Hertz follows electric car act with solar installation rollout
This one caught my eye, since literally I just saw a serviceman hoisting a solar panel onto a telephone line pole here in my hometown. Rental car company Hertz, which has taken a leadership position in adding electric vehicles to its fleet including the Nissan Leaf, is embarking of the first phase of its solar energy initiative.
By the third quarter of 2011, the company is planning to install panels at 15 facilities in Arizona, California, Colorado, Georgia, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York and Pennsylvania. Hertz already has installed a 235-kilowatt system at its facility near the Denver International Airport. That installation is expected to produce 342,766 kilowatt-hours per year, which the company hopes will offset approximately 650,000 pounds of carbon dioxide emissions.
The generating capacity of the 15 new systems will be more than 2.3 megawatts.
In North America, Hertz's Green Initiatives include investments in energy-optimized lighting technology, including LED, solar glass and solar shades. It also embraced a formal electronic waste disposal policy early on: almost seven years ago. That policy comes in the form of a deal with Redemtech, an e-Stewards certified technology asset disposition company, which covers all of the electronics equipment used in its American facilities. Since the two began working together, Hertz has kept an estimated 891,000 pounds of electronic equipment, 34,225 pounds of lead, 8 pounds of arsenic, 51 pounds of cadmium and 12 pounds of mercury from reaching landfills. And it has adopted power management technology for saving electricity on its computers: if a system is unused for more than three minutes, the monitor is idled.
Related posts about rental car companies and green initiatives:
- Hertz wants you to rent an electric vehicle
- Enterprise charges up electric-car rentals with Volt
- Enterprise needs 'holistic,' not 'incremental' approach to green tech
- ZipCar preps for IPO; are the world's cities ready for car sharing?
This post was originally published on Smartplanet.com