Envision Solar Tree

Envision installs new solar tree at NREL

Solar TreeEnvision Solar’s new solar tree at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Golden, Colo. proves the company can build for the harshest conditions in the world.

The tree, which is a concrete pillar topped with dual-axis solar tracking photovoltaic panels, is built to last.

“They made us design for incredibly extreme conditions,” said Envision CEO Desmond Wheatley.

While Colorado’s Front Range enjoys about 300 days of sunshine a year, there can be big snow storms and strong wind gusts. Wheatley said the new NREL solar tree is designed to withstand up to six feet of snow load and wind gusts up to 190 miles per hour.

“Now there’s nowhere in the United States we can’t build,” Wheatley said.

If he gets any inquiries from interested buyers in hurricane territory, he won’t have check before answering that the trees can be built to withstand hurricane-force winds.

The engineering is particularly significant, Wheatley said, because the NREL solar tree was probably Envision’s first fully modularized tree. It only took four days to install the tree once all the parts and supplies arrived on the scene.

This is the second solar tree NREL has bought from Envision. The first was several years ago when the company was just getting started. It was one of NREL’s first investments in solar for electric car charging, Wheatley said.

But at that time, the solar trees didn’t have tracking technology and they took weeks to install, Wheatley said.

This new solar tree is tracking and modularized. That modularization is a big part of the company’s growth strategy. Having only solar a couple hundred solar trees in the life of the business, Envision announced at the beginning of this year a contract to install 2,300 solar trees in North Carolina and marketing efforts in the Middle East.

Wheatley said being able to ramp up quickly to meet the new demand depended on getting the modularization down to a science and the company has accomplished that.