SolarSMART Interview - SEA-WILKINSON-INF02
let's start with the type of home ownership renter or owner owner okay type of structure single family detached multi-unit townhome condo apartment it's single unit okay and the date you approximately moved in that should be pretty easy that was uh 90 let's say we got married at 96 1996 okay uh so have you always lived in county what's your county wilkinson county okay don't tell too many people that i live in the four county area really i can go a half a mile one way and a half a mile another being four different counties at one time just about where is that are you close to cochran too i'm about 25 miles from here allentown is more towards the interstate 16. oh okay okay um and so have you always lived in this county i was okay born and raised born and raised okay can you tell me how your family ended up in wilkerson county uh farm farming oh that's awesome um my grandparents and great granddaddy and father and i we've all lived on that one track for that one supply to land well how many do you have acres or do you have acres how many acres that family farms about 750 800 acres where you farm in wilson county right there oh what do you find uh we do uh cows beef cows we do cotton peanuts everything the first really that's a lot of acres so what you got going on now like what's what's in season now well jojo are rotating we got through corn we're in peanuts now and then we'll be going into cotton so how many do you plot peanuts on all those angles i don't know the the large majority of that is pine timber pine trees and so we actually farm probably about 350 400 acres of row crop and hayden cows wow what's included in real crop peanuts cotton oh that's the one and then the beef cow side we have pasture land and halen and that's for the cows how much do they have they have those acres down generally generally you know one cow per acre maybe two cows per acre and a half something like that by your stocking rate how many calories you got out there around about 80 head oh so you have a lot of land for them to roam on oh wow yeah but i don't do it all by myself i've got a lot of help from family and all too oh so it's like a family business well i i i get help to help manage it oh see i work with extension also full time right so you can't manage all nights and weekends and holidays yeah leave his farm too oh wow that's awesome makes me old real fast yeah that's a lot of man in fact we've even thought about solar panels but um really from a large scale size where are we going to put them on some of this land on some of the land how was you gonna use the solar panels well just depends on if there was an incentive program to help construct it um but after looking into it i don't know if payback's in there because it's so expensive to construct them right but how would that help your acres of land well it wouldn't help by acres it would just supply extra income after you get it paid off because the the power company would actually buy power right from me so don't you have to have like do you have whales on your we do do you all have a man just heard it right so would that help it possibly could but they're on a three-phase line not like our homes or a single phase you have to have a lot more voltages like 480 volts that run goes through to operate those pivots and the wells and things of that nature so yeah it takes a good bit of electricity to run those types of equipment so you think you would have to you would have to have phase converters and things like that to convert it over i don't know what it would cost to do something like that to be honest with you oh wow we'll get more into that baby i mean that's really interesting i have some more questions um so could you tell me a little bit about the home that you live in though very very old um did you um seriously the front part of our home is over 100 years old really oh it's a family um home yep what was it built all i know is over 100 years old whoa it still has original fat lot of pine and we kept the front we remodeled the front and left it basically like it was everything we modernized it oh so that's very very old house yeah i bet it's got some nice um original details in it too yeah it was uh it was extremely inefficient when we got it but we insulated it and put siding on and stuff like that okay yeah what is it um the type of structure is it brick or vinyl wood ice vinyl siding now vinyl siding but wood on the front well it's wood up under the vinyl siding oh okay yeah let's just call it bomb inside and what type of roof is it uh asphalt shingles okay okay and then um how many what's the square footage 1800 and then how many bedrooms um two two it could be three but we only have two oh they have two okay and then one that's the thing about those old houses yep okay we fight over the bathroom right so um why didn't you um adopt rooftop solar at your residence well of course back in 1995 or yeah 95 or 96 when we moved in solar panels was not even discussed i mean that wasn't even an option okay and so when we put the new roof on that during that time frame i never really have even thought about it to be honest with you okay personally i just wonder about the weight of the structure right especially on an old home like that i would have concerns about the extra weight up there right okay not only that i'd be concerned with uh wind like if you get a hurricane tornado or something let me rip your rooftop off right because you would have air up under there right there's a space between the roof if i'm not mistaken right so that would be an issue for me i would be structural wise i would be concerned about that that makes sense it does um and so with that being said um that's basically what you just answered on why you don't have it and you made that decision on yourself structural issues and cost issues okay i don't think it's for that small of a rooftop i don't see personally how it would pay off in my lifetime right okay i think you need to be large-scale yeah like 50 acres of solar panels to really see your investment come back that makes sense um so would you um would you do it if you could if it was available did you want solo on your rooftop or no i don't think so just for the side of for us the aesthetics of it would take away from the the farm site i i i wouldn't just for the aesthetics the way it looks i wouldn't want it would look it would look very out of place on uh fourth generation farm right you know if you had a subdivision and every single house was like that yeah i can understand that but out in the country where i live this is gonna rise what's he doing that for right and so i like to just talk about rooftop in general and so i'm going to give you a map of the united states you have a pan right there and so you can just put a check a x a star or whatever states you think that has rooftop solar i would think florida okay i would think california um i would think probably these states south right here and possibly texas and my thinking behind that is because for the south is the more sunset more sunshine longer days hotter days [Music] that would