Federal Stimulus Solar Panels @ the Raws Tait VFW - Somerdale, NJ - Solar Power on Waymarking.com

This waymark covers about 20 of these things in the immediate area; they seem to be everywhere. They were installed in the summer of '10. They are up and down the side streets as well and along the main artery, Route 30 (The White Horse Pike).

Public Service Electric and Gas, New Jersey’s largest utility, has unveiled a five-year, one-of-a-kind plan to install solar panels on 200,000 utility poles in its service territory. The utility expects to spend $773 million on the project.

I interviewed a couple of the men who told me this is happening all over NJ and this is the first place county (Camden) in the world where this type of initiative is being undertook. Here is how they work. The panel collect energy from the sun and is converted from DC to AC and then is fed directly into the electric grid on the pole via the power lines. Pretty neat, huh? Each panel produces less than 12 volts or a battery but have a huge wattage and collect a ton of energy. The guy told me it would be enough to power an average size neighborhood for a 24 hour period.

These panels are especially visible in my neighboring home town of Cherry Hill. When all of these are up and running, our township will be buying less energy and saving money (which of course as taxpayers, we will never see), but town residents will be charged for the work. Also, By selling the electricity into the wholesale market, our utility expects to offset some of the cost of installing the panels. The panels are expected to generate 120 megawatts of electricity, one-third of which should come from the panels on utility poles. That amounts to barely 1 percent of the power consumed in the state, but is about 7 percent of the state’s goal of power generated from renewable energy sources by 2020.