“Going Green” is a pretty popular buzz phrase these days. It seems like you can’t swing a bag of recyclables without hitting something that is Green lately. There are many things a company can do to go Go Green such as composting, buying off-setting carbon credits, going paper free in the office, or installing motion activated lights in seldom used areas. Still others donate 1% of their profits to environmental causes.

For Planet Bike, Going Green has been a multifaceted process. We started by switching to soy based inks and 30% post consumer waste in our catalog. Then this summer we continued with the minimizing of packaging materials on our products, and switched to more efficient LEDs in most of our lights as part of our “Tread Lightly” campaign. The latest chapter for us is installing a photo voltaic power array on the roof of Planet Bike HQ. This 10-Kilowatt system is being installed by our friends at Full Spectrum Solar, and will be the third largest of its kind in the Madison area.

We don’t use much power as it is, but we’ll only use about 1/3 of the power our system is able to generate, and feed the rest into the city’s power grid.

According to Niels Wolter the Solar Electric Program Manager at Focus on Energy, our estimated annual output will be around 12,000 kWh per year. As of today, most of the install work is finished, and the rest should be done by the first of the year. You can see some photos of the ongoing work here.