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After years of hoping, planning and finagling, our little farm is finally solar-powered. Or to be more exact, most of our electrical power comes from the sun, via fifteen 240-watt photo-voltaic panels on the south-sloping roof of the guest house.
By definition, of course, our crops are solar-powered, as it were, and that arrangement has been in place for millions of years in one form or another. Residential solar power for water and space heating, and electricity generation is however quite recent in historical terms.
My first exposure to solar possibilities came in the mid-1970s not long after we had moved to northern New Mexico, by way of Benjamin T. or “Buck” Rogers, an early NM solar pioneer who died several years back. He was instrumental in getting me a contract job as a technical writer for the solar energy handbook being produced by a program of Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory, as it was then known, under the direction of engineer Doug Balcomb.
One of the innovative products of that program was a mobile home heated by solar panels from which air was pumped through a battery of water bottles below the floor, which served to store heat for the night. Buck later helped me design a Trombe wall, which is essentially a thin vertical “greenhouse” with an airspace of three to six inches mounted on a wall painted black and with enough mass to absorb the heat of the sun over the course of a day and to transmit it through the wall, adobe in our case, into the living space at night. Our first, built around 1975, may also have been New Mexico’s first; we have since added two more Trombe walls, one to another living room wall, plus one to the guest house.
The 1970s were also the heyday of the attached solar greenhouse, as championed by Bill and Susan Yanda. These were essentially low-cost, lean-to structures, built ideally against an adobe wall, double glazed with clear plastic or fiberglass. The program was particularly successful in the Costilla area, where a few may still survive. We built one, 30 by eight feet, against our south-facing bedrooms, where it generated good heat, if a little too good in the spring and fall. Over the years, we revised it twice, ending up with vertical double-glazed panels, with some summer shading, an iteration that has served us well for the past 20 years. Besides generating heat, we used it for starting up to 10,000 seedlings in the spring and for curing winter squash and gourds in the fall. A perhaps final revision will come this spring when we expand it to 14 by 30 feet, pour an insulated concrete floor and add a heat pump water heater to convert excess heat into hot water for the house.
For a long time I thought a photo-voltaic system to generate our electricity would remain unaffordable. But the lines crossed when the price of PV panels dropped precipitously and, along with home mortgage interest rates, essentially zeroed out the difference between the cost of principal and interest to finance the system and the cost of electric power from the grid over the next 15 years. Assuming an eventual rise in electricity rates and the eventual imposition of a carbon tax that will force utilities with coal and natural gas plants and oil companies to finally begin paying for their earth-destroying forms of pollution, we’ll come out ahead. Not to speak of the fact that our farm has taken a major step toward reducing its carbon footprint.
For years, I waited and hoped and lobbied for a change in U.S. energy policy that would follow the lead of the Germans, the French, the Spanish and the Canadians and actively encourage alternative energy projects with low-cost guaranteed financing. Now I wonder whether that change will ever come about, given the inability of Congress to agree on anything that might help the collapsing environment. In a narrow, self-interested way, the wait has been prudent: a solar pioneering friend told me that a PV system smaller than ours cost him almost three times as much in the 1990s. Prudent, as long as one ignores all the carbon we’ve been responsible for in that interval.
In a recent speech, environmental activist and writer Bill McKibben, who has launched a campaign through 350.org to encourage individuals and institutions to divest themselves of fossil-fuel company shares, maintained that the real environmental radicals of our age are the oil companies, whose practices will ultimately destroy the environment as we know it if they are allowed to extract all the oil left in the earth.
The true conservatives, he said, are those of us who are trying to reduce our carbon footprints, reduce our consumption and use non-polluting sources of energy in order to save an earth that has created and nurtured all that we depend on and value.
Stanley Crawford writes and farms in the Embudo Valley.
