Going Green: Solar Energy and Pet Care – Pet Camp

Going green often means harnessing the power of the Sun. Well, today the city of San Francisco unveiled an online map to tap the Sun’s energy. NBC 11’s Laurence Scott is here to enlighten us. Take it away, Laurence. So what’s the bright idea? It’s a first of its kind website, designed to estimate the solar potential for each and every rooftop in San Francisco.
If you’re considering the installation of solar panels on your roof to help save the environment or some money, check out how San Francisco is putting its residents and business owners on the map. This is a big deal. It’s a big step forward. In front of a large panel, Mayor Gavin Newsom was beaming about the city’s new web portal with Google Earth mapping technology, designed to help residents visualize the benefits of installing solar panels.
You can go and take a look right at the top of your building, right, your roof you’re living on, determine exactly the space that would be needed to put solar installation in, what it would cost, what kind of energy savings you would accrue. Every inch of the city’s 49 square miles has been mapped, from the Fog City Diner to Sunnyside Playground and everywhere in between, like Pet Camp, an animal boarding center in the Bayview district.
Solar panels are DC, direct current. Everything on the grid is AC. So this converts it from DC to AC. Yes, even in a city with a high prevalence of soupy, gray skies, the savings from solar are something to bark about. From a savings point of view, our power bill before we started doing a lot of our power saving stuff, was about $25,000 a year.
It is now down to under $9,000 a year. So we’re saving about $16,000 a year in our electric bill alone. We expect the system to pay for itself in between five and six years. And even though the mayor gets tripped up on the destination.details. San Fransisco is taking its green ambition to the streets. And if you’re like Mayor Newsom and can’t handle the dots, we’ve got a direct path for you at our website, nbc11.com in the featured links section.