Disrupting the energy industry on a global scale takes one heck of a software team. Get a peek into the industry-leading software that makes Sungevity tick, from our remote solar design tool to our brand new mobile app, and meet the team that creates it all.
(Beth Yarnelle Edwards for The New York Times) The Sungevity founders (from left) Alec Guettel, Danny Kennedy and Andrew Birch at a home installation.
The Secret to Solar Power was published in the New York Times today.
So what’s the secret? Spoiler alert: It’s missionary-mercenaries. It’s the color orange. It’s Sungevity’s founder, Danny Kennedy.
‘As Kennedy puts it in his passionate but rational way: “Think about it this way. We’re killing people in foreign lands in order to extract 200-million-year-old sunlight. Then we burn it . . . in order to boil water to create steam to drive a turbine to generate electricity. We frack our own backyards and pollute our rivers, or we blow up our mountaintops just miles from our nation’s capital for an hour of electricity, when we could just take what’s falling free from the sky.”
That’s a hard argument to refute.‘ - Jeff Himmelman, New York Times
What’s your favorite quote?
As we all start ramping up for the Patriots Giants Super Bowl in a few weeks I thought it would be a good time to look at a slightly different defensive play. A play designed to block the offensive line of fossil fuels. A play called, “Let’s install as much solar as we can at NFL stadiums!”
I did a Google spelunk of all the NFL stadiums with solar and here is what I learned:
The Redskins are far and away the winners in the solar stadium game, with 8,000 panels and 2 MW of generating capacity. Their array, the largest in the league, generates 20% of the team’s energy needs on game days and all of their energy needs on every other day of the year. The modules cover 841 parking spaces and the stadium has 10 EV charging stations and one enormous Solar Man statue.
While the Jets/Giants are currently in a distant second place with 0.69 MW of solar, they are looking to give the Redskins a run for their sunny. Errr…money. MetLife Stadium will be adding 1,500 modules to their existing 3,000 and the new panels will form a “solar ring” around the top of their stadium. The ring lights up AND changes color according to which team is playing.
The Patriots also have sunny days ahead of them. They will be jumping from 525 kW to 1.6 MW just in time for the 2012-2013 season. They’re also adding in a wind turbine. Speaking of which, if you count the wind and biofuel that the Philadelphia Eagles use to power Lincoln Financial Field then you’re looking at a grand total of 8.6 MW of green energy. They are actually selling power back to the grid and profiting from it! Estimated savings? $60 million.
While the Cardinals don’t have any solar modules up, they DO completely offset their energy use on 8 regular season game days and 2 pre-season home games thanks to SRP’s EarthWise energy program. Collectively that offset is equivalent to the power needed to run 60 homes for an entire year!
For a time-lapse video of what the installation at FedEx Field looked like check out this YouTube video:
One more thing. If you’re solar advocate AND a Giants fan you might want to consider getting ready for Game Day with a New York Giants solar powered garden gnome. That’s right. I said solar powered garden gnome. What better way to put the sun in your sunflowers? The day in your day lilies? The light in your bulbs? [Yeah, I know that last one was a bit of a stretch].
May the best team win!
As a white knuckle flier, it has always mystified me why people would want to fly around the world. It seems like a lot of time up in the air in a confined space where a lot could go wrong and bathroom breaks are anything but luxurious. Clearly there are people who disagree; and they’ve devoted their lives to doing exactly that — flying around the world.
So what’s next? What could possibly top a solo nonstop and unrefueled circumnavigation? How about a circumnavigation without any fuel at all? That’s right. I said without any fuel at all.
In 2014 Solar Impulse will attempt to fly around the world without any fuel aside from the sunlight that falls from the sky.
The idea for Solar Impulse came from Bertrand Piccard, the first man to travel non-stop around the world in a balloon. “We almost failed (because of) lack of fuel,” Piccard said of his epic journey back in 1999. He decided the next time he flew around the world it would be sans fuel.
The Solar Impulse team has already completed the first solar day-and-night flight in history: 26 hours, 10 minutes, 19 seconds, and 3 world records! They are determined to demonstrate that progress in transportation is possible using clean energy. Their first prototype (the one that set those 3 world records) has the wingspan of an Airbus A340, the weight of a family car, and the power of a scooter. I don’t know about you, but that sure looks like progress to me.
Just imagine they are able to develop a prototype that could commercialize mass solar flight. That innovation could dramatically slash the carbon footprint of air travel, which is slated to be an annual 1.5 billion tons of CO2 by 2025.
You can track their progress or ask a question on the Solar Impulse Facebook page.
