let the sun shine in
Sunday, June 22, 2008 at 03:12PM Nothing gets stuck in your bean like the 5th Dimension. It was what wormed into my ear and hummed out my head at Aunt Leslie and Uncle Stu's Summer Solstice party. It was at their place last summer where I worked with several other people hoping for free beer while assembling a huge array of solar panels. Now they produce so much energy that on many days they give power back to the grid. Their meter actually spins backwards!
And yesterday we got an entire keg!
Along with the sixty-panel array, Leslie and Stuart have panels on their roof that heat and recirculate water throughout the house for both heating and hot water needs.
The party was a good one, an enclave for a mostly progressive crowd that queried the existence of meat in the tapas and drank keg beer out of cups made of corn. These weren't your new school veggies and greenies, but Boulder's original liberal, the academic kind that in the 70s built geodesic domes, cursed Mork and Mindy, and found success in the growing field of computers. One IBM could calculate the distance to Denver in just over an hour. It was a time of great possibility.
Seriously, here's something Jimmy Carter said in 1979 about the solar panels installed on the White House:
"A generation from now, this solar heater can either be a curiosity, a museum piece, an example of a road not taken, or it can be a small part of one of the greatest and most exciting adventures ever undertaken by the American people; harnessing the power of the Sun to enrich our lives as we move away from our crippling dependence on foreign oil."
Sadly, according to this documentary, after Reagan removed the panels, they eventually did end up in a museum. (And what's with having the Swiss make this film? Do we have dependence on foreign filmmakers, too?)
Q did well...Aunt Leslie rescues animals (pigs, ducks, rabbits, cats) and has a huge collection of stuffed animals.
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