Making Energy Visible, One Solar Panel at a Time

Energy is invisible.

The more I work on my book and the more I read and think about energy—renewable and fossil—everything seems to come back to that one, basic premise: for most people, most of the time, energy is simply, magically there. Flip a switch and the lights go on.  Turn the key in the ignition and off you go.  The only time most of us even think about energy is when it’s not immediately available—when the lights don’t turn on or the car makes a weird noise.

Otherwise, though, energy is pretty much invisible, hidden away behind walls and under hoods. And that’s a problem because when energy is invisible it’s all too easy to ignore its costs, especially the hidden costs to health and the environment.

So one of the main purposes of the book is precisely to make energy visible. Now, I’m a writer, so mostly what I do is sit at a computer and write. Within the next few months I’ll also begin traveling widely across the country, visiting and reporting from wind farms, solar farms, and other renewable energy-related spots.

But this past Friday I did more than just visit and hang out and observe: I helped my friend Alex Jarvis install two solar panels at Brown County High School in Nashville, Indiana.

A few months earlier I’d interviewed Alex, a local (Bloomington-area) solar guy and owner of Solar Systems of Indiana.  Alex had worked at Otis elevators for eight years as a buyer for the company’s manufacturing and repair shop in Bloomington, but then got laid off when the plant left town. Cleaning out his desk, he saw an article he’d ripped out of some magazine about solar panels. A tech geek since grade school, the kind of kid who loved to mess around with science kits and build radios, Alex decided to get into the solar business. After a year spent driving around the country, attending solar seminars and workshops, sleeping in his car to save on motels, he returned to Southern Indiana, determined to become the area’s go-to guy for small-scale solar installations.

And he did. Business hasn’t exactly been booming, but solar is starting to catch on, even in a die-hard coal state like Indiana.  And Alex is making the best of it—he’s put in about 14 solar systems in the past two years.

When we first met I asked if I could come along on his next job. Alex said sure, and a few months later I got an email telling me that he had a job the next day, and that I could meet him. Only he didn’t just want me to stand by taking notes. It was a two-man job, this solar installation, and I was going to be man #2.

Nashville is about 20 minutes outside of Bloomington by car, and in mid autumn, when the leaves have changed and the air is crisp, it’s a beautiful, scenic drive.  I met Alex in the high school parking lot. Our job that day was to install two solar panels mounted on a pole to power a battery for a fountain pump in the school’s outdoor courtyard.   The local chamber of commerce had gotten a grant to cover the cost—about $3600. It was warm for early November, so I threw my jacket in my car and headed with Alex over to his station wagon. It took three trips to haul the equipment to the courtyard: two 12 volt, 135 watt photovoltaic solar panels, several boxes of tools, and a few bags of nuts and bolts. 

A few days earlier Alex had been to the site to set the mounting pole and battery box near the fountain, a small, rock-lined pool now filled with stagnant, brackish water.  We set the panels and other equipment down on the grass, unfolded the instructions, and got to work.

On TV, renewable energy always has a clean gleaming, sci-fi sheen: majestic wind turbines set again a vast, oceanic backdrop … hundreds of solar panels gleaming in the desert sun … important-looking scientists handling test tubes in a state-of-the art lab. But it turns out that setting up a couple of solar panels is a lot like playing with a life-sized erector set. Because the panels were going to be mounted on a pole (and not on a roof), we had to first build the scaffolding to hold them. This was both fairly straightforward and tricky, involving lots of bolting and unbolting (when we realized that we’d put one part on backwards), lifting and holding sharp, awkward metal parts, and manipulating several different sizes and types of wrenches.

Once the scaffolding was in place, it was time to mount the panels, which were about 2 feet by 4 feet and weight maybe 30 or 40 pounds a piece. And again, there was nothing cool or high tech about the process—just a lot of lifting and holding and grunting and making sure that the panels were properly bolted into place.

But once they were up, facing south and pointed at a 30 degree angle to the sun, the panels did look pretty cool. And the best part, to my mind, was that the whole thing is out there, right out in the open, for everyone to see.  At one point, as Alex and I were hoisting the panels, a kid stuck his head out a window and asked what we were doing. 

“Putting up some solar panels to power the fountain,” I answered.

“Cool,” he said, “that’s pretty awesome.”  And then I could hear him telling his friends what was happening, and a bunch of kids came to the window to check it out. 

And at that moment I thought, we’re making energy visible. Two PV panels won’t provide much power, and they certainly won’t do much to reduce the school’s carbon footprint. And electricity is so cheap in Indiana (thanks to abundant coal reserves and a powerful coal lobby) that the panels won’t pay for themselves any time soon.

So the solar panels Alex and I put up are mainly symbolic of what’s possible. But symbols are important.  The kids who go to Brown County High will see the panels and learn how they work.  And they’ll make a direct connection between the sunlight hitting the panels and the pump circulating water through fountain in a way that simply wouldn’t be possible if the technology that produced the energy that makes the fountain work was hidden away underground or inside a box.

In any case, it was useful for a writer like me to get my hands dirty and get down in the trenches, so to speak, to see what’s it’s like to take part in making renewable energy happen.

Here's a picture of me at work.  I've posted some more pictures of me and Alex at work on my other blog, Renewable.