Wise Acre Farm Goes Solar

For Dean Engelmann and Scott Endres, co-owners of Tanlgetown’s Wise Acre Eatery, their farm’s new solar array is pretty exciting. Not only is it powerful—when they turned it on last week, they had all the electricity they needed and were feeding power back to the grid within 20 minutes—but it looks pretty cool, too.

“A lot of the time, many businesses’ solar arrays are hidden on their rooftops. Here, it’s very visible,” Engelmann said. “It’s a marketing tool.”

And that’s not even the coolest part. With so much power generated on even a winter day, when the sun is weak, Engelmann said Wise Acre plans to fit electric water heaters on their greenhouses, to act as giant batteries. The solar-powered heaters warm the water, which then gets circulated through their greenhouses at night to extend the growing season. The restaurant already grows around 80 percent of the food it uses on the farm.

“As the sun’s angle gets higher and the days get longer, we can start doing things like cucumbers,” Engelmann said. “It’s been a fun learning curve for us about what can we do. We’re probably not going to try to grow pineapples, though.”

Ed. Note: This story was updated 4:49 p.m. on 2/16/12 to fix a technical problem that deleted hyperlinked words.