Mr. Price is the Executive Director of Black Rock Solar. The organization’s tag line is “Free the Sun” and their mission revolves around providing free or very reduced-cost solar arrays to people and organizations who could not otherwise afford them. His exceptional contribution: getting solar deployed. Not just deployed, but done so in some unlikely places like an elementary school in Gerlach, Nevada, USA. What’s exceptional about this is it engages the students, the teachers and ultimately the whole community.

They have harnessed the power and imagination of the human spirit. They took as their operational model Doctors Without Borders, the international medical group whose objectives are to help and do the right thing. These kinds of efforts capture people’s imaginations and inspire them. This is one of the key things these people do–they don’t invent technologies; they recognize that while it is important to push the envelope, it is equally important to get out and deploy what we have now. We actually have all the technology we need to improve the lives of billions of people, we need to get it out and stop waiting for the next great thing. When people see this being done on the huge scale that Mr. Price and Black Rock Solar have done, they are inspired.

Mr. Price is a passionate and driven individual. He has the vision and background necessary to drive a program like this forward through the inevitable obstacles. In his background he has had the opportunities to see the impacts of global climate change first hand and I think this is part of what drives him. The other part is an intense drive to make a difference and do the right thing. He sees that action is the most important thing and is willing to be out front, to take the hits and keep going, ultimately to all of out betterment.

The wonderful aspect of Mr. Price’s work is that it has such an incredible impact. The short term impacts start very simply with money. The agreements worked out with the recipients of these systems include that the money savings from the energy off-sets will go back to the school and communities, not to some central fund. Especially in these times of budget cuts those funds are even more welcome. That’s the small impact. Add to that the renewable energy that is added to the grid means that much less fossil fuel is being burned adding to an already over-burdened atmosphere. But the real impact is in the imaginations of the people who have benefited from these systems. The young students who walk past the solar arrays as they go to school every day grow up thinking that this is “normal” that this is where energy should come from. When they go on to college, they will hopefully ask “does this college have solar power?” When they get out and go to buy a house, they will ask “does this house have solar power?” The real long-term impact of what Mr. Price does is he is going to

Until Tom Price and Black Rock Solar, no one had approached solar with the question “what if it was free, and available to anyone?” By asking it, and by answering it with more than a quarter megawatt of installed low/no cost solar, Black Rock Solar is changing the face of renewable energy, and that as much as innovation in cost of materials will drive adoption of solar power. As I said before, we have the technology, we need to deploy it and that is what Tom Price and Black Rock Solar are doing.