Tuesday, November 03, 2009 at 3:01:13 PM - by Danny Vo

Vibrant Solar is gearing up to install a 100-kilowatt solar photovoltaic system on the roof of the Andrews Foodservice home office and distribution center in Pueblo, Colorado.

There will be 500 panels in all, arriving in the next few weeks, and Andrewscolo, a family-owned product distributor located on Industrial Boulevard, can’t wait to see the assembly completed.

That is scheduled for Thanksgiving, a mere 24 days away, but when completed the array will provide almost one-quarter of Andrew’s electricity needs and offset about 1.2 million pounds of carbon dioxide emissions per year.

Andrew’s owners, George Andrews III, Jacque Ponx and Debbie Hinkle, feel the array is an apt expression of their desire to support Colorado’s burgeoning ‘Go Green’ initiative, and represents a win for the firm, the community and the environment.

Denver-based Vibrant Solar is exclusively a Colorado company, and wants to expand its footprint in the Pueblo area by hiring local people. To that end, it contracted Pueblo-based Abel Engineering Professionals for structural engineering support issues, and is also hiring two local electrical firms to install the wiring components of the Andrews solar system.

Vibrant, along with Idaho-based Alternate Energy Holdings, Inc. (AEHI), is also looking toward the Colorado Energy Park, to be located east of Pueblo, where talk revolves around a solar array somewhere between 20 and 2000 megawatts. If built at the larger size, it would represent the largest PV array in the world, but even at a mere 20 megawatts it would be the largest in the state.

Vibrant is making quite a name for itself, both regionally and nationally. In August, Vibrant announced a deal with regional home builder G.J. Gardner to offer solar PV system options on all new homes, under what Gardner is calling its Zero Carbon System™. This whole-house energy system incorporates a 5-kilowatt solar array, a geothermal heating and cooling system, a solar thermal hot water system, and two KVAR Energy Controllers which reportedly optimize loading and delivery to reduce energy use up to 15 percent in homes.

Additionally, Vibrant subsidiary Helios Solar LLC has bought the license rights to SunCube, a squared-off solar panel that promises to be twice as efficient at converting sunlight into electricity as flat-panel PV systems. Of course, the price tag is also 30 percent higher.

The company plans to raise $2 million to build an SunCube assembly plant (somewhere along the Front Range in Colorado?) that will initially employ about 70 people on a single shift, ramping up to greater production and more shifts as product demand rises.