Published on September 9, 2017
At the Stibnite Gold Project site, we use solar panels to power almost all of our operations at the site. The amount of energy we generate in a day is directly tied to the sun. This was evident during the recent solar eclipse.
Below are two graphs of the solar radiation at our site measured from our weather station – one on August 28, a typical summer day, and the other on August 21, the day of the eclipse. You can see during the height of the eclipse, the amount of solar radiation reaching our site dropped drastically.
Even through the eclipse only lasted a little more than an hour, we still saw a decrease of about 10KWh in the amount of power we generated that day. Production was more in line with what we would see on a rainy overcast day. In comparison, we see a decrease of about 4KWh on these smoky haze days.
We may have seen reduced power generation on August 21 but solar power has helped Midas Gold Idaho save approximately 13,000 gallons of diesel fuel each year by reducing our dependence on generators. In fact, since we installed the solar panels in 2015, we’ve generated 20,500 kilowatt hours of solar energy.
You can check the weather at Stibnite as we share this data with regulators and the general public.
