Oakland Company Installs Solar Panels on Presidential Palace in the Maldives

Published on Friday, October 08, 2010
Last updated on 07:53PM, Friday, May 4, 2012
Oakland Company Installs Solar Panels on Presidential Palace in the Maldives

As you read this the switch for the newly installed solar panels atop President Nasheed's Presidental Palace in the Maldives is being flipped on.

What does this have to do with Oakland?

The project leader is Oakland-based solar company Sungevity, which designed and donated the installation. Sungevity is one of the partners in Put Solar On It, encouraging world leaders to put PV systems on their homes. President Nasheed, who will be installing some panels himself, was the first world leader to take up the challenge.

On a conference call earlier this week, President Nasheed said the decision to install the solar photovoltaic (PV) system was an easy one.  He highlighted how solar is a smart, affordable investment that creates jobs, saves money on energy bills, and combats the pollution causing climate change and health problems. As low-lying islands, the Maldives face extreme risk from global climate change and rising sea levels.

“To be going on with the obsolete technology is, in my mind, madness,” President Nasheed said on the call.

According to Sungevity founder Danny Kennedy, the solar system on President Nasheed's palace will provide half of the residential power needs.

Sungevity is the also company that launched the Globama campaign to encourage Obama to put solar on the White House campaign. Over 50,000 people signed their petition, which was delivered--along with an old Carter-era panel--to the White House last month as part of the Solar Road Show with 350.org organizer Bill McKibben.

While many other world leaders were inspired by the campaign to put solar on their residences, the Obama team passed. However, this week the White House announced it was going to put solar up next spring. Though Sungevity offered a free installation, the White House announced there will be a competitive bidding process.

See a video of the installation in the Maldives

About Ryan Van Lenning
Ryan Van Lenning is a writer and organizer focusing on issues of social justice and sustainability. He is also passionate about food justice/urban ag, anti-militarism, and building alternative economies in resilient cities. His work appears in Ecolocalizer, Truthout, Huffington Post, Terrain: Northern California’s Environmental Magazine, and Matador Change. Prior to becoming caught in the web of Bay Area ink-slinging and activism, he taught in the Humanities Department at a community college in Ohio, where he created courses in Environmental Ethics and World Religions: Peace and Violence. He is both a hyper-localist and a globalist, a home-body and travel-addict, and a city explorer and nature aficionado, just a few of the many paradoxes with which he is afflicted. Contact him at ryan@oaklandlocal.com, follow him on twitter @vanlenning, and find more at his blogs Pull the Root, Travelin' Bones, and Rumi and the Cholo.
livegreen commented at Fri, 4 May at 11:23pm

Solar might be " affordable investment that creates jobs" & "saves money on energy bills" but that does NOT mean that it is "smart" -or- that it "combats the pollution causing climate change and health problems".

The context is important, namely the supply chain, & input and output from factories producing it.  If the mining of the rare earth minerals lead to contaminated water supplies and air...if the factories making the panels are dumping the effluent & toxic materials into the waterways and ocean and polluting air (as many of them are), 

CHEAP does NOT equal GREEN & does NOT mean it "combats pollution causing climate change and health problems".

The vast majority of solar panels cheaply produced in China probably CONTRIBUTE "pollution causing climate change and health problems".

One of the preeminent environmentalist-entrepreneurs Paul Hawken has called solar a "dirty energy".

Just like any industry, cheap production of solar panels poses much more of an environmental hazard to our planet & animals than more expensive production of the same product.

Buying Cheap ANYTHING = Pollution