Over the last few days at the lunch table we’ve had a big discussion about electricity and how to minimize our use of it and how to generate at least some of our own in a green way. Ironically this morning our offices lost power. The entire downtown of Charlottetown lost power to be precise. Luckily we have a nice UPS system for the servers and the cadillac of small generators to keep ourselves alive (we did loose our Internet connection though due to an upstream provider loosing its power as well).

We’ve been seeing around North America over the past few years that our weather is getting more bizarre and our power is going out more often. We at silverorange think that it’s time to start looking at how we as a business and property owner can start to reduce our dependency on “the grid” and generate power in a clean way. The end goal will be to supply ourselves with a steady stream of power and maybe even feed some back into the grid (thanks to proposed new provincial legislation).

This will be a fairly interesting endeavor. Sure a lot of houses (geo-domes no doubt) out in the country are self sustaining, but do they have a server room and a massive air conditioner to cool it? Probably not. Being downtown and having unique power concerns will make this a fun project. We’ll keep you posted on our findings and progress.