It’s taken some time but we’re beginning to look at renewable sources of energy such as solar owner as the norm in new construction.

“Solar power as the norm rather than the exception.” –Philip J Reed, Westwood College

It’s taken some time but we’re beginning to look at renewable sources of energy such as solar power as the norm in new  construction. Take a look around at new builds and renovations and there are clear indications that we are taking the condition of our environment much more seriously then we have in past years.

Government incentives, buy back programs, and rebates have played a large part in this change in attitude as they have lowered the price of these technologies therefore making them far more widely accessible. There is no point in championing a technology if no one can afford to implement it. This is important not only in commercial or industrial applications, but in residential ones as well.

If a homeowner has the option of an inefficient heating or cooling system that literally hemorrhages money or an efficient solar or other renewable system that actually saves them their hard earned cash and has been made affordable by incentive programs, which do you think they’ll choose?

A perfect example of this new way of thinking is to look at the education sector. Seem like a strange jump from environmentally friendly building practices to education? It’s not.

At some schools- the ones that are forward thinking and have an eye on industry- a construction management degree will include curriculum in utilizing renewable resources. This is a very important change in our thinking as it ensures that our future builders will consider these options the norm rather than the exception. This inevitably means that we will see a greater increase in green builds and a more stable cost to do so. The better training in renewable options given at the university level will mean more implementation at the building level.

There are certainly further steps to be taken and more environmentally sensitive options and technologies to explore but adding a solar power component to something like a construction management degree is defiantly a step in the right direction. If we can make environmentally damaging construction something that is socially frowned upon by teaching its alternatives to those who will eventually be in charge of building, we will all win.

- Philip Reed

PS – Here’s a related quote from a builder we know, too:

“The truth of the matter is this, if building an energy efficient or energy independent house is the goal from the start, it’s really pretty simple.  By bringing together the client with a designer, architect, and building scientist that understand the process, a High Performance or Net Zero home can be built at a competitive price to similarly equipped ‘energy hog’ homes.” 

Reed Schweizer
Ravenwood Homes

I made the bold statement that Florida could be energy independent, in part, by using the Gulf Stream to power the east coast of Florida.

Well, today, you can learn more about how that will become a reality!

SmartPlanet.com’s blog post is titled:

“University moves toward powering Florida with the Gulf Stream”.

Think about how much energy we’d be able to harness from the ever powerful Gulf Stream!

If you’re excited as I am, be sure to read their post, and let me know what you think (simply add a comment below).

If you would like to learn more about creating a sustainable future, and the solar energy options that help create it, be sure to contact us online, or give us a call at (239) 574-1500.

Thank you!

- Dan

Every two years, the U.S. Dept. of Energy holds a week-long event at the National Mall in Washington, D.C. called the Solar Decathlon.

This year, twenty university teams from around the country (and a few international) will compete to design, build, and operate solar-powered houses that are:

• cost-effective,
• energy-efficient, and
• attractive.

Four universities in Florida are collaborating on one entry called: FleX House.

I’ve wanted to go for years… and so this is the year I’m going, and I’m extremely excited!

If you, or someone you know, might be interested in this event, be sure to share this blog post with them.

I plan on taking photos while I’m there, and I’ll share them after my return, too.

As you may know, I own & operate Fafco Solar in Southwest Florida, and our passion is helping people use the power of Solar & Renewable Energy.   Be sure to see our list of solar & renewable every services, or give a call at (239) 574-1500 if you’d like to learn more.

Complete information on the Solar Decathlon is available at:

www.SolarDecathlon.gov

and on the FlexHouse is available at:

www.FlexHouse.org

Here’s to creating amazing solar & renewable energy solutions!

Enjoy!

- Dan

…it’s interesting how it still applies, so I thought I share it with you:

Problem #1: We don’t know the true cost of oil.

We’re a little angry because we think we’re paying too much for gas.

Surprisingly, and perhaps foolishly, we still aren’t taking into consideration other costs we are currently paying via tax dollars.

• Do we have any idea how many of our tax dollars are being spent defending our oil interests around the world?
• How many are spent cleaning up the environment and regaining our health due to pollution?
• How many are spent, incredulously, subsidizing the oil industry. (What? Isn’t the oil industry profitable enough to pay it’s own bills?)

I don’t know if anyone knows the real number, but the cost has got to be painfully high. If these additional costs were paid at the gas pump… just how angry might we be?

Problem #2: Oil is now the wrong fuel.

Granted, oil has served us well for the past hundred years or so… the industrial age has increased our standard of living immensely… but the side effects are now too serious to continue using this type of fuel for much longer.

We all know this and being the good people that we are, we want to do the right thing, use harmless fuel, but…

Problem #3: Our freedom to choose better energy sources is impeded.

