Page 11 - The Noise September 2016

LOCALBIZNEWS : PROMETHEUS SOLAR & ‘PLUG & PLAY’
by cf SeiVerd
Loyal readers may recall Jim corning appearing in these pages several years ago. Back then, he was involved with the electric car club in Flagstaff, a group of local “old school” engineers who tinkered with the possibility of repurposing gasoline vehicles with an elec- tric motor and batteries; the upshot being one could convert an existing car into electric for a fraction of the cost of buying new from Tesla or another auto company.
Mr. Corning successfully converted a cherry red Kawasaki motorcycle and was easily spotted zooming through town at electric speeds that might have qualified him for a spot in the Grand Prix. Although the motorbike still roars on occasion, Mr. Corning now prefers the easy drive to work in a Chevy Volt, which charges at the shop and at home with solar, and utilizes an innovative small gasoline engine to recharge the electric motor as it drives.
He remembers his passion for alternative energy evolving as a student at MIT in the 1970s, where he witnessed firsthand the gas shortages that plunged the country into “a place of scarcity.” In his professional life, he worked with the oil industry on the Arctic coast, before moving to Flagstaff and starting up a company that manufactures specialty aircraft armor for the military’s peace keeping operations.
However, the lessons of his youth gave him pause to think outside the box in solving the energy problem now found here and throughout the developing world: how to power a nation without tapping into fossil fuel reservoirs, create more climate changing pollution, or mine for additional uranium resources in Grand Canyon or elsewhere?
In 2006, he began a new company with ryan Holtz, a West Point Mechanical Engineer who some may recall teaching solar energy classes at Willow Bend Environmental Center and Coconino Community College. The company, named Prometheus solar (after the Grecian who brought down fire from the gods) is a provider of rooftop solar installations throughout the region, and prides itself in the quality and variety of projects it has achieved in the past few years.
Prometheus’ most recent innovation is an alternative for anyone not quite ready to plunk down thousands of dollars into a home solar array. It allows a homeowner or renter to build “solar worth” one panel at a time, without changing electric meters, applying for a permit, or even notifying the electric company. [For the record, the current limit on solar generation without permitting in Arizona is 1000 watts; in states like Texas, it’s an open range.]
The “Plug & Play” solar Unit seems like such a simple solution, it’s remarkable it is not a part of everyday life already. More than a toy for the consummate utilitarian, the device is a fully housed stand-alone solar panel with a small inverter attached to its frame, and a regular three-pronged plug that fits a household outlet.
“There’s a couple extra steps. The inverter produces 240 volts, and so for a normal outlet
we have to step it down to 120 volts, so there’s a transformer. And we’ve added a monitor so you can actually see what it’s producing,” explains Mr. Holtz, and points to a unit facing south of the Prometheus production facility outlying Doney Park near Flagstaff. “So right now we’re producing 177 watts, and you can plan on, in Arizona, a little over a kilowatt hour a day per unit, which offsets your refrigerator usage, for the most efficient refrigerators out there.”
Designed with the ability to string together as many as four panels, Prometheus’ Plug & Play uses the nature of DC current so household electricity is pulled first from the closest source — the solar panel — before pulling from the meter. The result: a few hundred watts of electricity each day are generated cleanly by the Arizona sun, without reliance on fossil fuels or atom splitting from Palo Verde nuclear generating station.
While Mr. Corning at first used the Plug & Play as a teaching model, to highlight the ben- efits in class settings and to those who were interested in installing full residential systems, Mr. Holtz thought “why not develop this as a product?” and the side venture took off. To date, Prometheus has shipped a few hundred units, but believes the climate is right to ex- pand the line to new markets.
Speaking of the future of solar, Mr. Holtz envisions “just with thin-film and amorphous panels and photovoltaics, eventually you’ll see it as a film on a window and it’ll produce power. It’ll be everywhere, and there’s no reason that we shouldn’t be coating every surface with it. If the cost is low enough, and you can be generating your own power on all the surfaces of your house, why not?”
Meanwhile, Mr. Corning sees changes afoot in power distribution, “Maybe I’ll live long enough to see them start tearing down the high voltage lines because they don’t need them anymore. That’ll happen at some point.” In theory, with the advent of local power production — when households and businesses produce all their energy needs on site — transmission lines could be laid to retire. “They made good sense at one point; you had to transmit because power plants were big and dirty, or if they were nukes, they were big and dirty and dangerous, and so you wanted to have them a long ways from the city. But if all power is generated locally, then gradually that stuff will become obsolete.”
He laughs at mention of APS’ recent rate hike squawks over solar producers abusing its infrastructure, “Those poor guys, they own the biggest and newest nuclear power plant in the country, and I would hate to have to be paying the mortgage on that thing! They can pretend to like solar, but they’ll make dern sure they can make the payments on Palo Verde.”
As ratepayers like you and me are paying the note on the state’s nuclear facility each month, and it isn’t likely APS will lower its rates any time soon, we may have to rely on in- novations like the Plug & Play to take a bite out of the electric bill. PrometheusSolar.com
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