be my that was my next question that's what i would think anything else well i mean i know that they are in georgia but it's well i know for a fact they're in georgia because i have seen them before okay so you said hotter days and longer days on those states that's why you think they have anything else you can think of or they might have um i'm just hotter climate uh because of florida because of california i would say population those states probably use a tremendous amount of electricity especially with the heat because you're gonna have air conditioners running in the summertime yeah and you're going to have a lot more households yeah but i just don't know that much about north i would think it would be i think he would be more like wind tower so i mean instead of solar power but right i'm not an expert in that department in the midwest yeah that is true um so why do you think people here in this area [Music] um have a lot more solar power on their rooftops on those states that you named well probably i know in the state of georgia there was a solar panel company in dublin at one time really sure was in fact my brother my brother worked for them for about a year or two oh how long are they still here they're not here they're out of business that kind of tells me another thing about the soul what was their incentives when he worked there uh they were doing rooftops they were doing um in fact um the city school of dublin has one of the largest um solar panels out there and if i'm not mistaken they're not even hooked up because of the cost they constructed them but never did hook them up and get them on the grid oh okay across the problem right and that business at the time i think it started up due to i think it relates a lot back to our government that we that's in power at the time so the obama administration they were real big on green power and stuff like that so like companies like that started up in dublin you know this is a great time to start up right so then when you get another type of administration in there they may not be too much towards geared towards subsidizing solar panels and green energy and things like that so those things kind of fade away right i think that plays a huge part in business i think they have to be subsidized to be for people to do it that's true which makes me think that it's not profitable right because of what happened with that company that makes sense all right i'm just being honest about it i don't have anything against it somebody wants to do it that's great realistically yeah it needs to be on a large scale that makes sense and so the next one is going to be the state of georgia so what counties do you think were you seeing or do you believe orange counties for sure okay um and there are one there's one county i know for a fact that has it on rooftop of their shelters of their business they do ethanol production and they have like 50 by 100 shelters and their tops are solar panels in fact it was um in my previous career with soil and water conservation commission we toured it and it was like a 25-year investment for them to invest in it before they started seeing their money returned back and the power company was actually buying power credits from them but and it still was going to take that long time frame to get their money back but it was a very large scale project i mean that's probably the equivalent of five rooftops oh but what county was in it it was north georgia but i i cannot remember what county it was in um i wanted to say it was let's see the that district would then um oh okay right here this is right here oconee county oh okay ain't just marking on this map oh so oconee has it okay walt no coney um i'm pretty sure they have some so athens clark okay but i would say walton and oakland county oh okay now that that power company there is a real large power company yeah if i'm not mistaken they promote that right up north though and then you mark lauren's county oh and lawrence crowley okay any other places you can think of or you've seen them not in nowhere okay i would suspect it's probably around savannah area okay you mark that if you want to okay [Music] i would say some of these coastal counties yeah maybe and so um why do you think some of these those counties though have where you mark have solar rooftop solar panels well this lawrence county was there was a distributor there okay maker of solar panels so naturally that county would [Music] they would market heavily in that county uh in the northern counties um they were promoting it through their emc and also they were being incentivized through nrcs natural resource conservation commission yes they do uh equip program that i'm not mistaken it's available statewide i don't know how much of a priority it is now with nrcs funds cost share funds no matter what program you go through it's a competitive um grant basically well it's actually not a grant because you have to it's a cost share is what it is so they factor in how much electricity you can actually produce your location how closely you are to a main power line like uh the the big lines that you see going up down the highway the big ones yeah those they want them close to those that grill line because that's that's the ones that carry electricity back from the plants and all that so location plays a great part of it right and also in the nrcs location and how big a scale and availability of funds oh okay so what um thinks what do you think is makes it different from say your county versus these counties here at cochran these are rural counties and homeowners are not going to be successful to for again cost yeah these coastal counties the people who live there are probably hiring pay scale wise their income is probably larger and they're they're right there close to they get so much sun from the coast and all that right it's probably more acceptable to see homes like that in those type areas that makes sense too so do any of your close friends here in the state of georgia have solar on their roof not on the roof but they have it in fields not on ripping fields and how do you know how they're using it in the field yes uh well they're the emc or the power company is actually buying electricity from them that they are creating how many panels do they have i have no idea it's several like it's a couple acres that the panels are sitting oh yeah there's for example on highway 80 going back towards dublin there's there's a small one there's probably 20 acres wow the largest one in the state right now is on making highway halfway between here and macon on your left that's the largest one in the state of georgia and do you know what they're doing as far as with their solar panels they're going to talk they're going to sell electricity back into the grid that's a lot of panels but there's a lot of acreage out there and the sun availability is huge it's massive you need to go see it wow that's pretty good yeah probably wear some shades out there maybe maybe some aluminum foil around your body or something there's no telling what kind of raise is coming in there that is awesome
2021-06-28 02:56
