One day during the final inspection of the roof of our new 70,000 square foot building a group of us were standing on top of the building and we looked at how big the roof was. Somebody said "It would be great if we could turn this into manufacturing space, wouldn't it"? A few weeks later it dawned on us. You can produce something on the roof that the world needs: clean cheap electrons!

In September of 2009 UPB completed the first phase of our Rigid building solar farm. We worked with Park City based Utah Solar to do the installation and it was complete in one week. The first phase is the infrastructure and 10kW of solar production. The goal is to add on to the farm every year and grow it to an entire rooftop of solar production. This will power our building during the work week and we will sell it back to the grid on the weekends and holidays.

Using the Utah basic guidelines for measuring solar output, we will produce (on average) over 1400 kilowatts per month. For the company, this "starter set" of panels will provide about 5% of the power needed to run the Rigid Box division. In our case, generating the power via solar will offset more than 22,800 pounds of CO2 per year. That's similar to the amount of CO2 that is given off when 1175 gallons of gasoline are used! The plan to add to our solar farm will have us producing as much as 7000 kilowatts per month in five years.