Be Local Mt. Airy

Being Local is about doing things closer to home. Well you can’t get more local than your own house, so when it comes to electricity, my Wife and I decided there’s no better source then our roof. Yes, this past week our photovoltaic solar panel installation commenced! We’re incredibly excited as this project has been a couple of years in the making. After much research we’ve chosen a solar lease arrangement, installed by a Frederick based company Sustainable Energy Systems LLC, and serviced by Sungevity, a national solar leasing company.

For those not familiar with Photovoltaics, here are the Tech and Cost basics.

Tech

A photovoltaic system consists of an array of inter-connected panels, made primarily out of silicon. These panels are placed in a sunny location, in this case our Sout-East facing roof on the back of our house. When light strikes the panels, the photons in the light knock the electrons in the silicon free. The free electrons become an electric current in the panels wires. That current is carried to an inverter, which changes the direct current (DC) created by the panels, into alternating current (AC) used in homes. This current is connected to our electric meter and circuit breaker panel, powering every electric device in our home. Pretty simple really.

Finally the system is connected to the utility by something called a net-meter. So when the panels produce more electricity then we’re using, we get credits from the utility. When we draw electricity from the utility (night time, cloudy days) we draw down against those credits. The end result is that, for our system at least, 95% of our power should come from the sun, and only 5% from Patomic Edison in the course of a year.

Here are some photos of the progress about mid week showing where the components described above will go:

Here are the first set of rails being mounted on the roof. Ultimately there will be 6 rails, which will hold the Photovoltaic Panels

The Inverter needed to be placed on the North side of our house, out of direct sun since it can get hot

This close up shows the inverter mounting bracket and switch box

However, since our utility hookup is on the south side, some wiring conduit had to be installed through our attic and across a lower roof..

… down the chimney …

… to the meeter on the other side of our house.

So that’s the parts of the system. Here’s how you pay for it.

Cost

There are two basic ways to have Solar installed, buy the panels yourself, or lease them. If you purchase, there is a large up-front outlay of funds, which are somewhat offset by tax and other incentives which you must apply for. The return on the balance of the investment comes from your savings in utility payments, and from something called Renewable Energy Credits (RECs), which can be sold through a special market. The payback period can be anywhere from 5 to 20 years depending on the size of the system, your energy use, fluctuations in the RECs market, and other factors.

The other option which is becoming increasingly popular is to lease your system. It this scenario a solar company covers the cost of installation and maintenance, handles all the tax credits and RECs, takes care of financing, and all you pay is a monthly leasing fee about on-par with your current electric utility bill.  This is the option my wife and I have chosen. We liked not having to make a big initial outlay, having a maintenance contract included in case there are any issues, and having a fixed utility bill for the next 20 years, protecting us against future price increases as the cost of electricity produced in fossil-fuled plants continues to rise.

For those interested in exploring Solar for themselves, here are some links to companies that provide leases or purchased installations:

Leases

Sungevity

Solar City

Installations

Banner Home Solutions (based in Mt. Airy)

Greenspring Energy

SolarEnergWorld

Please come back and look for updated posts as our project progresses. To our knowledge, we’re the first solar panel installation in our neighborhood, so we’re very excited to share our experience with the Mt. Airy community!

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Last year my son attended his 1 week camp experience at the Hashawha Outdoor School. If you are a parent with children in the Carroll County School system, then you are or will become familiar with this tremendous learning experience and rite of passage for all 6^th grade students.

Among the myriad of adventure and instruction they had in the fields, woods, streams, and classrooms at Hashawha was paying something my son described as the “Survivor Game”. In it, campers were assigned the role of herbivore, carnivore, or omnivore, and competed to “survive” by exploiting their available food sources.

All of us out here away from camp are in another sort of survival game, and our best odds may be to play the role of “Locavore”. What you may ask is a Locavore? Well according to wordspy.com the term was coined around 2007 to describe someone who strives to get all their food sourced from within 50 to 100 miles of where they live. In other words, Locavores “Eat Local”.

How is that a good survival strategy? This operates on several of levels. First, food which is shipped over great distances, the kind you usually find on grocery store shelves, is often frozen, picked before its ripe, or highly processed or preserved. All of which diminishes the nutritional value of the food, and often involves the addition of potentially unhealthy or even harmful ingredients. Reducing the good stuff, and adding in bad stuff, is not an optimal strategy for your long term “survival”, by which I mean your health, vitality, and life span.

Second, all that transportation and processing of distant food uses an awful lot of energy. It is estimated that industrial agribusinesses use an average of 10 calories of fossil fuel inputs for every 1 food calorie they output. In an age where energy costs will continue to rise, and supplies become ever more volatile, ensuring the reliability of our food sources requires dramatically lowering that energy input-output ratio. Locally grown and raised food, especially when done using natural or organic methods, greatly reduces transportation, processing, and chemical fertilizer fossil fuel inputs, making it far more sustainable in an uncertain energy future.

There is a third survival benefit to being a Locavore as well. By choosing to spend your food dollars on locally grown or raised products, you are helping to strengthen the local economy. You are helping maintain and create local agriculture jobs, and are helping ensure the survival of the rural environment so many Mt. Airy residents have told us they treasure.

So support your local farm and farmers market. Ask for local meats and produce at the grocery store, and cultivate that back-yard garden. You’ll find a list of great local food sources on our Eat Local page. Who knows? Maybe in a few years the Hashawha campers will even get a chance to pit the Locavore against the Globavore, and see which one thrives.

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The full results of the 2011-2012 Town Needs Assessment Survey are now available here. Thank you to everyone who supported this effort. It’s been a year of hard work, and we look forward to supporting the hard work to come of building community around what the citizens want to see for our town.

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BeLocal and Kiwanis will be holding a Presentation and Discussion of the Town Survey findings!

Wed, March 21, 7-9 pm at the Mt. Airy Senior Center

Come find out…

• What residents would like to see in a community center.
• How citizens envision community connections.
• How many adults offered to volunteer their time to address citizens’ wishes?
• How many offered to donate money?
• How you can get involved!

Refreshments will be Provided

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