Oil companies are motivated by profits.

Politicians are motivated by power.

You and I are motivated by costs.

When we get hit in the pocket, we get angry and act.

Yet, because we don’t know and don’t pay the true and total cost of gas at the pump, we’re not very angry or motivated… in spite of the recent increases.

As long as we’re pacified by the illusion of low gas prices… an illusion that is perpetuated by a quiet but powerful collusion between the oil industry and politicians… we won’t insist on using alternative energy sources that seem, but by true comparison aren’t, more expensive.

I advocate that our tax dollars not be spent subsidizing the oil industry… that our tax dollars not be spent cleaning up oil spills… and that our tax dollars not be spent defending our oil interests.

If the oil industry was made to pay these costs and consequently we paid these costs at the pump, we would feel the true and painful urgency needed to develop and use better energy sources.

There’s a better way… and I have no doubt that the creative geniuses in the world can develop affordable fuel that serves our needs without causing harm to the environment and ourselves.

- Dan – October 14, 2000

Special Thanks to Jason Szumlanski, our Operations Manager, for this blog post!

However, these terms represent very different, but related concepts.

Power is the rate at which energy is consumed, expressed in watts or kilowatts.

Energy is the amount of power consumed, expressed in watt-hours or kilowatt-hours (kWh).

To understand energy use, and consequently our utility bills, we must factor in the amount of power devices and appliances use and how long we use them.

Let’s look at the example of a typical light fixture outside your front door with a 60 watt light bulb. Sixty watts is the amount of power the lamp consumes, or the rate at which the lamp uses energy. If you run a 60 watt light bulb from dusk to dawn for 12 hours, you will consume 720 watt-hours of energy (or 0.72 kilowatt-hours).

In Southwest Florida we currently pay around 10 cents per kilowatt-hour, so that light bulb would cost 7.2 cents per night, or $26.28 annually.

If you look at your utility bill, you will see that you are charged for the number of kilowatt-hours (KWH) that you consume.

This is the amount of energy consumed between meter readings. To reduce the energy you use, you must either reduce the amount of power you use, or the amount of time you use that power (or both!)

Energy  =  Power  x Time

Going back to our light bulb example, you could install a light bulb that uses less power, or you could reduce the number of hours it runs. Both courses of action would reduce the energy used and save you money. Here are three different ideas to save energy and money.

1) Replace the bulb with a 13W compact fluorescent with equivalent light output (reduce power).

Energy Saved:                   0.56 kilowatt hours daily, or $20.58 saved annually

2) Put the light on a timer and run for just 6 hours nightly (reduce time).

Energy saved:                  0.36 kilowatt hours daily, or $13.14 saved annually

3) Do both of the above (reduce power and time).

Energy Saved:                   0.64 kilowatt hours daily, or $23.43 saved annually

While power and energy are intimately connected, they are not the same.

Understanding the difference can help you save money!

In my next article, I will take this concept one step further and explain why you think twice when trying to be “energy efficient.”

- Jason

PS – Be sure to check out our information on “TED – The Energy Detective” to monitor your energy usage!

…our new Hybrid Solar Air Conditioning product (see video above).

You can learn more about our Solar Air Conditioning solution, along with all of our Solar & Renewable Energy solutions on our Web Site.

If you have any questions, contact us, or give us a call at (239) 574-1500.

Enjoy!

Dan

…and how Florida is not number #1 in terms of solar usage, YET, it is the Sunshine State!

We’ve been in the Solar Energy business for over 30 years, and we’re definitely seeing a continued growth in our solar energy business.

Here’s 9 ways you can conserve energy by switching to solar energy based solutions:

• Solar Pool Heater – save by using the sun to heat your pool!
• Solar Water Heater – save by using the power of the sun to heat your water!
• Solar Electric Photovoltaic System – save by powering your home with solar energy!
• Solar Lights – save by using natural light for your home!
• Solar Attic Fan – save by using the sun to pull heat from your home!
• Solar Pool Pump – save by using the sun to power your pool pump!
• Pool Automation – save by automating your chlorination, pump timing and heating!
• Solar Water Pump – save by not having to bring in costly utility lines!
• Hybrid Solar Air Conditioning – save between 30% to 50% on your air conditioning!

If you have any questions about Solar Energy, or would like to learn more, visit our web site at: www.FafcoSolar.com, or give us a call at (239) 574-1500.

We’re very passionate about what we do, and would love to help you!

- Dan

I thought I’d share with you, and spread their word.

UPDATE 1/6/2012, here’s the related video that was ranked the “Top Video of 2011″ from the Rocky Mountain Institute:

Enjoy,

Dan

PS – Remember, if you’re thinking it’s time to “Go Solar”, be sure to visit our web site at: www.FafcoSolar.com, or give us a call at (239) 574-1500.  We’d love to talk to you!

