“Ready for Anything” article in Custom Builder

Custom Builder Magazine’s current issue has a good overview of resilience measures that can be incorporated into new custom homes. The article, “Ready for Anything,” describes how a half-dozen builders are addressing resilient design in their respective climates.

Near the end of the article, my own system that allows me to draw power from our rooftop solar array during a power outage isn’t described quite right—but the basic concept is correct. If the electric grid is down and it’s sunny out, I’m able to manually disconnect from the grid, and my TL inverter from SMA allows me to plug into an outlet beneath the inverter and draw AC power (see photo). This doesn’t power the whole house, and the disconnect doesn’t happen automatically.

It’s still a good article!

Our 5 kW TL inverter from SMA (one of the first installed in the U.S.) at Leonard Farm in Vermont. Photo: Alex Wilson

David W. Orr, Ph.D

David W. Orr is Paul Sears Distinguished Professor of Environmental Studies & Politics, Emeritus. He also served as “Counselor to the President” of Oberlin College for ten years. He is the author of eight books, including Dangerous Years: Climate Change and the Long Emergency (Yale, 2016) and Down to the Wire: Confronting Climate Collapse (Oxford, 2009) and co-editor of three others. He has authored over 220 articles, reviews, book chapters, and professional publications. In the past twenty-five years he has served as a board member or adviser to ten foundations and on the Boards of many organizations including the Rocky Mountain Institute, Bioneers, and the Aldo Leopold Foundation.

He is currently a Trustee of the Alliance for Sustainable Colorado, Children and Nature Network, and the WorldWatch Institute. He has been awarded nine honorary degrees and a dozen other awards including a Lyndhurst Prize, a National Achievement Award from the National Wildlife Federation, leadership awards from the U.S. Green Building Council (2014) and from Second Nature (2012), and a lifetime achievement award from Green Energy Ohio and the North American Association for Environmental Education. He has lectured at hundreds of colleges and universities throughout the U.S., Europe, Latin America, and Asia. He headed the effort to design, fund, and build the Adam Joseph Lewis Center, which was named by an AIA panel in 2010 as “the most important green building of the past thirty years,” as “one of thirty milestone buildings of the twentieth century” by the U.S. Department of Energy, and as one of “52 game-changing buildings of the past 170 years” by the editors of Building Design +Construction in January, 2016. He was instrumental in the design and funding of the Peter B. Lewis Gateway Center. He is the founder of the Oberlin Project and a founder of the journal Solutions. His current work is on the state of American democracy.