Personal and @Autodesk Commitment to Sustainability: Our Solar Panels Went Live One Year Ago Today

Autodesk is committed to helping designers and engineers create a future where we all live well and within the limits of our planet. We are excited to lead the way with sustainable, forward-thinking business practices. Together, we can design a sustainable future. In this spirit, my wife and I went solar on our new home in Texas. I chronicled the process in a series of blog posts:

• A Bold Proposal: Solar Plans for My Home Energy in Cypress, Texas
• A Bold Proposal: Proposed Layout of Solar Panels for My Home in Cypress, Texas
• A Bold Proposal: Proposed Schedule for Solar Panels for My Home in Cypress, Texas
• A Bold Proposal: HOA Approval for Solar Panels for My Home in Cypress, Texas
• A Bold Proposal: Installation of Solar Panels for My Home in Cypress, Texas
• A Bold Proposal: Inspection and Activation of Solar Panels for My Home in Cypress, Texas
• A Bold Proposal: Cost Analysis of Solar Panels for My Home in Cypress, Texas

When titling these posts in 2019, I considered solar in the northern part of Houston, Texas a bold proposal ($37,044) because in 2011 we made small improvements to our home in California that I classified as a modest proposal ($1,581) as an homage to Jonathan Swift. We have noticed that a few other homes in our Texas neighborhood also have solar systems. Perhaps it's beginning to catch on?

Our SunPower system, installed by Freedom Solar, went live one year ago today. Here's a screenshot of the system dashboard from three days ago.

You can see that our family saved $2,349 in the first 363 days. That's the equivalent of:

• Not driving 34,358 miles while consuming 1,581 gallons of gasoline that have to be removed from the earth as 33 barrels of oil and processed
• Not burning 15,358 pounds of coal that would have been strip-mined from the earth
• Planting 234 trees to remove greenhouse gases from the atmosphere
• Recycling 10,795 pounds of garbage into usable energy

So in addition to the bottom line, there are invaluable other benefits.

Autodesk has always been an automation company. Today, more than ever, that means helping our customers automate their design and make processes. We help them embrace the future of making, where they can do more (e.g., efficiency, performance, quality), with less (e.g., energy, raw materials, timeframes, waste of human potential), and realize the opportunity for better (e.g., innovation, user experience, return on investment). Doing more with less to seize the opportunity for better also includes our employees' lifestyles as well as our software and business practices.

Savings are alive in the lab.