Solar electricity for 10 low-income families, USA

Here's a photo from one of our recent volunteer solar installations in San Francisco's Bayview/Hunter's Point neighborhood. At front are the homeowners who participated in the installation team. Check out the old polluting smokestack in the background - this neighborhood has suffered from very high rates of asthma due to that power plant, which just got shut down due to local activism. We're helping make the transition to renewable energy here while saving money for folks who really need it!

A GRID Alternatives client and his sons celebrating having installed their new electrical inverter. This family recently moved into a new Habitat for Humanity development in East Oakland, and participated in one of our volunteer solar installs as part of our Solarthon 2006 event. This inverter converts the DC power from their roof into AC power that their home can use, while also helping them track how much electricity the system is producing.

This is a great picture from one of our March installations in Southeast San Francisco. Thanks to all the hills in SF you can get some great views from our rooftops there. For those of you interested in volunteering but afraid of heights, there's plenty of work to be done on the ground as well. And as you can see, our roof team volunteers wear harnesses to keep them safe.

Here's the volunteer installation team from a recent Habitat development built by Habitat for Humanity Santa Cruz County. GRID Alternatives has recently been starting to expand outside of the San Francisco Bay Area. This year we'll be expanding as far south as Bakersfield in Central CA, and as far north as Lake County in Northern CA. Our hope is that next year we'll start the process of creating our first chapter in another metro area.