TO PV OR NOT TO PV

How one family took a leap of faith into the world of solar-power - and wound up being their own utility in the process. PLUS: a lowdown on going solar, even if you’re already on the grid.

February/March 2001
 
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Solar power, utilities and the beauty of a backwards spinning meter.

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by Richard Carnes

So with the country dangling on a thin wire between formidable possibilities, my wife and I decided to proceed with the next logical step: Build an addition onto the house.

We live roughly 7,500 feet above sea level in the Rocky Mountains, which means that our proximity to the sun's powerful rays, as well as our electric bills, are skyhigh. I had always been interested in solar power, and since we would be constructing a new roof anyway here was an opportunity to install solar panels on our house.

Most small towns do not usually have a listing for "solar energy," so the first (and only) place we began looking was the Internet. Typing in the ambiguous to term "solar panel" brought 88,126 possible hits.

"Solar panel installation" narrowed it down to a mere 3,489, while "solar panel installation Colorado" tapered the listing to a workable 212. What a pleasant surprise it was to find listed on the very first page, no less - the Solar Energy Institute (SEI) of Carbondale, Colorado, a mere hop, skip and a jump over one mountain pass from our home in the Vail Valley.

The word "Institute" alarmed me a bit. I was convinced I would be talking to a group of scientists and listening to hours of brain draining solarbabble. But what (or who) I found instead was Ed.

Ed is a soft-spoken, gentle, articulate individual who seemed genuinely interested in answering my simpleminded ("What does PV stand for?") questions. We spent more than half an hour on the phone, and Ed followed up the next day via e-mail. I stumbled upon no less than one of the world's most prestigious schools for studying and exploring the possibilities of solar power.

The first real hurdle we had to clear was determining what type of system we really needed. Our so-called secluded community high up in the Rockies includes 5,000 other let's-get-away-from-it-all souls, so it's not as if we were off the power grid. Therefore, a line-tied system made perfect sense. This type of solar system would allow us to install our very own miniature power plant on the roof, with the option of selling the excess generated power back to the utility company via the grid.

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