Today, we do not need to convince the world that Reinventing Fire is necessary. Instead, we must work together to make it happen.”            – Amory B. Lovins

Dear Dan,

Since 1982, Rocky Mountain Institute has been hatching gamechanging innovations to help make the world richer, fairer, cooler, and safer. Among other things, RMI has made important contributions toward achieving tripled-efficiency cars, trucks, and airplanes; laid many conceptual and practical foundations for electric and water efficiency, widespread renewable energy, and community economic development; devised profitable approaches to solving climate change, oil dependence, global insecurity, nuclear nonproliferation, and critical-infrastructure vulnerability; and forged (with Paul Hawken) a natural version of capitalism. All this work has prepared us well for what comes now.

RMI’s Next Big Thing will bring together all of our 27 years of innovation and engage the world in our most ambitious and important work yet. Put simply, this effort is aimed at changing the way most people have been getting and using energy since the Industrial Revolution. We mean to speed the transformation from pervasive waste to elegant frugality, from causing scarcity by inattention to creating abundance by design, from liquidating energy capital to living better on energy income. In short, we are Reinventing Fire: driving the business-led transition from oil, coal, and ultimately gas to efficiency and renewables.

Reinventing Fire will require tapping, in particular, the two biggest motherlodes of energy, efficiency and the Sun. Efficient use is generally the largest, least expensive, most benign, most quickly deployable, least visible, least understood, and most neglected opportunity in the whole economy. Efficiency can save half of U.S. oil and gas at about a fifth of their current price, and probably three-fourths of U.S. electricity at about an eighth of its price. RMI is speeding the expansion and capture of this vast “efficiency resource” by showing, in our 10xE (Factor Ten Engineering) project, how whole-system design integration can often make very large (sometimes even tenfold) energy savings cost less than small or no savings.

Once we use energy in a way that saves money, supply becomes much easier, and important synergies emerge between efficient use and renewable supply. Every 70 minutes or so, the sun supplies the Earth with enough energy to run global civilization for a year. An average square meter of land receives each year as much energy from the sun as is in a barrel of oil, and it falls reliably, freely, and relatively evenly on rich and poor alike. The world’s electricity use could in theory be provided 20 times over just by modern 20-percent-efficient solar cells on the rooftops of buildings in the 1 percent of land area that dense cities already cover. Solar power is always in stock, never runs out (even at night when it’s shining elsewhere), is safe, and never threatens us with terrorist plots.

The sun also causes wind, which could cost-effectively provide over 35 times global electricity needs, particularly at night. Sun and wind are the fastest-growing global energy sources: windpower was the biggest addition to power generating capacity in the U.S. in 2008, and in Europe in 2007–08. Sun and wind in 2008 added, respectively, 6 and 27 of the 40 billion watts of new renewable power worldwide (excluding big hydro dams). Sun powers photosynthesis, which can produce the biofuels for efficient mobility without interfering with food and fiber production or destroying natural ecosystems. Solar warmth already does 98 percent of our space-heating: without it, the Earth’s surface temperature would average not 15˚C but nearer –269˚C. Reinventing Fire is about putting the sun’s benign warmth to efficient use in vehicles, homes, factories, neighborhoods, planes, electricity systems, ships, appliances, trucks, and cities, with all these devices, systems, and social orders sharing power and information to create mutual value.

But the Reinventing Fire story is not just about efficiency, the sun, wind, and other renewables. In the third of a century since my “soft energy path,” a powerful new force has begun to reshape society: modern information technology (IT). Putting IT to work can speed the leap from fossil fuels to efficiency and renewables. Thirty years ago, few utility managers thought about influencing a home’s or a factory’s power consumption. Now, many smart utility managers are doing just that, sniffing out places—swimming pools, water heaters, air conditioners, manufacturing equipment, commercial lights—where sharing information with consumers to inform smarter choices can retime use, cut costs, and curb emissions. The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission has found up to 188 billion watts of such “demand response” potential in the United States; we suspect there may be even more.

Information technology has further transformed how renewables can mesh with each other and with the power grid. A prevalent myth holds that solar cells and windpower can’t do much because they don’t always work. (Neither does any other source of electricity: the various types of power plants differ only in the size, frequency, duration, predictability, and cause of their failures.) RMI’s analysts have developed a unique simulation tool to explore how to integrate these variable renewables into utility operations, backing out coal- and gas-burning stations whenever the wind blows or the sun shines. Our initial findings suggest that integrating even very large amounts of variable renewables into the grid—just as utilities now integrate intermittent big power plants and cope with fluctuating demand—requires not new technology but new attitudes and operating procedures that can deliver better service at lower cost and make more profit with less risk. To help our utility partners understand how to do this, as some in Europe already do, RMI is now synthesizing with them a practical vision of the shape, stability, economics, and transitional path of an efficient, diverse, dispersed, renewable, resilient, economical, and climate-safe electricity system.

