 So this is the EPA's Research Triangle Park campus, it is approximately 150 acres. We share a federal campus with the National Institute of Environmental Health Safety or NIEHS that the whole federal campus is approximately 550 acres. This is the EPA's largest site, it is by far the largest piece of property and building complex that the agency has ever built. Right now we're currently in building D of a seven building complex. This is a laboratory building and it's also an office administration building. We're currently standing in the atrium of one of the buildings, one of the laboratory buildings building D and as you can see it's a very well lit space. There aren't a lot of lights actually lit in here. You can see some of these decorative lights behind us. They're not even on right now, they're actually only on at night and that's just to keep the space lit because the sun does all the work. We call this passive solar. So the sun actually heats and lights the building during the day time. You can see some of the panels in the atrium rooftop above here. The color of the luminescence of that color actually helps ignite the light inside of the building here. This in fact lowers our electric load and our heating load in here because we don't have the sun burning through a glass into the space and at the same time we're also lighting a space without having to consume electricity to run the lights inside the building and an otherwise walled building. So this is the rooftop of building E that's actually the office side of this laboratory building and we have an amorphous silicon thin film array. This is more durable than the glass encased monocrystalline or polycrystalline solar panels you would see typically on the roof of a home. This is a 55 kilowatt array or 55,000 watts. I typically call this enough to power 8 to 10 energy efficient homes in the summertime and it adheres directly to the roof. Each of the strips that you see come as a 50 watt set. It just is a roll. You peel off the back of the roll and stick it directly to the rooftop. Once that's done, you connect it to either side of the electrical grid, the plastic sections that you see horizontally across here. And then those are sent into the building via the disconnect boxes at the end. So you can see a bit of the aging that's occurred in the eight years that these have been installed on this rooftop. So this is due to a couple of things. The sun is both good and bad. We're looking at both versions of that. So the solar panel is in taking the sun's energy. Sun's photons converting them to DC electricity for then later use as AC electricity within the building. But also the heating expansion and contraction because of the sun beating down on the top of the roof, you get an expansion of the solar panel. And at the same time, a different rate of expansion of the white rooftop. And all this expansion and contraction results in the wrinkles that you see of the shape of the solar panels on the roof down there. You can also see some slight discoloration. This is the sun degrading the surface and changing its chemical makeup on the surface of that particular solar panel. The sun's gonna degrade all substances, but it just matters the rate at which the sun will degrade that particular substance. So you see slight discoloration. Otherwise, even though you may see these wrinkles and this discoloration, this solar array is performing at 99% of its original rated capacity installed eight years ago. So a lot of media will tell you a solar panel has a 15 to 25 year life. That's typically what a company's media will state. That's the expected lifetime of a particular solar panel. But solar panels seem to be outlasting their expected lifetimes by two and three-fold. We see some in the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Golden Colorado, where their solar panels are 40 years old, yet still generating at 70% of their original capacity. So we have effectively no degradation in the first eight years of the life of this array. One other thing to think about is that when you replace a rooftop, especially a flat roof like this, where you're gonna get a lot of settling of pollen, dust, and dirt throughout the year, that when you want to time a solar installation with a roof replacement. So when it comes time in 10 years to replace this roof, that might be a good time to change out the solar technology on the roof. But we won't want to do that before then. Because if we were to put new solar panels on one year before a roof replacement, then you have to spend a lot of money pulling off the solar panels, putting a new roof on the building, and then reinstalling the solar panels, and all of that labor adds up to an additional cost. But these are less efficient and more expensive than the typical types of solar panels you would see every day driving around your neighborhood. Because this type of solar panel only has one layer of solar cells, and you can't stack multiple layers on top of each other and then encase that in glass. So you have fewer solar cells per unit area, and that will affect the efficiency. Because the idea behind the efficiency of a solar panel is literally to cram as many solar cells within each square inch as possible. So because of that single layer design, you're going to have less efficient solar panels per unit area. And in addition to that, because it's made to be durable, the extra materials that are used in this to add to the sticky surface