Many school roofs are home to solar installations that have been paid for by energy suppliers, foundations, the federal government or the federal states. In Berlin alone, for example, there were a total of 100 school roofs equipped with such systems. However, these included many school facilities that were not being used for educational purposes. In some cases there were structural defects, in others there was a lack of educational concepts or simply nobody felt responsible for the system. The aim of the "Solarsupport" project was to remedy this situation. To achieve this, ten exemplary systems were optimised for educational purposes, a further training event was designed, a competition was announced and a best practice brochure was written. The project was funded by the Federal Ministry for the Environment and ran until May 2009.

Over the past ten years up to 2007, many energy suppliers had provided numerous schools with photovoltaic systems free of charge. A number of systems were also financed with state and federal funds or by foundations. In Berlin alone, for example, there were a total of 100 such schools. These systems generally had an output of 1 kWp and fed their electricity directly into the school grid without the schools receiving feed-in tariffs.

Such installations primarily have an educational function. They should improve the acceptance of renewable energies (RE) among children and young people. The actual energy generated by these systems was of secondary importance. The expected approx. 700 kWh of electrical energy per year are in the per mille, at most in the per cent range of consumption and were hardly noticeable statistically as electricity savings at the respective facilities.

In the experience of the project partners from other research projects, most schools and youth centres have so far been overwhelmed by the intended function of the systems - their communicative use. There were also no materials available for the schools and no training courses were offered on how to handle the systems and how they could be integrated into lessons or solar working groups in the respective institution.

This problem was often compounded by technical difficulties. For example, reading out the data (output, work, etc.) caused problems for many systems, there were often no displays in the foyer, for example, to provide information about power generation, the system itself was located on the roof where it was difficult to see, and so on. As no feed-in tariff was paid, there was also no other information about the functionality of the systems, meaning that there were many schools where nobody knew whether their own PV system was still functioning at all.

The aim of the project was to remedy this situation and to ensure that children's and youth facilities were able to use their solar installations to increase acceptance of RE. The following work packages were processed for this purpose:

Analysis of the current situation and obstacles in the model regions
Firstly, research was carried out into the distribution of school facilities, support programmes, further training opportunities for teachers and evaluation software for school facilities. In a second step, an explorative survey of teachers was conducted regarding the use of systems, the obstacles (technical, structural, pedagogical, organisational) and the pedagogical integration of the systems. The results were summarised and discussed in a workshop entitled "Sleeping solar systems in schools and youth leisure centres - exploiting the potential!".

Development of good practice
From the previously researched systems, 10 systems were selected that were optimised in terms of their use. The aim was to show that a "dormant solar system" could be transformed into a usable system with little effort. This optimisation was combined with the development and testing of teaching units to train teachers in the pedagogical use of the system. The examples researched were documented in a good practice brochure.

Dissemination of good practice and competition
Good practice was disseminated through a campaign involving headteachers' conferences and school advisory councils, state educational institutes, members of the BV SEB and energy supply companies, as well as through articles in trade journals, teachers' magazines and specialised solar literature. A competition for the best educational use of school solar systems was also organised.

Final presentation as part of a workshop
The project results, in particular the obstacles, the optimisation paths and the criteria and case studies for good practice, were presented at a final workshop. The winners of the competition were also presented and honoured.