More Power!

This entry won't be especially deep or wordy. It's just to show you something I've been tracking for a few months now.

The last "Safeway Sunset"? Maybe.

At the corner of Golf Links and Wilmot in Tucson is a formerly empty lot. Looking west across it from the Safeway shopping center, one sees the Tucson Mountains in the distance. When the lot was empty, it was a fabulous setting for sunset photos. Over the years I've taken many a "Safeway Sunset" picture from the parking lot in front of Subway.

I think that I shall never see
base housing lovely as a tree.

A year or two ago that began to change, as base housing for Davis-Monthan Air Force Base was built at the south end of the empty lot. The view was suddenly more prosaic, but if I pointed the camera in the right direction at the right time I could still get something good.

Then something new happened. First a bunch of short posts went up, hardly taller than old-fashioned headstones. These spread across the land on the south side of Golf Links, from Wilmot nearly to Craycroft Rd a mile away. As the mysterious construction continued, I discussed this odd sight with someone from the temp job I had at the time. He also lives in the area, and had also been watching the proceedings. We concluded that the work crews were building solar panels.

They were indeed. I don't think they've quite finished construction on the acres of off-the-grid green technology, and it's very hard to photograph them adequately from the Golf Links side. But here are some of them as seen from the Subway / Safeway parking lot.

Much as I love taking sunset photos, I'll happily trade that particular vantage point for DM going solar, and getting off the Tucson Electric Power grid. More power to them.

Karen