Building a solar farm isn’t hard if you have the money; you just pay contractors to show up, install electrical service, build the solar panel support infrastructure, and truck in the panels. But if you want to do it cheap, you could buy some land from a friend and set up your own fabrication shop, spending an entire summer welding together 50,000 pounds of structural steel and pouring concrete around 20,000 pounds of rebar to save serious cash on the infrastructure.

Connor Field, a Michigan resident who built the largest solar farm in the state this way in late 2009, said drily, “I would not do that again.”

“Do you know how to weld?” I asked him when we met recently in Ann Arbor to discuss the project.

“I do now.”

I’m astounded at what small businesses like this can do when they put their mind to it.

via How one undergrad built the largest solar farm in Michigan.

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