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South Mountain Company

Martha’s Vineyard’s integrated design/build company

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The Company We Keep

Dear Reader,
This blog is now an archive. John Abrams (Founder of South Mountain, author of this blog, and a book of the same name) retired on December 31, 2022. All posts published up until this date are preserved below.

For updates on John's next chapter, visit abramsangell.com.

For updates on South Mountain's second act, subscribe to our newsletter using the form below.

solar

Local Sustainable Economies…And Way More Than That

July 17, 2017 by John Abrams Leave a Comment

My colleagues and fellow owners Deirdre, Rob, Siobhán and I just returned from a conference in Boston called Local Sustainable Economies. It was a national gathering, hosted by the Sustainable Business Network of Massachusetts, of people and organizations working to localize economic activity and encourage the long haul shift from the extractive economy of the present to a generative economy of the future.

Read More about Local Sustainable Economies…And Way More Than That

Filed Under: Climate Change, Design, Economic Crisis, Energy, Environment, Long Term Thinking, Martha's Vineyard, News, Politics, Small Business, South Mountain Company Tagged With: alliance bernstein, clean energy, fossil fuel, local sustainable economies, solar, solar power

SunPower: There’s More

April 25, 2017 by John Abrams Leave a Comment

For the Earth Day campaign mentioned in the last post, SunPower created two videos and three blog posts. This link will take you to their second video and second blog post. Please take the journey to explore the SunPower/South Mountain relationship further. This one is about the connection between our devotion to craft and our passion for solar. The two go hand in hand.

We’ll send out another reminder when the 3rd SunPower blog post is up. Thanks for listening!

17_RESI-201_EarthBlog2-Social-Images-Twitter-2

Filed Under: Design, Energy, Environment, Martha's Vineyard Tagged With: clean energy, Deep Energy Retrofits, earth day, earth month, Martha's Vineyard, solar, SunPower

Tower Down

October 25, 2013 by John Abrams 2 Comments

For several years our 100’ steel tower stood here without a wind turbine on top.  We took the machine down for repairs and never put it back up.  We decided to save it for parts, for the several other similar turbines we installed years ago in other locations.

Meanwhile, we have covered the roofs of our building here with enough solar panels to take care of all the energy needs for our shop and offices.  Having just switched our heating and cooling to all-electric air source heat pumps, we’re pretty much at Net Zero for the entire facility (we’ll find out for sure after a year of monitoring).

We’re not in the wind business any more (as important as we think it is), and our experiment had not been particularly successful, so it was time to take the tower down, pack it up, and prepare it for its next home.  Pete D’Angelo and Phil Forest orchestrated the project.

But before it came down, Phil, who was always responsible for servicing the machine, felt the need to experience the top of the tower one more time.

Here’s what Phil had to say, and what he saw, and what we saw:

“While I sat comfortably on top of the wind turbine tower, waiting for the crane to arrive, I took in the fall foliage of the oak forest and I saw water in Lake Tashmoo brought in from the last tide. I thought about the impermanent, ever- changing nature of things.

Read More about Tower Down

Filed Under: Energy, Martha's Vineyard, South Mountain Company Tagged With: Air source heat pumps, Great Rock Windpower, Net Zero, Pete D'Angelo, Phil Forest, solar, South Mountain Company, Wind turbines

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