Modern society is built from fossil fuels. They are the root source of our society’s wealth and power. But as their rising costs to our security, wallets, and habitat become ever more intolerable, we see one system dying and another struggling to be born. The inflection point at this moment in history is both evolutionary and revolutionary. The evolving tools to reinvent fire have at last caught up with the vision that has been hatching for decades. And it’s a revolutionary moment because we can at last move beyond just conceiving answers to actually getting off oil, coal, and gas by integrating, articulating, and applying what we know. Today we need not convince the world that Reinventing Fire is necessary. Instead, we must work together to make it happen.

Hence, Reinventing Fire is a “grand synthesis” that will systematically combine decades of intellectual capital, both ours and others’, into a practical map of the road beyond fossil fuels—then help the world head down that road with due deliberate speed. Integrating the latest developments that make getting off oil and coal even more attractive than we thought five years ago, Reinventing Fire weaves together a resilient, multi-layered web of connected, efficient, renewable replacements for fossil fuel, chiefly in the U.S. but in a global context.

The pieces of the most complex jigsaw puzzle in human history are falling into place. The world that we at RMI imagine, and that we strive daily to create, is starting to take shape. We need to form it even faster, because humanity, as Dana Meadows said, has “exactly enough time—starting now.” Please join us as we embark on one of the most important phases in the 27-year history of Rocky Mountain Institute.

Sincerely,

Amory B. Lovins
Cofounder, Chairman, and Chief Scientist

Learn more about the Rocky Mountain Institute on their web site at: www.RMI.org.

I’d like to thank one of my fellow team members, Melissa Upton, for creating this for you!

In Germany, where the clouds rarely seem to part, there are more photovoltaic installations than anywhere else and it is the third largest producer of solar cells and modules after China and Japan.

So why in the world is Germany the worldwide leader in solar energy and what does that have to do with the Florida Gators?

The answer to that question is Feed-in Tariffs or FITs.

Now Germany and the City of Gainesville, Florida have one major thing in common.

Gainesville, in the heart of the Sunshine State, is probably best known for its powerhouse football team – the University of Florida Gators. It is now attracting attention for promoting power of another nature – that being power from the sun – and photovoltaic modules are being installed all over the city. Modeled after the Feed-in Tariff that resulted in Germany’s turbo-charged solar industry, the City of Gainesville was the first in the nation to enact a solar FIT.

The city-owned utility, Gainesville Regional Utilities (GRU), offers its electric customers—both business and residential—the chance to invest in solar photovoltaic systems and sell all the electricity that they produce directly to GRU. Participants signing up for the program before 2011 will be guaranteed a fixed rate of $0.32 per kilowatt-hour of electricity produced for 20 years, an estimated 4-6 percent return on investment.

The Feed-in Tariff for solar energy is the ultimate renewable energy incentive. A solar FIT means that homeowners or businesses sell all their renewably generated electricity to the utility at a premium price and buy all energy used at retail rates. Wow, imagine the tables turned for once. The major difference between FITs and other energy incentives is that the intent goes beyond just supplying energy—the idea is to promote the use of renewable energy by richly rewarding system owners. Per-kilowatt payments for renewably produced electricity are set higher than conventional market prices for fossil-fuel-based electricity, as an incentive to add renewable energy to the grid.

In Florida there is an organization called “FARE” which stands for the Florida Alliance for Renewable Energy (www.floridaallianceforrenewableenergy.org). They are a coalition dedicated to educating Floridians about Feed-in Tariffs and other policies that promote the use of renewable energy. The United States would benefit from a national FIT law. A national FIT would encourage more renewable energy in general, create U.S. jobs, and significantly help the national effort to reduce climate changing greenhouse gas emissions…

Go Gators, Go Gainesville, Go Solar.

If you’d like to learn more about Fafco Solar, and all of the great solar solutions we provide, be sure to visit our web site.  We look forward to hearing from you!

Well, we didn’t just start…

…and we’re not starting over.

We didn’t follow the easy money.

We were green before green was ‘in’.

Fafco Solar was “born” during the energy crisis of the 70′s and represents a multi-generational family commitment to delivering quality solar energy products for the purpose of bringing forth the ideas of:

FREEDOM and FUN… FOREVER!(sm)

We’ve been focused on solar energy without interruption, through thick and thin, in communities throughout Southwest Florida for the past 35 years.

To learn more about our history, be sure to visit our Web Site.

Here’s to 35 more years of solar powered freedom and fun!

-Dan