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Let's Share The Sun

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  • Three years ago, electric light first found its way to Fontaine, Haiti, where power lines from the capital city, Port-au-Prince, pass — unconnected and virtually powerless — along the mountain village’s main road. Guivelorna Laguerre holds a solar lantern her family purchased through a microfinance partnership between her secondary school, College Saint Gabriel, and the Let’s Share the Sun Foundation, an Albany, New York-based non-profit founded in 2009 by Bill ’85 and Nancy Brennan Jordan ’85.
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  • Schoharie Valley Farms in upstate New York is a family-owned fresh-market vegetable operation. In 2010-11, proprietor Richard Ball shifted the bulk of his operations — packinghouse, greenhouses, cold storage and a popular shop and restaurant called The Carrot Barn — to solar energy, which powers it all throughout the day.
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  • Nursery manager Lisa Dean cruises past Schoharie Valley Farms’s 95-kilowatt array on August 5, 2015, with a cargo of fresh flowers.
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  • Schoharie Valley Farms, about a 40-minute drive from Albany, was one of the first customers of Jordan Energy, Bill Jordan’s small solar development firm. The company donates ten percent of its profits to Let’s Share the Sun’s work in Haiti.
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  • Zerek Smith, Justin Witt and Kyle Page pick vegetables under intense August sunshine. The Albany region gets an average of 4.3 sun-hours per day each year, enough to make solar a viable daytime energy solution for farmers like Ball, who may recoup their investment through tax credits, grants and financing within seven years.
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  • Garlic — one of 42 varieties grown on this farm — hangs outside the Carrot Barn. Agricultural diversity in the valley of the Schoharie Creek, which flows into the Hudson River, helped make it a breadbasket of the American Revolution.
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  • Photovoltaic panels have added sunshine to Schoharie Valley Farms’ annual harvest.
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  • Energy cost savings will help Richard and Shirley Ball keep their farm in the family.
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  • Hunt Farm, a 250-cow dairy in western Massachusetts, is one of Jordan Energy’s current customers. A few years ago, owner George Hunt Jr. installed a 55-kilowatt system on his barn roof to cover his farm operation.
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  • A three-megawatt array occupies a rocky, untillable field across Route 2 from Hunt’s farmhouse. The panels power city government in Lowell, Massachusetts, 60 miles away.
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  • George Hunt Jr. (right) discusses future solar projects on his land with Bill Jordan (center). A dairyman first, he’s become a sun farmer — and a major source of referrals to other New England dairies as the industry strives for a 25 percent reduction in its greenhouse gas emissions by 2020. A 145-kilowatt project, completed in October, yielded $2500 for the work of Let’s Share the Sun.
    8.6.15 Let's Share The Sun Foundatio...JPG
  • George Sr. greets Mother Mary Elizabeth Koss and Sister Gemma Meade. The Benedictines of nearby Saint Scholastica Priory buy the Hunts’ milk for their Fontina cheese, which they hope will become a sustainable source of income. They also pray for Let’s Share the Sun.
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  • Fourteen volunteers joined Bill and Nancy Jordan on Let’s Share the Sun’s annual solar installation trip to College Saint Gabriel in Fontaine, hours north of Port-au-Prince, August 8-12, 2015. Before the school’s founding in 2010, children who wanted to attend school past age 12 had to walk more than two hours each way. The solar array on the roof, expanded this summer through the school’s partnership with Let’s Share the Sun, is the community’s only source of electricity.
    Let's Share The Sun Foundation 436.JPG
  • Saint Gabriel’s church, a three-minute walk from the college, was an oasis of calm during the parliamentary elections that took place that Sunday. Many voted at the polling place outside the church’s doors, then wandered into the 6:45 Mass.
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  • Augustin Dantil (left), the chapel sacristan whose daughters Clara and Asmide attend College Saint Gabriel, gives communion to Pierre-Louis Joizil, the school’s 36-year-old founder and headmaster.
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  • Sunday services at Saint Gabriel’s normally lasts several hours. The elections shortened the service to just over an hour.
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  • Nathalie Monin-Voelker, a Let’s Share the Sun volunteer translator, offers a short English lesson.
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  • Bill Jordan and a St. Gabriel student carry concrete blocks up to the roof for the construction of the new system’s theft-proof frame.
    Let's Share The Sun Foundation 417.JPG
  • Nathalie Monin-Voelker takes in the view from atop St. Gabriel.
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  • Rose Kelly, 15, and her father, Jim, Kelly, a Notre Dame professor of law and Let’s Share the Sun board member, carry one of 26 PV panels that General Electric donated to Let’s Share the Sun.
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  • Stephen Jordan (left) carries a panel with his father. Haiti gets an average of about 8 to 10 hours of sun each day.
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  • Let’s Share the Sun installed the 900-watt array at right in January 2013. The additional panels promised to increase the system’s capacity about 400 percent, a transformative change for the school, its computer classroom and the clinic and pharmacy operated twice each year by medical students from the University of Buffalo.
    Let's Share The Sun Foundation 428.JPG
  • Ken Oldrid, a volunteer electrician from Vermont, feeds electrical wire into protective conduit.
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  • Longuisse Simón, a Haitian electrician, has led most of Let’s Share the Sun’s installation projects over the last three years. His training is a key component of the organization’s vision of local empowerment.
    Let's Share The Sun Foundation 403.JPG
  • Cell phones — and curiosity about the latest technology — arrived in Fontaine long before electricity. Until the school’s solar array made it a viable venue, recharging one’s phone was a life event requiring a walk of several hours.
    Let's Share The Sun Foundation 430.JPG
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