Solar Panel Bids for Manalapan-Englishtown Schools to be Analyzed

LAN Associates presented the Manalapan-Englishtown Board of Education with a new plan to move forward in bringing solar energy to the district at the weekly meeting on Tuesday, Aug. 16. Two representatives of the firm explained what approach they would take as hired consultants on the project. 

Kenneth Karle, the President of LAN Associates, and Angel Cabello, the Director of Construction Administration at LAN Associates and a professional engineer, spoke to the board about taking the next step in the bid process for the solar panels. 

LAN Associates is an engineering, planning, architecture and surveying company founded in 1965. LAN Associates has worked with the Manalapan-Englishtown Board of Education in the past. 

Karle said that LAN Associates tends to “take a little more shepherding approach where we prepare a big package and expose it to bidding on the market.” Karle further added that the market is “very competitive right now”. 

Karle and Cabello have not yet evaluated the school roofs, which is the next step. The firm needs to determine which roofs are viable for receiving solar panels. 

Cabello explained that the firm is creating a performance-based specification. After analyzing the roofs, they will determine which roofs or what portions of the roof are usable (generally 30 to 40 percent), and then a request for proposal will be created. The request for proposal (RFP) explains what the firm thinks can be done, according to Cabello.  

The RFP will be released to bid and then various solar panel companies will respond with a proposal explaining what the company could do with their vendors and special financing, Cabello said. 

Since the district is not outputting money for the solar panels, the bid process is more about what benefits the companies can provide the district, Karle said. These variations range from life expectancy of the panels to cost per kilowatt hour. 

“We (LAN Associates) help you evaluate those bids because they often have little intricacies and little hidden language in them which sometimes make them difficult to understand,” Karle said. 

Karle went on to explain that some companies may include inflation rates, escalation clauses, so even though the bid may be the lowest it may not be the cheapest when evaluated over a 15-year life span. 

“When we do get the bids we do have to analyze them because they are rarely directly apples and apples comparisons,” Karle said. 

Cabello said that not only will LAN Associates help evaluate the proposals, but they will work with the district’s legal counsel and evaluate the purchase agreement and roof lease to verify that the district is getting what they want. 

LAN Associates will also sit down with the company and negotiate terms of the contract and oversee the installation. At that point, the contractor would handle the fees and, ideally, reimburse the district for any upfront fees that LAN Associates charges, according to Karle. 

Superintendent John J. Marciante Jr. invited LAN Associates to look at the project and create an RFP that would give the district the best chance of getting a bid, which means that ground mounting and canopy mounting had to be removed from the RFP because many contractors are not willing to pay for the increased cost. 

“At one time we were looking at [canopy mounts and ground mounts] to maximize the total mega-watts that we were going to use to get it to a level that would pay for roofing,” Marciante said. “Since we don’t need to pay for roofing since we are going to do the roofing separate from this, what we really want to do is get the best deal and by not including [the mounts].”

Board member Joseph DePasquale said that including a canopy mount would create more energy and it would be another thing the district would not have to pay for, and he would like to see it in the request for proposal. 

Canopy mounts are the least cost effective, according to Cabello, which is why many companies do not want to do it. Cabello and Karle said that they could put the canopy mount in the RFP as an alternate, but they would never force a company to do it because it is a deterrent.   

Board President Stipelman commented that the reason the district was looking at solar panels on the rooftops of the schools was because the roofs were in poor condition and the district did not have the money to replace them. Initially, the proposal included replacing the roofs because it was a way to get grant money to fund the “green” project. 

Since the roofs are being replaced through allocated funds this summer at , , and the solar panel project would most likely only be created on those three roofs, the superintendent said. However, the LAN Associates have not yet evaluated the roofs.