The following is a guest blog post from Solar Spring Break participant Abhishek Rao, a graduate student at Arizona State University. Learn more about our Solar Spring Break program here!
Solar Spring Break with GRID Alternatives in the Central Coast has been the best week of my life so far! Atascadero, CA and all of the California central coast was such a beautiful place to spend spring break at, we were glad this was our project site! Arizona State University had a crew of eleven graduate students in the solar energy engineering and commercialization program participating in Solar Spring Break. We drove down in three cars from Phoenix, AZ, halting a night near Joshua Tree National Park, and arrived at Morro Bay State Park to see that the GRID team had already set up tents for us. Camping out four nights of the week was definitely one of the highlights of the trip. There is something magical about gathering around a campfire, cooking a barbeque meal and s’mores, and talking in hushed whispers under a clear, starry camp sky.
The two days of installing solar panels on the two low-income houses in Atascadero were the biggest takeaways of our trip. The GRID staff taught us more in two days than we had learned in months at school! We put into practice all that we had studied from textbooks about residential solar systems, right from surveying the site, using the cool SunEye tool to determine shading, designing the system, and actually installing it with our own hands. The GRID team made sure to explain every step of the installation process and let us do most of the install work, all the while looking out for our safety up on the roofs. Solar Spring Break has definitely added a much-needed real-world perspective to my experience studying solar energy engineering at school. I would highly recommend that my juniors at ASU and friends at other schools spend their Spring Break with GRID Alternatives in the future.
GRID not only facilitated the design and installation training, which were the prime highlights of our trip, but made the entire work week all the more enjoyable with other items on the itinerary. In the evenings after the install, we had time to go exploring the Central Coast: we made a trip to Hearst Castle, hiked up Black Hill, went wine-tasting at a winery in Templeton, and hit Pismo and Morro Bay beaches. Friday the 13th proved to be a very lucky day for us when GRID Alternatives arranged for us to visit the world’s largest solar plant – the Topaz Solar Farm in the Carissa Plains. This was a high point for the team from Arizona State University because it is rare to be able to walk around a fully-functional solar plant of this size and to get to speak with their engineers and staff. GRID enabled us to enter the control room of the plant, where real-time power production is monitored and beamed back to First Solar’s headquarters in Tempe, AZ!
My personal favourite part of Solar Spring Break was the night we stayed at Piedras Blancas Light Station. It was a childhood dream come true, visiting a lighthouse let alone spending the night in one! The biologist-in-residence at the light station described the plant and marine animal life surrounding the lighthouse in great detail. It was a surreal feeling to sight grey whales and sea otters in the Pacific waters! We drove back to Phoenix via Los Angeles with lots of learning and lovely memories from our fun week at Solar Spring Break. On behalf of my crew from Arizona State, I would like to sincerely thank the team at GRID Alternatives for the amazing work that they do, and for creating an unmatchable experience that, I am sure, we will all cherish for our lifetimes.