It's overcast, it's raining lightly but surprisingly these solar panels on the roof of Walters Hall are still generating electricity according to Mike Kelleher here at SUNY ESF.
"Well, the panels will actually work in ambient light and a lot of people think of upstate New York as a lot of cloud cover, a lot of winter, and they don't think it's the place for solar but even on a day like today with clouds up above and not much sunlight, we're generating power with these panels," said Mike Kelleher, Director of Renewable Energy Systems.
And demonstrating that premise is one of the big reasons for the college's installation of a 40-kilowatt photovoltaic array.
Terry Ettinger tells us about solar panels that are in use at the SUNY ESF campus.
"A great source of reference is the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority, NYSERDA, they provide incentives and a lot of information. One of the important things when we did the application of PV here is we're generating power, we're reducing our carbon footprint but we also conduct outreach educational activities and education for our students so we hope to expand the impact of our solar experiment to help people use them in their homes and businesses and a lot of other applications," said Kelleher.
In addition to the PV array on the flat roof of Walters Hall, another array is installed on Baker Laboratory but on the side of the building to provide shade while also generating electricity. But PV arrays are not just for big buildings, homeowners can benefit even if it's just a 5 kilowatt system
"That would cost about $40,000 gross but with incentives and tax credits the actual cost would be about $15,000. That would generate about half a typical home's electric use and reduce its carbon footprint of that home by about 2 and a half tons a year," Kelleher said.
So this is where the electricity generated by the solar panels comes into the basement and then gets distributed throughout the building and as Mike was saying we can see here that even though it is cloudy electricity is being generated.