The Ypsilanti Solar Project, a network of solar installations around the city, is growing in power, with new and pending installations and increasing amounts of trackable solar energy generation data now available on the the
Solar Ypsi.org website.
Call the site the proof in the pudding, if you will. "My whole goal was to just get one spot where we could collect information about installations, parts lists, there's a lot of educational material there, and then do this real-time monitoring," Dave Strenski, an Ypsilanti Solar Project volunteer, says.
For the year ended April 2011, the Ypsilanti Food Co-op was 34.4% solar-powered. City Hall, which which now has one full year of tracking data, was 2.6% solar. And after just five months, the River Street Bakery was 80.1% solar-powered, reaching levels in excess of 100% solar-powered for March and April, according to Strenski's figures.
Strenski attributes the relatively low percentage at the four-story City Hall, which has a sunny exposure, to inefficient power usage. "The only way to make the percent solar bigger is by making the total power usage smaller," he explains. To that end, he's working with the city on a grant of up to $100,000 to fund the replacement of interior and parking lot lights with LEDs.
In upcoming months, look for readings from the new 2.3kW solar photovoltaic panel system on Ypsilanti's Adams STEM Academy, funded by a grant from the
Michigan Renewable Schools Program. Additionally, the Michigan Theater and Corner Brewery have their own solar works in the pipeline and may also make their data available on Solar Ypsi.org, Strenski says.
Source: Dave Strenski, Ypsilanti Solar Project volunteerWriter: Tanya Muzumdar
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