Xcel Energy installed a bi-directional solar utility meter at my townhome here in Highline Crossing Cohousing Community a couple of days ago while I was in Europe on vacation. The first thing I did when I got home on the evening of June 16 was to turn on my 6 kW ARE Solar installed solar system šāļø.
With the flip of a switch, we began producing solar electricity here, adding to the 19.6 kW worth of solar we already have at Highline Crossing Cohousing on our community center and on our shared garages. The 9.3 kW system on our garages powers three EVs, including my 2020 Chevy Bolt.
It’s a great feeling to be online with my own solar system, for which I invested about 18 months worth of time and effort in order to get our community to approve the right for individual townhome owners here to have solar installed on community owned/shared rooftops.
It is, of course, a drop in the bucket and not nearly enough, not the 25.3 kW worth of solar here in Highline Crossing, with 4.5 kW more to be added in July sometime by ARE Solar on another neighbor’s townhome rooftop here, not the approximately 100 gigawatts of solar that has gone up so far in the United States, and not the approximately 800 gigawatts of solar installed globally so far.
The world needs terawatts and terawatts of solar.
The fact that my 6 kW home solar system — which I plan to use in order to get very close to being 100% fossil fuel free in my town home — is a tiny drop in the bucket has always been clear to me.
However, this sense on my part, and reality, was accentuated by a trip to Europe that I just completed — my first in six years — with my oldest daughter. There are SO many people in the world, as throngs of people in Paris, Vienna and Stuttgart, among other places, clearly underscored to me. So many cars and trucks and vehicles as well, billions of them, so many homes, offices, buildings, billions of these as well.
We have a long way to go to get to 100% renewables, something we have to do as quickly as possible in order to avoid destroying the fragile, amazing, wonderful, razor thin biosphere that protects the earth, and all living beings on earth, from the brutal, harsh, radiation laden and frigidly cold vaccuum of outer space.
Six kW of new solar isn’t going to be enough to pull this off, but at least it’s something. And it, along with my 13 years of solar advocacy, which has resulted directly in 36 kW more worth of solar populating the world, is all that I can do. It is my hope that countless others follow through on going solar as well: My neighbors here in Highline Crossing, my fellow Coloradoans, Americans, and as many as people around the world as possible.