on the back, and the ability to roll it up, and then just toss it on a truck and deliver it to its site. These are actually more expensive per unit watt of generation, so less efficient and more costly equals a decision to go with another type of technology. We actually get a data point for every one of our solar arrays every 15 minutes. And all of that data is stored in a spreadsheet. We trend that data and report it to our headquarters. So each type of our demonstration scale projects here are reported side by side to show which ones are more efficient, which ones are working better for us and enable us to provide some data to present to the public about which technologies are better than others. So this is an inverter. This will literally invert DC electricity to AC electricity or vice versa, depending on which direction you need to go. If we were to store a battery, store electricity in a battery, we would do that. When it's DC, send it to the inverter. And then that inverter converts it to AC electricity for use in the building for the plug loads for all of the heating and cooling within the building. And also to light the building. So that noise, most of that noise is actually coming from the transformer. So we have a high voltage coming into the building, 480 volts to be exact, AC electricity. So we then want to transfer that voltage. We want to turn that voltage into 120 or 208 volts. And in that transformation, we're actually getting some both heat and electrical losses. So we're getting a lot of noise in here. We're having a lot of losses to the tune of about 20% in just one transformation of a voltage to another. So we want to minimize the number of times we transform one voltage to another level. So our entrance roadway between the gates that access the campus have approximately 70 solar roadway lights. They're not connected to the electrical grid. They have a solar panel atop them and then a battery which stores the solar energy generated throughout the day to power the lights at night. So we have currently have a CFL bulb installed with a lawnmower battery with a solar panel on top of that. We're trying to make a push to convert all of those to LED lights and lithium ion batteries which will allow the lights to last more than one night on the case that we have a cloudy day. So that after the cloudy day is done, we still have enough energy stored in the batteries to power the lights during the next night. Within the state of North Carolina, we see a great variance of wind west east part of the state. So in the mountains and at the ocean, we're averaging wind speeds of on the range of 12 to 20 miles per hour at any given time throughout the year. And in the middle part of the state, we have a lot of plain areas which don't have a lot of elevation differences. So the wind speed is actually lower and actually within the triangle of North Carolina Research Triangle, we have an average wind speed of about four and a half to five miles per hour. This is not enough to power a standard wind turbine which has a blade cut in speed, the speed to get blades moving of nine miles per hour, nine to ten miles per hour. New designs have come about to allow for both vertical axis and lower cut in speeds for the blades so that we can utilize wind turbines here as well. So we're currently looking at opportunities to install wind turbines with with blade cut in speeds even down as low as one and a half to two miles per hour so that somebody with a low wind speed such as the Raleigh Durham Chapel Hill area we could operate and renewably generate electricity in methods other than just solar power. So we're hoping to install some low speed wind turbines on our on our plaza area outside of our main entrance and as well as a hillside at the north end of our campus. So evaluation factors to think about when choosing solar or wind, the predominant renewable energies that would be supported in the state of North Carolina are what's the average wind speed around my house, how far above the trees do I need to be before I'm getting a good wind speed? Well if that's 300 feet then you're going to have to pay to install a 300 foot pole above above the tree tops in your neighborhood but you know if you have a very sunny area and you have some trees that are kind of offset from your from your rooftop then solar might be the better option there if you fill up your entire solar roof and you still have a windy area you know if you live in a windy area such as at the beach or in the mountains you can install both solar and wind on your rooftop and benefit from both types of renewable energy. A sustainability manager in a typical day job would work in stem outreach. We'd also provide ideas for work sites to increase their sustainable footprint through pollinator gardens, renewable energy, expanding energy efficient installations across campus such as LED light change outs, better HVAC systems. I am a mechanical engineer by education and also by trade here at the EPA but in serving as a sustainability manager that also required a bit of the belief system aspect to it. You want to be an ardent environmentalist to serve in a passion driven organization such as the EPA. So the environmentalist effort, the environmentalist belief system is one that kind of drove me to come here. So generally speaking a stem education would be an appropriate education method to to qualify yourself for a federal government agency working in environmentalist efforts.