D&E GreenWorks! Gets Front Page for Solar Install

The GreenWorks! club at Davis & Elkins College netted front page coverage in last Saturday's Inter-Mountain for their new solar PV array.  The 3.24-kW PV array is on the Eshelman Science Center at D&E's campus in Elkins, WV.  The Inter-Mountain covered the ribbon cutting ceremony and printed a press release that you can read here.

The GreenWorks! group has worked for a couple of years to build support for solar on campus.  The twelve panel solar PV array was constructed by club members and is the largest solar PV array at any residential college in West Virginia.  The club has completed a number of projects in the past including solar lighting of a gazebo on campus, re-lamping, LED exterior lighting retrofit, and electronics recycling.  GreenWorks! is a great club and a fantastic group of people to work with.

I Love the International Space Station - It's Off-grid with a 110-kW Solar Array!

I can't give a presentation about solar without mentioning the International Space Station.  It epitomizes off-grid living at its most extreme.  The New York Times recently featured a beautiful video that shows views of our planet from the ISS, "Earth, the Marvelous Blue Orb." 

"One of the little-known benefits of the space station is that it is at just the right altitude to photograph things on Earth. Every week, the astronauts aboard the space station record images of things that would spew headlines if we saw them on any one of the thousands of planets that we now know circle other stars." 
-NY Times 4/2/15


 The video has footage of our planet; thunderstorms, city lights, volcanic eruptions.  It is also fun to watch the solar arrays on the ISS as they move from shadow to sun.  You can learn more about the ISS electrical system on Wikipedia.  NASA also offers a site to help you spot the ISS in the nights sky. 

It's up there, and it's off the grid!