Al Gore's home on way to creating electricity

By ANNE PAINE
Staff Writer

Al Gore got what he wanted: Permission to create electricity.

The city of Belle Meade on Tuesday said the former vice president could put 33 panels on top of his Lynnwood Boulevard home to convert sunlight into energy.

The process had been slow because the city first had to change its zoning laws to allow solar panels.

A stipulation was included, however, that the equipment put on homes in the Davidson County satellite city not be visible to neighbors for fear it might be an eyesore.

“The only people that will be ‘bothered’ are LifeFlight,” joked Carole Nelson, a member of Belle Meade’s Board of Zoning Appeals, after looking at the plans Tuesday night. She was referring to Vanderbilt University Medical Center’s air ambulance service.

The board, which has five members, voted without dissent in favor of allowing the panels on Gore’s roof. The approval was needed after the new zoning rules took affect April 1.

The Gore family had already added energy conservation measures, including electricity-saving thermostats and windows, to the home, which is about 70 years old, said Gore spokeswoman Kalee Kreider.

“One of the things this points to is the need to integrate some of these things in new homes as they’re built,” she said.

“From a policy perspective, building homes green from the get-go is really one of the silver bullets. If you start it off right, it makes it a lot easier than trying to go back and retrofit it later.”

The system should be installed within a month, she said.

A total of 33 panels embedded with photovoltaic cells will go on a horizontal, flat part of the home’s roof. They won’t be at an angle, but will lie flat against the roof, which results in about a 12 percent decrease in efficiency, according to Stephen Rick, architect on the project.

That will keep the look of the house as-is, he said.

The panels’ edges will be painted the color of the roof so no shiny aluminum sides would disclose themselves to neighbors as something other than roof.

His firm, Street Dixon Rick Architecture on Kenner Avenue, uses the same solar panels, which are made by Sharp Electronics Corp. in Memphis.

The energy produced at the firm’s offices basically covers all the lighting in the company’s building, Rick said. That’s about 24 percent of the energy use there.

A Tennessee Clean Energy Technology Grant helped with that project, but is available only to businesses.

Kreider declined to disclose what the Gores had spent on the panels, but said that it’s part of the family’s commitment to promoting clean energy and trying to avert a climate crisis.

A Sharp company representative in California said a display the size of the Gores’, which will be relatively large, could cost about $50,000, though prices vary depending on, for instance, the roof and installation needed.

Over the expected 25-year life of the panels, they should save in pollution from coal-fired power plants, Kreider said. It would include saving about 430,000 pounds of carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas contributing to global climate change, and 2,240 pounds of sulfur dioxide, a component of acid rain.

The Gores also pay extra to Nashville Electric Service for green power development and have a company that buys “carbon offsets” from a third party to cover travel and other energy used, she said.

NES’s program that sells green power is called the Green Power Switch program. Adding solar panels required being part of NES’s Generation Partners program. Both are through the Tennessee Valley Authority.

Gore critics had blasted the former vice president in February for having a 10,000-square-foot home that used a correspondingly large amount of energy.

Anne Paine can be reached at 259-8071 or apaine@Tennessean.com.