Sunny Days Ahead
Solar power at Kiskiack
charges the golf carts
and allows more
money to be invested
elsewhere.
“You don’t have to go all or nothing with solar systems,
you can get into relatively small systems to start out.”
–Carl Zangardi
increase the percentage of production to
35 or 40 percent at peak performance.
“I always like to err on the conservative
side,” he said. “Even if I’m doing 15 to 20,
it’s still worthwhile over time because it’s
a 30-year life on these things.”
TRENDSETTERS?
Zangardi was in Ireland earlier this year
and visited a shop, The Burren Perfum-
ery in County Clare—“In the middle of
nowhere,” he said—where they have solar.
“[They] had a neat display in the shop that
shows what they are generating, and we
have the same capability, I just haven’t
gotten to it. I think the [Kiskiack] mem-
bers think it’s kind of cool.”
During the unveiling in May, attendees
had the opportunity to climb on the main-
tenance-building roof to see the solar
panels up close.
“I would like to have a screen display
showing what we are producing,” said Zan-
gardi, who doesn’t miss a day checking on
the output. “I get a kick out of it.”
Solar United Neighbors has facilitated
more than 700 installations in Virginia since
2014. One of those installations is the Rising
Silo Brewery in Blacksburg, the only one in
the Commonwealth using solar power.
Sutch said he would like to see more
golf courses go solar. Zangardi suggested
the VSGA could form its own co-op and
help owners throughout the state with a
co-op program.
“What we see is a lot of people over-es-
timating the cost. You don’t have to go all
or nothing with solar systems,” Sutch said.
“You can get into relatively small systems
to start out. There is certainly a value pro-
ducing clean, local energy. Carl essentially
is becoming an energy producer.”
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KISKIACK
“We guide [co-op members] through
the process to see if it’s a good fit then
leverage the numbers of the group to bid
out to a single installer. The group selects
the installer and through the group eco-
nomics of scale, the participants are able
to get a pretty substantial discount,”
Sutch said.
“From the time we started, Carl real-
ly had an interest in it from a business
angle. … He obviously wanted to get some
environmental benefits. He saw the value
in solar technology and the value of the
group—he was looking into it for a while.
A lot of folks have similar stories: I’ve
been looking into this, but where do I
start? How do I know about the tech-
nology? How do I know about vendors?
I think that was really the value of the
co-op to him.”
The Kiskiack project cost $54,000.
The payback time is seven years but, “I
could see that being accelerated over
time. That’s assuming rates don’t go up,”
Zangardi said.
The second panel array Zangardi is pon-
dering would double the first and could