Former SmartPower intern helps American University become national solar leader

ABOVE: Solar panels atop a building on American University’s campus.

Keep in touch with your summer interns! Many of them go on to do great things. In a brand new Huffington Post column, SmartPower President Brian F. Keane discusses just that:

Take Joshua Kaplan. When Josh, then a junior at American University in Washington, D.C., began his internship at SmartPower, my first comment to him was that we should work together to get solar all over AU’s campus.

Josh agreed - and now, working as an assistant to AU’s director of sustainability, Chris O’Brien, he is making it a reality. In fact, AU is now the home of the largest solar installation in Washington, D.C.

The school recently finished installing more than 2,150 solar photovoltaic panels on six different buildings. There are also 174 solar thermal energy panels set for installation on four campus buildings this month. Those will provide “hot showers to more than 2,000 students living on campus and hot water to the university’s largest dining hall,” and will comprise the largest urban solar hot water system on the east coast of the United States.