Staten Island Ferry Terminal Solar Array, photo copyright (C) L. Furman. 2007. All rights reserved.

The next time you ride the Staten Island Ferry take a good look at the roof of the terminal on the Whitehall Street terminal on the Manhattan side, pictured above. You can see beautiful blue things that look like windows. They’re not windows. They’re photovoltaic solar modules. Just like the solar chips that power your calculators, and the solar powered walkway lights you see all over the suburbs, these convert sunlight into electricity, and provide power for the ferry terminal, Atlantis Energy Systems, late of Poughkeepsie, NY, produced the system.

If they solar electricity systems in the public schools and other buildings used as emergency shelters after Katrina, and those systems were configured to come on when the sun came out the morning after after the storm – as it always has and always will – then they would have had emergency shelters with power.

But unlike conventional emergency power systems, these would be emergency power systems that don’t use fuel, and that are used all the time. They are therefore more efficient and because they do not burn fuel they don’t create waste.

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Magnetek built the inverters used to connect the system to the electric grid.