A Commitment to Green Energy on Anna Maria Island

As well as our beautiful Pineapplefish homes, Mike and I also own other properties on Anna Maria Island. With all of these buildings, we have been able to fulfill a very personal passion; creating sustainable, compassionately developed green buildings, which utilise their environment such as sunlight (which is in abundance on Anna Maria) to support their functioning, such as hot water and electricity.

Not only do we want to help protect our climate and our Island resources, but we want to take a lead in the investment of optimum renewable energy sources and share and showcase our projects to help educate others, to support we hope a continuous increase in sustainable development for the future.

Here we share with you the 'green' initiatives we have undertaken already on Anna Maria Island.

2009 - BEACH BUMS We put up just under 5kW of solar power on the roof of Beach Bums at 427 Pine Avenue to see how effective it was at generating electricity for the store, before we 'took the plunge' on far bigger roof on the warehouse next door We invested just over $40,000. Read more about the project and see pictures of the panels on the roof at Beach Bums.

The installers, Solar Direct inc of Bradenton, believe this to be the first ever commercial photovoltaic solar installation on AMI. They also believe our latest projects (see below) are firsts - and big!

Then in June 2010, we went big:

PINEAPPLEFISH HOUSES We installed solar photovoltiac power and solar hot water heaters on 4 of our Pineapplefish homes, with the photovoltiac costing around $6/watt (the price had reduced from the previous year with the new technology) - we put between 2.7 and 5.2 mW onto each house. These will be rebated as before and will help reduce the bills there by at least 40%.

GINGERFISH WAREHOUSE We put up 102 panels, driving 3 solar inverters and generating peak power of 24 KW (54 Megawatt-hours/year on Gingerfish's roof at at cost of $160,000. We plan on usinga lot of this power across the road at the Green Village we are currently building, powering those commercial buildings.

Our solar power was installed by both Solar Direct and Harrimans of Venice Beach. And, very importantly to the implementation of our plans, we worked with the islands's resident Solar Power man Tom Stockebrand, a retired electronics engineer, who lives on Key Royale, but who has in previous years built his own solar house in Alburquerque AND drives his pick up truck on electricity generated by solar power at his own home. He has always stressed that on-site power generation is not only an excellent investment, but is also of double benefit to the environment. Power plants loose 2/3rd of the energy they use to generate electricity in it's production - by generating our own, we are effectively avoiding the use of 3 x that much use of fossil fuels in a power plant.

One of the benefits of putting in solar power is that whilst FPL costs will most certainly go up over the coming years, a big portion of our costs are covered by our investment and will effectively reduce the impact of FPL's increases. Effectively, the solar industry believes with power prices certain to rise, teh amortized cost of Solar Electricity will come down to equal the price of Utlity electricity within 5 years.

We plan on making as much as possible of our Green Village into a Zero Energy site, by which we mean great insulation, LED lights, solar hot water, and overall energy reduction so that our solar array can power the rest. Read more about Anna Maria Historic Green Village.