For Lenny Zemon of Atwater Ohio, there's no better birthday present than a convention on renewable energy. So on the day he turned 43, his wife Terry Benko and their four year old son are treating him to the 2007 Solar Conference. They're planning an addition to their house and they want to built it Green. Benko says their house came with geothermal heating, but she wants to go farther.
Terry Benko: This is exactly what were looking for. We want to do part of our dream, which is to make the home a little bit more sustainable and maybe get more off the grid.
Benko thinks if her family can successfully become more sustainable, it might rub off on their neighbors. They're interested in solar panels or a small wind turbine... and there's no better place to start than the conference's exhibit hall.
Here the majority of exhibits market photo voltaic arrays, or solar panel systems. Ohio gets only .3 less hours of peak sun than Florida does - 4.2 hours compared to 4.5 in the sunshine state. So companies from California, Michigan, and even China are hoping to break into an emerging market here. Almost all PV Array companies offer similar panel systems, except for Solar Kits USA, out of Perrysville Ohio. John Witty is a spokesman.
John Witty: We're offering a complete standardized system, that will have all Ohio content. All the products will be manufactured and installed by Ohio companies. And for installations on a large scale we're looking at potential to put several hundred installers to work.
Most solar panel systems run upwards of $25,000 installed. If consumers aren't ready to make that kind of investment, they can visit Massillon inventor, Doug Simmers. Surrounded by large silver disks he's pretty easy to spot. He says for $200 dollars, people can discover the power of solar energy by using the disks to concentrate rays of sun light.
Doug Simmers: From 4 feet diameter down to about 6 inches diameter and over 1,000 degrees Fahrenheit. So you can bake bread, cook roasts, pretty much anything you want with it.
Down the aisle from Simmers is Don Sandler of Innergy Power. For around the same price as the solar cookers, visitors can purchase portable solar panels for remote or emergency situations.
Don Sandler: We've come up with a series of products such as a notebook binder that has a solar panel built into it that in an emergency when there's not power, when cell phones are dying radios, are dying you open it up, plug them in and it recharges them.
Consumers looking for something sustainable for their home without the huge price tag of a photo voltaic array can find it in a solar boiler. Scott Desilva of Detroit sells systems that use solar panels and pipes to heat household water. Hot water may not seem like a large expense Desilva says, but this system can provide 30 years of free hot water.
Scott Desilva: Out of pocket its running about $5,000 for the family. A typical family of four would use about maybe about $1,200 in hot water for the year. That's just a guesstimate. So the system pays itself off in about 4 to 6 years.
A pool heater Desliva's company, Mechanical Energy Systems sells, costs about the same. However, he says pays for itself one year quicker. It consists of around 10 solar panels and system of black tubing about the size of a briefcase.
Scott Desilva: The water runs across the small tubes, across the panel to the top, and then comes back down to the pool. There's no pump even involved, we just use the filter pump that's already installed on the pool.
Whether these any of new products using renewable energy technology will take off on a scale large enough to rival the traditional market leaders remains to be seen. But it's clear that to these environmentally connected consumers, they represent the path to a much cleaner, greener future. Lisa Ann Pinkerton, 90.3.