It's exciting to help homeowners make their own environmental impact on the planet by committing to cleaner, greener energy, but it's also encouraging to look at the combined environmental impact of going solar with all of our customers put together, and see the scale of change that we're able to accomplish as a group.
To have some fun with anecdotal math, we looked at the energy that will be generated in 2021 by all of the solar power systems that we installed in 2020, and came up with combined environmental impact stats that use some very unique units of measurement:
- If you think of time in units of one-hour episodes of The Mandalorian, we installed enough solar to offset 178,886,400 hours of combined TV viewing, so feel free to binge on your favorite Star Wars series - we've got your back!
- If you wanted to focus your attention on a smaller screen, we installed enough solar to keep 11,180,400 iPhones charged for an entire year, so swipe away!
- If you added up all of the coal that doesn't have to get burned to produce the energy saved by our solar power customers over a year, it would fill 1,799 train cars. To put that in perspective, if you were sitting at a railroad crossing and a train that was 1,799 cars long came rolling past, you could watch the entire The Wizard of OZ movie on your iPhone before the train passed by and you could drive again.
- We're removing the same amount of carbon from the atmosphere as 5,444,468 trees do over the course of a year, which is enough to cover 11,992 acres, or an area that is 80% the size of Manhattan!
- We'll remove the same amount of carbon that gets produced by 804,571,440 miles driven in cars, which means that we're offsetting the carbon pollution created by the yearly total of 60,000 people driving. How far is 804,571,440 miles? You could drive your car to Saturn, and still drive another 58 million miles around Saturn when you got there! (Don't try this at home... Saturn is very cold, and the roads there aren't well maintained.)
We love to talk about joules and watts and kilowatt-hours, but sometimes it's fun to just think of these numbers in other real-world values, even if those values are a little silly. We're proud of the environmental impact of going solar that our customers contributed to in 2020, and we're looking forward to helping even more people make an even bigger environmental impact in 2021!
