needed, in order to save on their electricity consumption.
Until the summer of 2021 it worked without problems – except then, according to the educational director, a software glitch occurred that caused the system to stop working. An internal mechanism, designed to ensure that in such a case the students would not be left without light, switched all 7,000 lamps in the building to maximum power, and from then until today no way has been found to turn them off.
About a year ago, the problem was revealed when Lily Degrande, a student at the school, wrote an article in the school newspaper, “Amud Ha’anan”, in which she said that teachers complain about not being able to dim the lighting to show movies in the classrooms, for example. She even said that it got to the point where they simply took light bulbs out of their sockets to darken the classrooms or just save electricity. In a letter written by the mayors last summer, they severely criticized the educational director, according to which “the presentation he presents is one of extravagance, at a time when many families in the communities served by the district are struggling with their own energy costs.”
Now, the district and the Reflex Lighting company, which the company that installed the system became (after many iterations) part of, are revealing that next month the control components on the system will be replaced, so that the lights will turn on again, dim – and especially turn off.
The reason for the amount of time it took is that the school first tried to contact the company that installed the system – but it no longer exists. They discovered that she went through several incarnations, until they reached Reflex, which was the last incarnation. There was no one there who knew the system, and it took weeks to find someone willing to explain what the problem was. So the school asked the company for a price quote for its replacement – and they didn’t like the answer: 1.2 million dollars. They turned to other consultants to check the possibility of installing switches or fixing the software, and after all the options were found to be inapplicable, they returned to Reflex Lighting, and asked to replace not the entire system, but only the control components. They came up with an offer that the school could afford and ordered parts from China – but the delivery of these was repeatedly delayed, and only in October did the last components arrive. Now, the new system will be installed at the school, which is the only high school in the district with almost half a million residents and serves about 1,200 students on an area of 23,000 square meters – “And (this time) there will be a manual bypass switch, so that it doesn’t happen again,” said Osborne .
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