Back to Work

     The parts arrived. People, too. I had the design and its problems in my head. And the experience of the ground, the tools, the parts, the electrical cord, the phone numbers. The excavator hired and Marco set Saturday aside to drive it.
     We also had hot summer sunshine. And it had the potential of being VERY hot. My shoulder limited my ability to work late hours to sort details left over from the day and to prepare for the next.
     And after all the cement had set, the structure constructed and aligned and the panels on their way, I discovered that the supporting structure was short one set of legs and is about 2 meters too short to support the 64 panels that were about to arrive. Luckily, Marco had drilled two extra holes in the clay. Giles filled these with a mix of concrete while I requested a correction to the shipment. When the panels arrived, we were ready.

    By this time Jenny and Dan had arrived. They pitched in and in two days we had the entire array assembled. A couple more days of work with drills and screwdrivers and I had mounted the utility box and the current inverter. If it weren't for Marco, Giles and Dan, we would still be working on the mounting structure.
 

    The next big job was to feed the heavy cable underground from the utility connection at the house to the panel array. We had previous buried an empty conduit in anticipation but both ends needed big manholes to feed and receive the cable. Alex worked at one end and Isolde the other, Giles in the middle and all fell into place.
    Now we worry about whether the Italian electricity utility and the government will live up to their promises. I wrote this to my mother: "Our government incentive scheme to help finance solar panel installations declines in a step-wise fashion into the future. I presume this is to anticipate a maturing market where technology, manufacturing techniques, and competition drive the prices down.
  31 August is the deadline for the latest incentive level, and we're going to miss it. Not because we haven't done the work on time or paid the fees, but because the damn utility won't come out to provide a wire sufficient to carry our power back to them. It will take possibly two hours work and they've know about this since their boss inspected last April. And there's nothing we can do about it. That's life in Italy. VERY frustrating at times.
  I suppose the 100 degree heat hasn't improved our tolerance; but there is some relief in knowing that our part in the big job is more or less over."