Visit Adath Israel Solar Stats (external site)
Adath Israel Congregation celebrates the completion of its three-year ‘green’ program to facilitate site-wide energy conservation and efficiency upgrades. An intangible benefit of this program has been to raise awareness with our membership and religious school students about the need for energy conservation, so we can all do our part to combat global warming. Rabbi Benjamin Adler reminds us that upon creating the first human beings, God guided them around the Garden of Eden, saying; ‘Look at my creations! See how beautiful and perfect they are! I created everything for you. Make sure you don’t ruin or destroy My world. If you do, there will be no one after you to fix it.’ (Midrash Ecclesiastes Rabbah 7:20).
Our solar energy harvesting project was recently completed and became operational in mid-April, 2017. With an electric energy production capacity of 138,000 KWh/Year, the system is expected to save Adath Israel nearly $238,000 over a ten-year period and an estimated $640,000 over a 20-year period, while contributing environmental benefits. The system implementation represents the most current technology available for this installation. The design incorporated high-efficiency, networkable ‘smart’ inverters. In addition, solar panel clusters are monitored and controlled by optimizers which can determine the energy production and operational status of each solar panel in the cluster. A link to a public portal provides information about energy production, organized in easily understood numeric and graphical forms. The electric energy produced by this system is also represented as ‘saved CO2 emissions’, ‘number of trees planted’ and ‘number of 100 Watt bulbs powered for one day’. The annual projected pollution reduction impact of our energy conservation programs save 275,000 lbs. of CO2 and other ‘green house’ gas emissions.
Photo Credit: Abe Abramovich
