Tabiang Primary School

Tabiang Primary School is in Tabiang Village, at the western tip of Rabi Island. It has 117 students from kindergarten to Year 8, taught by 5 teachers, with two teachers' homes at the school.

When we arrived, the school's diesel generator had failed. The school was hiring one for FJ$50 a day and running it for an average of two hours a day, and in the evening when needed so the teachers could get their work done. We expected solar to save about FJ$3,000 a year on fuel and transport, money the school planned to put into computer learning.

The system we installed in February 2018 gave our original pilot project a second life. It reused 12 BP solar panels from the 10-year-old Rabi High School system, our first installation in 2008, with an OutBack FLEXpower ONE inverter and charge controller, SimpliPhi lithium batteries and a new Clenergy ground-mount system. We replaced most of the tube lighting with LED tubes, fully wired the kindergarten and one teacher's home, repaired the wiring in the other, and extensively rewired the school building, whose wiring was particularly dangerous.

New panels were installed in 2024, and the system now has a 3.3 kW array and 15 kWh of battery storage.

The project was funded by multiple sponsors.