Thoughts on Solar by Run on Sun's Founder & CEO, Jim Jenal

UPDATE: The final tallies are in and our hometown team placed sixth overall and tied for the lead in two categories: Energy Balance and Hot Water efficiency.  Congratulations to all who participated in this competition - you make us proud!

The Solar Decathlon is a tremendously cool event that allows collegiate teams from around the world to show just what innovative, energy-efficient design looks like - and boy can these kids think outside the box!

Here in Pasadena we admit to being a bit partial to our hometown heroes over at Caltech (as in, the California Institute of Technology, in case you didn’t know).  Teaming up with architecture students from SCI-Arc (as in the Southern California Institute of Architecture, in case you didn’t know), the combined team’s entry - called CHIP,  for Compact, Hyper-Insulated Prototype - features insulation on the outside of the building and some other very clever design features, including - of course - solar panels.

Check out this video “walkthrough":

The Decathlon starts September 23 and runs through October 2 on the National Mall in Washington, D.C.  We can only hope that the folks who work in Washington and have a hand in setting national energy policy will take the time to become educated about the possibilities created by innovative thinking regarding our long-term energy needs.

We will be following the status of the SCI-Arc/Caltech team and will post updates as they become available.  Go team, GO!

The April 28, 2011 edition of the Pasadena Weekly has a very nice article by Sara Cardine titled, The City of the Future, which includes an interview with Run on Sun Founder & CEO, Jim Jenal.

Part of its month-long series of articles on going Green, Cardine's piece looks specifically at how Pasadena has taken long strides toward turning itself into a truly Green City.  Starting with its adoption of a "Green Action Plan" in 2006 - the same year that Run on Sun was founded - Pasadena is working hard to turn its good intentions into practical actions.  For example, Pasadena has made major reductions in its own energy usage and is pushing to do much more.

From the article:

Since the Green Action Plan was established, the city has seen improvements on multiple levels, said Ursula Schmidt, the city’s sustainability affairs manager. In addition to increased water and energy conservation, renewable energy use and recycling, the city is also making headway in its green building program and in an effort to establish an alternative-fuel fleet.

Last year alone, Pasadena trimmed its peak power demand by 4.45 megawatts and saved enough energy to power 3,640 homes for one year. Officials now hope to see a citywide reduction in greenhouse gas emissions of 25 percent by 2030, along with an increase in the citywide use of green energy sources beyond recently adopted statewide standards. Last month, state lawmakers passed SBX1 2, a law requiring that 33 percent of the state’s energy come from renewable sources by 2020. Pasadena is already pushing itself past that benchmark; last year the City Council adopted a comprehensive integrated resources plan that set a goal of 40 percent renewable energy use by 2020, according to Gurcharan Bawa, PWP assistant general manager.

Encouraging commercial and residential customers to Go Solar is a big part of the strategy to meet those goals.  Caltech, one of the largest energy users in the City, has installed over 1.3 megawatts of solar power on its campus with more planned.  Yet some customers have been reluctant to follow Caltech's lead.  To get the installer's view, Cardine interviewed Jim Jenal and quoted him as he described the process of working with an installer to get a proposal and ultimately, an installed system.

Please check out the article online or pick up a print copy (which features a wonderful picture of Jim with that famous Solar Kid) and let us know what you think.

As Cardine concluded:

“This isn’t rocket science — it’s truly something normal, everyday people can understand and feel comfortable with,” Jenal said.
It just begins with a little knowledge and the commitment to make a difference.

We couldn't agree more!

One of the paradoxes of our so-called Information Age is that while the Internet brings a world of knowledge to our fingertips, it comes at the cost of a fairly high carbon footprint. Those servers that sustain the World Wide Web consume enormous amounts of power - power which for the most part comes from burning coal.  That dark little secret means that the very largest Internet entities - such as Google, Facebook and Twitter - could be responsible for enormous amounts of greenhouse gas emissions.

While Google has been highly visible in its efforts to power its server farms from renewable sources - sporting everything from vast solar arrays to the latest fuel cell technologies - Facebook and Twitter have been largely silent on this issue.

At least for Facebook, that silence has now been broken.  Announcing something that it is calling the Open Compute Project, Facebook is now offering information on the greening of its server farms and providing documentation on what it did so that others can follow suit.  According to the OPC site, Facebook claims that its “vanity free servers” are 38% more efficient and 24% less expensive to build and run than what is generally found in state-of-the-art data centers.  Still, the LA Times is reporting that Greenpeace is pushing Facebook to do more - including pledging to get all of the energy that it needs to run its data centers from renewable sources.  No word yet on whether or not Facebook will make such a pledge.

All of that is good for Facebook, but what about the rest of us?  True, most of us don’t run server farms or manage data centers, but we all use computers to access the Internet - to write and then to read this post, for example.  What about us?  If we are not in a position to upgrade our computers at home or at work to the latest and most efficient models, what are we to do?

In an effort to make our operations as green as possible (within our budget!) we recently installed “power saving software” called Granola from MiserWare that helps you “help save the planet” by lowering the energy usage of your PC.  Or as they say:

Granola makes computers more energy efficient without slowing them down. It’s safe, it’s easy, and it lets your computer run like a hybrid Ferrari – fast when you need speed, but energy efficient when you don’t. Granola helps you save the world.

We have used the software for just over two months on our primary office PC and here are our results so far: 19.7 kWh saved for an overall efficiency improvement of 23.8%  Will those numbers save the world?  No.  But imagine the savings if every PC adopted similar software?  In our experience the software has been entirely transparent and we have had no problems using it at all.

We have said it before and we will say it again - energy efficiency is more cost effective than energy generation.  We encourage all of our clients to make their buildings as energy efficient as possible before adding solar. In that vein, we applaud the efforts by Facebook and are happy to promote Granola - collectively we will save the world.