jonathan
Park In the Shade, Recharge Your Plug-In Vehicle Dell’s headquarters in Round Rock, Texas, now have a shaded solar parking structure called the Solar Grove. It was built by Envision Solar , and it has a capacity of 130 kilowatts, which should help avoid about 145,000 pounds of greenhouse gas emissions per year. But the clean electricity is only part of the benefit; there’s also some energy savings that come from the shade produced by the “solar trees” since cooler cars don’t need as much A/C…. Read the full story on TreeHugger
Original post:
Dell HQ Gets a 130 kW Solar Parking Lot with Plug-In Charging Stations
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1 comment
December 6, 2009
While Envision Solar touts its accomplishment, the true accolades belong to McBride Electric located in Austin (Round Rock) Texas. It was McBride Electric that was the general contractor for Dell Computers and chose to use Envision for the structural design of the “Trees”. They [McBride] utilized other contractors for various portions of the project on various trades. Though there were significant issues involved with the structural steel by Envision that caused McBride to make in-the-field repairs and changes to the assembly, McBride overcame those obstacles and produced a great landmark installation for Dell. This is obviously just the very first of many installation of both covered parking and most likely roof top mounted photovoltaic system that Dell will be installing. The credit belongs to those at the general contractor [McBride Electric] and Dell for an outstanding project. I watched the building of this outside of my window.