Does solar work in Seattle? Yes, if you’re the aquarium…
In June, the Seattle Aquarium installed its first solar hot water demonstration system. The system preheats water used in the second flood cafe by way of five solar panels that are located on the building’s south facing wall.
A press release from A&R Solar Corp., the company that installed the system, says the solar system isn’t just doing well. It says the solar collectors are offsetting almost double their expected amount. Reeves Clippard, president and co-founder of the company, said if solar works this well in Seattle, “the rest of the country has no excuse not to act now.”
Honestly, I don’t really know what to make of this. It’s a good thing that the system is performing so well. But a system that produces double what the models said it would makes me wonder what exactly that baseline was. Then again, we have had an amazingly hot, bright and sunny summer.
The system has a monitoring device that will eventually allow visitors to see how it is performing in real time. It uses Heliodyne Gobi flat-plate solar hot water collectors.
Tags: Energy efficiency, Energy information, Seattle, Solar, solar hot water heaters
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August 19th, 2009 at 12:38 pm
Here is a link to the actual monitoring data, provided by FatSpaniel: http://view2.fatspaniel.net/BEF/seattleaquarium/EndUserView.html
August 26th, 2009 at 2:36 pm
Katie, it turns out that the real performance of the system is so much larger because of the hot water usage in the building. During the modeling phase there were many assumptions made about how much hot water was used and when. Now that we have real data we’ve been able to see that the solar matches up with the loads much more harmoniously than in the models.
August 26th, 2009 at 5:38 pm
it’s nice to know that when people take off thier blinders and not worry only about payback time, things can get done and beautifull results happen. Good luck Aquarium on this and future enviromental projects,lead by example