Practical Clean Energy in the Hudson Valley

Practical Clean Energy in the Hudson Valley & What Benefits/Results You Should Expect

By Lindsay Suchow, Hudson Valley Clean Energy

It’s pretty obvious why solar power is so effective in states like California, Florida, and Arizona; you’d be hard-pressed to find a day that isn’t warm, sunny and clear in the southern and western United States. But just because we Northerners don’t have the luxury of owning anything but tropical shirts, sandals, and sunglasses doesn’t mean that we can’t harness the power of the sun just as well as individuals do on the west and gulf coasts.

In fact, temperature has little-to-nothing to do with the effectiveness of solar power – something that we are well aware of at Hudson Valley Clean Energy, New York State’s largest and most experienced solar installer. Hundreds of homeowners, businesses, municipalities, and nonprofits all over the Hudson Valley have also snubbed this widespread myth about solar power and are taking full advantage of this unlimited natural resource every day.

An all-too-common misconception about solar energy is that a warm climate is required in order for the sun to be a viable source of power for our homes and businesses. However, evidence actually supports the contrary. Solar energy is not measured by heat, but rather in peak sun hours per day. When compared with the rest of the country, the Hudson Valley and the entire northeast compare quite favorably to states such as California and Florida. The city of Los Angeles, for example, averages 5.2 peak sunlight hours per day; the city of Miami averages 5.2 hours. Meanwhile, here in the Hudson Valley, we average about 4.5 peak daylight hours – which is really not that much less than the warmer areas of the United States.

Sure, we tend to have higher amounts of cloudy, gloomy days than the Sunshine and Golden states, and our winters tend to be jam-packed with brutal snowstorms, icy conditions and sub-freezing temperatures. This is a harsh reality we were reminded of far too often this winter, which local utility Central Hudson Gas and Electric Corporation has dubbed the most devastating winter in the history of the company. Still, this bears very little relevance in the effectiveness of solar technology, since solar systems in the Northeast produce an approximately 5-to-10 percent higher power output than systems in the south. Lower year-round temperatures create a lower electrical resistance in the solar modules (or, more popularly referred to as “solar panels”), as well as other components such as electrical inverters. Since the output generated from solar modules is actually higher in cold temperatures, the gap between solar energy’s effectiveness in the northeast versus the southwest is closed even further.

So forget everything you thought you knew about solar power and embrace the power of the sun. Our customers are generating their own power naturally every day, whether it’s a fraction of their energy demands or 100 percent of their total electric usage. And with other technologies such as solar hot water and geothermal heating and cooling, it’s even possible to produce more power than you actually use – like Hudson Valley Clean Energy’s groundbreaking carbon-free headquarters in Rhinebeck, the first of its kind in the region.