The snow is falling fast and furious. Schools and businesses are closed. Northern Michiganders are arming themselves once more with shovels, snowplows and snowblowers. Nevertheless, the feared ice storm and threat of mass power outages that meteorologists warned us about appears not to have materialized—at least not in Leelanau County.
Just before Christmas, Ian Olmsted and a team from Peninsula Solar completed the installation of 70 rooftop solar panels above the Art’s Annex, the former gas station turned t-shirt shop next to the popular tavern in downtown Glen Arbor. The solar array will generate 30,000 kilowatt hours annually —satisfying 15-20 percent of Art’s energy load.
The windstorm that hit Leelanau County this week was the strongest storm ever to hit the continental United States, rivaling the pressure of tropical storms and surpassing the winds that doomed the famed Edmund Fitzgerald in 1975 in Lake Superior.