Mono Lake Committee goes solar
October 4th, 2010 by Geoff, Executive Director
Here at the Committee office we’re very excited to see nine wonderful solar panels covering the roof of our “ice house” office building! It’s a group project with big thank yous going out to Committee members for financial support for the project and to Jim, TJ, and Isabel at Sierra Solar (760-937-0307) for donating their installation labor. The Sierra Solar team was fast and efficient as you can see from this time-lapse video!
With a weekend of power production under our belt we’re already checking every day to see how much power has been produced (about 7 kWh each on two partly cloudy days) and how many pounds of CO2 emissions have been offset (28 pounds in the first two days). The setup is a 2kW solar array capable of producing an annual daily average of 9kWh or so of power. Based on recent power use in the “ice house” office, we expect to entirely cover all power use in the building with the new solar power, plus we’ll offset a bit of the power consumption of the Information Center & Bookstore building.
Can we get the entire office and Bookstore property down to net zero power consumption from the grid? I think we can—we’ve got plenty more roof space above the bookstore. But of course that takes some up-front expenditure. As the “ice house” roof pours forth electrons we’ll be analyzing the costs and capacities of expanding on that success!
Completed solar photovoltaic installation on Mono Lake Committee building. Photo by Geoff McQuilkin.
