Sunshine School

During the 1973-74 Arab oil embargo, Virginia's Fairfax County school board decided to build an innovative, energy-saving school. Blueprints called for a partly solar-powered building, buried underground so that the heat generated by students, lights and machinery would not escape. When the board took its plan to the federal Energy Research and Development Administration in search of a grant, it got nowhere. Then, a Washington consultant for Saudi Arabia, who had read about the school, asked the board if it would be interested in a "private" investment. It was, and a $700,000 grant from Saudi Arabia's Al Dir Iyyah Institute followed.

The result: Terraset (i.e., "set in the earth"), one of the nation's first energy-conserving schools, which opens this month for 990 kindergarten through sixth-grade students. Built into a hill in Reston, the school contains four large "learning circles," each of which is divided into eight wedge-shaped classrooms, plus a "media center," a gymnasium and a cafeteria. A layer of soil three to five feet thick covers the top and three sides. A panel structure on top of the hill contains 4,900 solar collectors to turn the sun's rays into heat. The yearly cost for energy to run Terraset is a projected $10,000. Conventional heating would require about $40,000.

And why are the oil-rich Saudis sponsoring an experiment in solar energy? Because the sun will not only heat Terraset in winter but air-condition it in summer.

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