SOLAR TODAY - March/April 2012

Building a Solar Movement

ASES member Dave Strenski, of Ypsilanti, Mich., knew little about solar energy in 2005 when he applied for a grant to put photovoltaic (PV) panels on his local food co-op. Little did he know that the effort would lead him to star in a Google commercial promoting the promise of solar (see tinyurl.com/strenskivideo).

Strenski is a renaissance man. His degrees in surveying, civil and mechanical engineering bespeak earthy practicality, but he makes his living as a high-powered coder — technically, an “application analyst” at Cray Inc., the supercomputer company. Naturally, he’s also a self-taught plumber, carpenter and electrician.

In 2005 he founded Solar Ypsi ( solarypsi.org), a loose group of volunteers dedicated to making their economically stressed town into a solar destination. The town now has 10 PV arrays, with more coming.

SOLAR TODAY: What inspired you to start Solar Ypsi?

Dave Strenski: There’s a food co-op in our town where I do volunteer electrical work. The manager of the store there got me interested in putting solar panels on the roof. We wrote our first grant [proposal] and we won $6,000 in 2005.

What makes this interesting is that we wanted the public to be able to see, in real time, what the panels were doing. To do this, we figured out a way to read the utility meters for essentially free, and all perfectly legal. The utility company would put an extra card in their digital meters and I would hook it up to a laptop. I wrote a program that would constantly poll the utility meters for data. The program then adds up the number of pulses, converts it into kilowatt-hours and pushes it to a server running the Solar Ypsi website. A friend of a friend introduced me to Nik Estep, a college student from Eastern Michigan University, who built the Solar Ypsi website that takes the data from the laptop and produces real-time graphs of the power being produced, consumed and exported at that site (see solarypsi. org/installations/foodcoop).

ST: What was the town’s response?

DS: Part of that first grant was for public outreach, so we put together a presentation about solar power. We’ve reached more than 2,000 people with this presentation, and now that the [Google] video went out I’m getting emails like crazy, to schedule more events. The video has more than 230,000 hits on You Tube.

I picture Solar Ypsi as a conduit for spreading the news. I have a couple of key messages when I give these talks — one

google

Dave Strenski, Ypsilanti, Mich.
ASES member for five years
Chapter member (Great Lakes Renewable Energy Association)
for five years

is that it’s really simple. People are surprised when I say you just wire it into your breaker panel like an electric stove. I try to stress no batteries; you want to be connected to the grid. Especially with the inverters today, it really is a no-brainer. The other question people don’t really understand is, if you don’t have batteries, what happens to that extra power when you can’t use it. I do a pretty good explanation of how it backflows through your meter and your meter spins backwards and the power goes to your neighbor’s toaster. It’s not going to the power plant. It’s just supplying power locally to the grid. That means one less shovel full of coal goes into a power plant someplace. People seem to eat it up; they like it. The town is ecstatic because we got on national television, so they think it’s all really incredible.

Then I talk about the economics and where we’re at today. Up until last summer we had some very good economics because the local utility company had a program with subsidies. With those subsidies and the federal tax credit, it was a good business decision to install solar panels.