Bob Cavello from Mercury Solar is one of the players in solar PV sales in Brooklyn. There aren’t many players and you get to know them all if you are in the green building community.
He has this great term: Solar Heroics.
Solar Heroics is when your installation pushes the limits of conventional solar installations. An installer likes a nice flat roof where they can lay the panels and be done with it. They don’t like puncturing the roof, they don’t like steep roofs, and forget about wall mounted or PV on pergolas. All of that just adds extra headache in logistics, paperwork, engineer fees, material costs, approvals…
This list of headaches is long when you attempt solar heroics. Like anything, the golden rule in solar installation is to KEEP IT SIMPLE.
But we at Eco Brooklyn love pushing the green envelope. When a “professional” tells us “It can’t be done” we hear, “There’s an opportunity to make it better.” Sometimes we don’t succeed, other times we do. But we always try.
And our answer to the “professional” is always, “How well is the current way working?” because the answer is current building methods are barreling us towards mass destruction of the planet. So no matter how great the current way is we need to change it or make it better. Because things are not working right now.
Green builders must push through the “Industry Standards” because those industry standards suck. They are literally killing us and our planet.
So needless to say we are doing some great solar heroics at the Brooklyn green show house. We have built a pergola on the roof to hold the Solar PV and thermal. And because of our huge affection for synergies we are putting solar PV on the south facing vertical wall above the windows so that they also double as sun shades during the summer.
We are in desperate times and desperate times call for solar heroics. Bob, who loves all solar, is trying to get Mercury Solar to agree to do the install but the verdict is not out on that yet. We shall see who ends up installing it….