Father and Son Risk Own Money To Install Acre of Solar Panels

Father and Son Risk Own Money To Install Acre of Solar Panels Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

INTRO: A Kalamazoo man has spent $1 million dollars and 4 months digging holes. He wants to give his son a career, stop the flow of dollars spent on foreign energy and help fight global warming. Michigan Now’s Chris McCarus has his story.

You could call Sam Field a risk taker and a Michigan patriot.

“We aren’t importing coal from somewhere else or nuclear fuel from somewhere else or oil from the middle east. This is Michigan fuel. This was all built with Michigan labor and parts. 90% of what’s here was made here.”

Here is a fence around an acre of farmland between Kalamazoo and Battle Creek. The fence encloses a million dollars of solar power equipment. Domesticated geese stand guard. Instead of tending to his law practice last summer, Field was digging holes here. His son Connor also dug holes and engineered the project.

“One day had to sit down with a bunch of excel spread sheets and plots and figure out what the path of the sun on the ground needed to be. And figure out how far the rows needed to be apart so they weren’t shading each other at any time.”

Connor and Sam adjust the panels to tilt in 3 different positions. They can generate electricity even on cloudy winter days. 2 friends joined them during construction.

“So we had to fabricate the rebar, fabricate the steel. And then we started working out here on site. We had to do grading. And then we had to dig the trenches to put the foundations in. And then build the racks on top of them.”

They had to figure out how many panels could be hooked up to a set of invertors. They ended up with 252 steel posts stuck into as many holes. 700 panels are now absorbing the sun. They didn’t build this from a kit. Such things might not exist. These guys had to innovate.

“We were gonna make this happen. We just said whatever it took.”

Permits from the township, negotiating the largest contract of its kind ever with Consumers Energy. And more and more dollars from Sam’s pocket.

Let’s hope we’re not wasting our money. We’re working hard. We’ve acquired a lot of intellectual property in the last year. When we’ve make mistakes we call it tuition.”

Sam’s been paying four years of that too. Connor’s getting his economics degree at the University of Michigan. But because of the project he wants to add an engineering degree and make a career out of solar energy.

“What we need to do is through the implementation of these renewable generating technologies as they get adopted on a larger scale the cost is gonna go down. Eventually it will reach a point where it’s at parity with other generation technologies. At that point the market is gonna explode.”

“The retail cost on each of those panels is between $800 and $1,000 dollars. And at that price coal and gasoline win. But you get that price down to about $100 a panel and these panels will win.”

Fields talks about a triple bottom line. Alternative energy helps Michigan’s economy, climate change and maybe it will decrease international battles for oil.

“As T. Boone Pickens said we were at one point exporting $800 billion a year offshore to buy oil. Well all that could be replaced here. Think about it. If all of our motor vehicles were electric we wouldn’t be spending any of our money offshore. We’d be building it here either with wind or solar. The challenge is the economics of it right now.”

Sam Field is 57. He’s about the same age as James Howard Kunstler. In his book The Geography of Nowhere, Kunstler writes, “Jimmy Carter told the American people the truth. And they hated him for it.” Says Sam Field.

“Jimmy Carter was right. Except he made a mistake. He asked the American people to live in cold houses, and drive slow in small cars. And they didn’t want to do that. We don’t have to do that. We just have to be smart.”

Sam and Connor Field have been waiting since September for Consumers Energy to figure out how to take in their electricity. When they do, they’ll send it onto the huge Eaton Corporation building nearby or to 25 houses.