With Christmas quickly approaching, last weekend my husband and I embarked on the annual pilgrimage to the attic to retrieve our large Tupperware containers filled with festive decorations. As relatively new homeowners, the task of holiday decoration is still fresh and exciting for us, so I opened the boxes with the energy of a four-year-old on Christmas morning, eager to start decorating (I have been informed by more veteran homeowners that this chore loses appeal with each passing year).

When I came to the Tupperware that holds our outdoor Christmas lights, I paused, remembering a new homeowner discovery that we had recently made. Our 1917 home has zero – count ‘em – zero outdoor electrical outlets. I guess folks back then were less concerned with where their strings of brightly colored Christmas lights or summertime margarita blenders were going to plug in. Last year we had bypassed this problem by simply not putting up outdoor lights; we had just bought our house and were still trying to locate which box held the pizza cutter. Next year, we said. Well, next year is now and suddenly I was being forced to face, once again, the Christmas light conundrum.

I offhandedly wondered out loud to my husband if they made solar Christmas lights – this would not only be green, but also solve our lack of outdoor outlet problem. “Someone probably does – maybe online?” he offered. He also followed with the fact that they were likely to be spendy. I hopped online and Googled “solar Christmas lights” and lo and behold the first result was from Target, who was selling strings of solar-powered Christmas lights for $17. I was still skeptical. I used Target’s handy store finder to find stores that had the solar lights in stock – the three store nearest me were all sold out. I thought this either meant they are great and everyone wanted them or they were only stocking three boxes in each store. I went to the fourth-closest store to further investigate.

And there they were: Phillips 50 bulb LED white Christmas lights with an itty-bitty little PV solar panel, probably about 5×4 inches. I bought two, brought them home and wrapped them around my two little Christmas trees on either side of the front door. I planted the mini-PV panels in the ground near the trees and aimed them towards the sun. And just like clockwork that night at dusk the lights popped on, were bright, and stayed on all night past when we went to bed. All with nary an electrical plug, utility cost or GHG emission. Magic, I thought! And then, the more I thought about it the more I thought about the greater implications of buying solar Christmas lights. The lights worked great, were sold at a major national retail chain and were affordable enough that I could justify buying them (especially with now power costs to run the lights). It started to make solar power more real to me.

The U.S. currently has 8,775 megawatts of installed solar capacity and the cost of pv solar has been dropping by about 3.5 percent annually since 1998. While my little solar Christmas lights are a tiny example of residential solar energy, I started to see those 100 little lights outside my house as a harbinger of things to come. Maybe in a few years with a little more investment and development, we can swing over to Target to pick up some groceries, socks, cat food, and some bigger PV panels to power our entire house.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 25th, 2009 at 4:16 pm by Fresh Energy and is filed under Energy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.