A Solar Powered Moving Company
We are the only solar powered moving company you’ve ever heard of. We use it to power our electric moving trucks, our warehouse, warehouse/office heat and AC, forklift, company car, and lights.
Solar and Energy Efficiency
In the spring of 2016 we had a 17.1 kWp solar array comprised of 60 photovoltaic panels installed on the roof of our warehouse at 18 Beck Rd in Arlington. The system is designed to provide for 100% of the annual electrical usage of the company, in reality it outpaces our consumption. This paired with a complete refit of LED lighting throughout our entire warehouse as well as a new energy efficient mini-split HVAC system for our office show our commitment to a positive outcome for our planet and environment. The solar installation also soaks up a lot of the light energy hitting the roof of our warehouse, which brings down the internal temperature of our warehouse which is better for our comfort, but also better for the goods we’re storing there.
We also installed an additional 24kwh system in 2022 to help power our two electric trucks and full heatpump based heating/cooling system for our warehouse.
You can find the current statistics on it’s production here.
Charging our solar powered electric trucks
We also have two electric trucks, which are powered by the rooftop generation. We use a variety of Clipper Creek L2 chargers to charge the truck.
Mass CEC Speach
I gave a talk on this at the Mass Fleet Advisor Program put on by the State and MassCEC. Find the text of the speech below.
It’s probably been 200 years since folks in this area powered their vehicles and heated their homes and business with energy produced and collected on their own land. Since then we’ve had little to no control over where and how we got our energy. If we didn’t like the price, who it came from or what it did to the planet, too bad.
The combination of solar power, the electrification of transportation and the electrification of heating change that and bring us back to our roots, but in a way that’s clean, sustainable and looks to the future.
We have the opportunity to let those past 200 years be a brief but weird episode of history… OR! some sort of penultimate chapter in our own tradgedy. I personally and professionaly embrace these new technologies and opportunities and look forward to seeing how we can benefit from them.
In 2018 I purchased an electric car to see if it was viable. I figured worst case scenario I’d get a semi-usable car that I could at least power off my solar panels and an idea of how far off we where from a main-stream usable EV. It was MUCH better than I expected and made as much power as one of my small box trucks. It seemed to me that if the world could produce a very slick very comfortable very fast EV sedan, at a reasonable price a box truck aught to be doable. I went looking.
I spent a lot of time reading up on the details and combining that with what I already knew about trucks. It seemed like there was a lot of interest but what I found was that there was nothing to buy, and the major manufacturers where essentially manufacturing press-releases instead of real viable trucks. What I could find that might be bought was also pretty expensive, and the only viable incentives seemed to be in California or New York.
So I started to dig a bit deeper. What I found was that there where some organizations and manufacturers that actually seemed to be doing something, rather than just talking about it. My search found SEA Electric, which seemed like the best implementation available, they directed me to CALSTART who made me aware of some legislation that might be helpful. It was suggested that a signed purchase order for a truck might help prove some interest and help move a program forward in Massachusetts, so I did. Eventually MOR-EV truck was announced and within a week of it going live I had reserved two vouchers and ordered our first truck. That was in March of 2021. We received our truck in late August and it’s been on the road 90% of the days since then. We’ve logged 3000 miles and done somewhere in the neighborhood of 100 moves with it. We recieved our payment for the voucher a few weeks later. We asked for an extension for our 2nd voucher so we could evaluate the truck we had for a few months and in December put in an order for our 2nd truck from SEA and expect to see it before our busy season starts in May or June.
How’s the truck? The crew loves it, every morning they come in and it’s charged up, no stopping for fuel. It’s also a pleasure to drive. It’s got very smooth power delivery. It’s so quiet we could hear the rivets in the body settling for the first few hundred miles as we drove it. The neighbors love the lack of noise. The crew loves being on the cutting edge of moving, we’re the first electric moving truck in the world as far as I know and that’s a real added value for our movers and customers.
When combined with our rooftop solar the truck is cheaper than it’s equivalent diesel over 10 years. And that’s the thing, electric vehicles and heat pumps are great on their own, but the real game changer is pairing them with solar, it drastically changes the return on invenstment time. In fact, I don’t think there are many bachelors degrees with a quicker ROI than an electric truck and solar panels.