As most of you know, last weekend was a flurry of graduation parties in Northfield. My family dropped in at the home of our friends Bruce Anderson and Anne Larson for the party recognizing their brilliant and beautiful daughter (long-time best friend of my own brilliant and beautiful daughters) Maia (who is attending Grinnell College next year).
While there, I actually got to check out the solar panels that Bruce and Anne installed some time ago. Although I had seen them through the windows at a winter “Nine to Dine” dinner as part of the UCC social calendar, I had not yet gotten the full nickel tour.
I’ve never been big on science so I asked Bruce to summarize it in a sentence. He said: “It’s a 3.04 kilowatt grid-connected system that provides all of our household electricity on a net annual basis, powering our neighbors’ home when a surplus is being produced”.
Not bad for a single sentence, but then Bruce is a pro. You can find out more at Sustainable Community Solutions.
So, here I am a planning commissioner. I want every new housing development proposal to fill out a worksheet showing that they offer a “3.04 kilowatt grid-connected system” as either an optional (home owner can “opt out”) or standard component of the houses. It needs to show (1) cost to homeowner of such an option, (2) expected payback time, (3) TCO. Developers are usually not in the business of gilding their product like this, but if (2) and (3) are reasonable then they will want to. I don’t have time to run down such stuff, or to dig through a bunch of motivational literature to try and find it. Give me a trusted one-sheet handout that I could include as a standard part of Dundas’s “So you want to build in Dundas” package that we could give to developers.
[…] to cleanse 100% of stormwater (and in some cases, sewer water), on site, and maybe a Green Roof and solar panel or […]