The Navajo Solar Project: Lighting the Navajo Nation with Solar Powered LED Lights

Roughly 250,000 people call the “domestically dependent” sovereign Navajo Nation home. It is a place full of diverse landscapes, tradition, beauty, and history. Many inhabitants live in such remote places that simple amenities like running water, power and lights aren’t available. Miles of rugged dirt roads separate neighbors and the cost of running power and water to each home becomes fiscally impossible. Thus, over 18,000 homes are without power. Part of a larger ongoing operation run by Elephant Energy, known as Eagle Energy to the Navajo, a non-profit dedicated to resolving the energy access issues in Africa and in the Navajo Nation, Eagle Energy and The Honnold Foundation partnered with Goal Zero, The North Face, and Clif Bar to install solar panels and lights on rural homes and to donate to an entrepreneurship program Eagle Energy has already set in motion.

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Avatar Director James Cameron has designed Solar Sun Flowers

James Cameron Solar Sunflowers

Director James Cameron has designed Solar Sun Flowers as a gift to his wife, which have been installed on campus at her MUSE School in California. Cameron had five flowers installed on the 22-acre Malibu Canyon campus and they generate roughly 300 kilowatt hours per day. The flowers are expected to offset the non-profit school’s power usage between 75-90%. Amazing! The patent-pending design will soon be an available, free and open-source, to encourage wider use of solar power. Now that’s what we call charitable!

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