The Zoo

[Sea Ray]

I came across this today and thought others might be interested so I'm passing it along. The Cincinnati Zoo is about to complete a solar canopy over the parking lot which will provide a fair amount of power for the zoo and provide shade for the folks parking there. It cost $11mill but from the sound of it, they paid for it through grants and tax credits thus no tax payer money was used. This could lead to more projects in the future.

As you are reading this, workers are busy constructing what will be the largest publicly accessible, urban solar array in the country — a 1.56-megawatt system with 6,400 solar panels installed on a canopy structure over the Cincinnati Zoo and Botanical Garddens' main entrance parking lot on Vine Street. Many zoo visitors (especially all the moms out there) will be happy to know that 800 of the zoo's 1,000 parking spaces available in the Vine Street parking lot will be shaded by the solar panel structure.


While you and the kids stay cool in the shade, the solar panels will absorb the sunlight and covert it into clean energy that will supply 20 percent of the zoo's energy needs. To put that in perspective, that is enough electricity to power 200 homes or enough electricity to play your favorite Wii game for 95 million hours. Many days the zoo will be completely self-sustaining and actually sending energy back to Duke Energy Company.

http://cincychic.com/content/view/3313/10044/

[NJReds]

That's a brilliant idea. Hopefully to be copied by other organizations. Think of how much power Disney could generate. Their parking lots are about the size of Connecticut.