Delaware Energy: Seniors Home Installs New Solar Design

Tubular panels easily fit building's flat roof.

When Delaware's electric rates were deregulated in May 2006, the residents at Stonegates went on a search.
 
They were looking for ways to keep electricity costs down at their Greenville retirement community. They combined their brainpower to save power.  One of the ideas at the time was to install solar panels at Stonegates' Manor House. The 62,000-square-foot building consumes the most juice housing 16 apartments, 49 skilled-nursing beds and the commons area.

 
But, as in other commercial buildings, the roof is flat. Traditional solar panels are angled to capture the maximum amount of sunlight, so adjusting and maintaining such panels on a flat roof wasn't worth the additional costs.  "We were thinking that it might help us, but we found that it was too costly," said Allan Britton, one of Stonegates' 250 residents. "But we were sure that solar energy would reduce our costs."

 
Stonegates' residents simply had to wait for the technology to catch up with them.  Three months ago, 785 specially designed solar panels were installed in the Manor House, making Stonegates the first retirement community in Delaware to use solar panels as the primary power source. The panels are made with rows of tubes and represent the latest evolution in solar devices. Designed by Solyndra, a Fremont, Calif.-based company, the panels sit flat, making them ideal for commercial rooftops. The panels are projected to offset 196,000 kilowatt hours of fossil energy this year. Stonegates officials expect the community's annual electric bill of $120,000 to drop to about $95,000.

 
"We didn't do it to become the first retirement community with solar panels," said Charles Cantera, a managing partner for Stonegates. "We were very aware of the fact that we needed to keep our costs under control and look wherever we could to save money because it would help us keep our occupancy and it also keeps the residents happy."

 
Flat on roof  Photons from the sun are absorbed by solar panels and converted into DC electricity. From there, the electricity is routed into an inverter that transforms it into AC electricity that powers the building.

 
In the Mid-Atlantic states, traditional panels perform optimally at a 39-degree tilt because they fit and operate easily on pitched roofs. That's why they're more likely to be found on gable-roofed homes instead of flat-roofed buildings.
 

But Solyndra's panels are designed to be installed on commercial industrial rooftops and they lay flat instead of at an angle.

 
"Our uniqueness comes from
the fact that we don't require anything to hold down our panels," said Cara Morano, the eastern regional sales manager for Solyndra. "The panels are not doing anything to penetrate the roof membrane."
 
Each panel contains 42 tubes that harness sunlight across a 360-degree surface, no matter the height of the sun. There's no need to ballast the roof, as the panels sit flat on 18-inch legs, locked in together like Legos.

 
If a tube on a panel breaks, it won't knock out the rest of the panel. If there is major outage, Stonegates has backup emergency generators.

 
"This system is designed perfectly for the type of roof that we have," said Ken Hilbeck, the plant service director. "And because we didn't have to ballast these things, we're keeping all that extra weight off the roof."
 

They've been tested to withstand hail and 130-mph winds.

 
Morano said she is unaware of any other retirement community in the country that has Solyndra's panels. And Stonegates is the only building in Delaware with such panels.

 
Deregulation of electric rates will compel other companies to consider the tubular panels, said Peter Palmisano, a consultant for Flexera Inc., a green energy company in Harbeson that installed the panels at Stonegates.

 
"The landscape in Delaware is very different than other states because of deregulation," he said. "What you have then are these businesses in bad economic times with high energy bills. So many commercial businesses are needing to do very important things in a quick timeframe when it comes to electricity and they're looking at ways to make it sustainable."

 
The panels cover about 16,000 square feet of the Manor House. They are cleaned by rainfall, require no routine maintenance and have a 25-year guarantee.
Inside the Manor House is a monitoring station that provides readouts of how much energy has been used and how much carbon dioxide has been saved.

"It can give us an update about where we are today, and it quantifies the information for the residents," Hilbeck said. "It gives the people some visibility from inside the building to see what the panels are doing at that moment in time."

 
Expense subsidized Stonegates paid about $930,000 for the entire installation. But more than half those costs are expected to be subsidized through state and federal renewable energy grants.

 
More commercial buildings -- and likely, retirement communities -- have incentives to follow suit. A mandate requires Delmarva Power to use renewable energy to generate at least 20 percent of the electricity it sells in the First State by 2019.

 
Nationally, more businesses are being topped with solar panels since the U.S. Department of Energy last March awarded its first alternative-energy loan guarantee to Solyndra, which is expanding with the $535 million loan.
 
Link to article: 
http://www.delawareonline.com/article/20100124/BUSINESS/1240312