Black Rock Solar

Hey folks-

I’m just back from a site visit to Rothbury, Michigan, checking out the location for our planned installation at Shelby High School, in conjunction with the ROTHBURY festival.

We’re planning to do a minimum 6 kilowatt installation there this summer–and perhaps a lot more. We’ve heard a whole lot of the people buying tickets to the event are “upselling” their ticket, with the added donations going directly to adding even more power to this project. We’ll also likely be there during the event offering solar-powered recharging for cell phones and PDAs to participants.

Meanwhile, the crew is making good headway on the Natchez Elementary School in Wadsworth, and we’re lining up more projects to follow right on the heals of that one–it’s going to be a busy year!

Thanks to everyone for their support and donations, they make all this work possible.

-Tom Price, emailing from the Minneapolis Airport.

Black Rock Solar is hard at work on our latest installation–a 60KW array for the Natchez School in Wadsworth, NV. Take a look at the location from space right here.

This project started on Wednesday, March 19th, following approval by the Washoe County School Board. We expect to finish in a month or so, and it’s expected to save the school some $14,000 per year in energy costs. Of that, half will go to the school directly, while the other half will go to a special school district fund to support other conservation measures at other district schools.   All of the students who attend this school live on the adjacent Pauite Indian Reservation, and as far as we know this is the first–but hopefully not the last–solar project built in this community.

The array will be located on the triangle of land west of the school, next to HWY 447–so pretty much anyone heading north on that road, like folks going to Burning Man, will drive right past it.

If you’re in the area, feel free to drop by and say hi to the crew. And, if you think you might have time to donate a day or two to help build it, please email corey@blackrocksolar.org with your contact info, background, and interest.

After many fits and starts ( mostly due to their remote location, and the difficultly getting the right people and parts there at the same time to flip the switch ), our solar installation for the Pershing General Hospital is live and making power–check the real time production here.

As part of our committment with the ROTHBURY festival to install solar power at a nearby school, we’re looking to bring new partners in to help us streeeetch our donations, so we can build even more free solar power. Here’s the message going out on their site today. Got parts? Get in touch!

CALL OUT FOR SOLAR PARTNERS!

The Rothbury Solar Schools program seeks partners for our Shelby High School
solar installation, powered by Black Rock Solar and RE:VOLVE.
Specifically, we’re interested in hearing from people who can help us get great deals on
the equipment we’ll need to make green power from the sun. Every
penny we save will get plowed back into the array, so we can install
more solar, and save more money for the students at Shelby High
School. 100% of all the money saved from this program will stay in
the school for the benefit of the students.

So, if you know what these are, and where to get a good deal on them, get in touch!

Inverters
PV panels
Racking systems ( roof mount, likely ballasted)
Combiner boxes
Disconnects
BOS materials
-tom (at) blackrocksolar.org.

We’ve been selected as the official solar partner for the just-announced ROTHBURY festival, a four day, camp out concert event in Rothbury, Michigan. They’re committing a minimum of $50,000–with the possibility of much more, donated by participants– to build a permanent solar array on the nearby high school.

Read about the show, see the lineup here, and a news clip about it here, and all about our project here, under Special Rothbury Initiatives. It’s a really great event, with a really forward looking approach to how large events can go green!

In other news, we were honored yesterday by the Washoe County Commission, in a ceremony during their monthly meeting. They passed a “Resolution of Accomplishment” noting the work of Black Rock Solar, Sierra Pacific, MMA Renewable Ventures, SCHOTT Solar, and the Washoe Co. School District in “their effort to improve the quality of life for the Gerlach students” through our installation at the Gerlach school. Aw, shucks.

And then we toured the Children’s Discovery Museum in Reno, to inspect the site for a planned installation on that new facility, later this fall.

And last night, the Searchlight Town Advisory Board approved our moving forward with a plan to build solar on the Harry Reid Elementary School there in Searchlight, south of Las Vegas.

There’s more, but that’s enough for today, stay tuned!