Milestone for Tennessee solar: The First Megawatt Site in Tennessee
It exists! Ask Robby Thomas, the installer, if it is real. “One small step for man and one giant step for mankind.” Here in Greater Knoxville is our first megawatt site of solar photovoltaic panels on Andrew Johnson Highway on five and a half acres. It is impressive when you see how little ground holds one megawatt. It is a solar pioneer’s dream come true. It is working delivering electric power to the electric distributor. The fuel is free and will remain free for the next 30 or more years. It dispells the myth that the Tennessee is not a good site for solar: totally wrong! As the price of solar reaches the point where it makes sense for the homeowner to install solar on their homes and commercial buildings, our electric distributors and TVA have to reinvent their business model to incorporate the new distributed power sources into the system. Taking a system that was invented some hundred years ago and updating the system to incorporate a time and situation dependent power source into a normally constant power source system is not going to be easy, but it is a change that must be incorporated or there will be problems in the near future. The message to our electric power distributors is: “It is here, it is now so let’s work together.”
Stephen Levy
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