Luminalt’s Environmental Impact
In our 15 years of operation, our organization has, to date, offset over 54,086 tons of carbon dioxide (CO2)* (calculation source) through our work in solar and energy storage installation across the San Francisco Bay Area. This CO2 would have been produced and released into the atmosphere by the burning of nonrenewable fuels, such as coal, natural gas and diesel used in generators and power plants, and gasoline used to power internal combustion engine cars.
To put this number into perspective, 54,086 tons is roughly equivalent to the emissions produced when powering 8,307 homes with fossil-fuel based electricity in a year…
…or consuming 113,598 barrels of oil
…or driving 10,600 cars for one year.
Every day that the sun shines, the clean energy produced by our projects around the Bay Area continues to make a positive impact on the environment.
How is our carbon dioxide offset measured?
Roughly, one kilowatt (kW) of installed solar panels produce about 4 kilowatt-hours of electricity a day (or, 1,460 kWh of electricity per one kW of solar panels). According to the EPA’s Greenhouse Gas Equivalencies calculator, one kWh of electricity generated by American power plants produces 1.6 pounds of CO2.
For every project, we multiply numbers of days that installation has been in operation by kilowatt size of the system by 4 kilowatt-hours by 1.6 pounds of carbon dioxide to get the number of pounds of CO2 that the project has offset.
(# of days in operation)(kW size of system)(4 kWh)(1.6 pounds CO2) = total pounds of CO2 a system has offset since its installation
These sums are added up and divided by 2,000 (to convert to tons) to provide total CO2 tonnage offset by all of our projects.
* Last revised 7/17/2020.
