American Icon Goes Solar at 60

LOS ANGELES - August 24, 2009: So many of us grew up with Bob's Big Boy, the iconic L.A. burger drive thru and car hop service so closely associated with Southern California in the 1950s. Today, Big Boy is celebrating his 60th birthday by going green.

The restaurant will be hosting a special ceremony and sock hop celebration Thursday, Sept. 24 to dedicate its solar power system. In the mean time, fans are invited to share their stories at www.sixtyandsolar.com.

This is the place where the Beatles, James Dean and Bob Hope all stopped to eat. Celebrities today, such as Jay Leno, still frequent the Burbank eatery and its Friday night classic car shows. The Big Boy chain is on the brink of expansion, blending history and tradition with modern, sustainable technology.

The Bob's Big Boy Restaurant located at 4211 Riverside Drive in Burbank, California is the oldest remaining Bob's Big Boy in the United States. The Bob’s Big Boy solar power system utilizes 132 Canadian Solar CS6P 200 Modules in two installations, one on a large steel carport structure and the remaining on a flat commercial roof above the neighboring Starbucks. The system was designed and installed by HelioPower.

With 132 solar modules from Canadian Solar, the solar power system will produce 39,000 kilowatt hours (kWh) of renewable electricity per year. The project was started on late April, 2009 and completed mid May.

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The solar power system is monitored by a Sunnyboy inverter system manufactured by SMA America. Every day the monitoring system produces information about how much energy the system is generating. You can see the live data information by going here: www.heliopower.com/projects/california/burbank/bobs-big-boy.

The Bob's solar power system is doing its part to create less GHG (green house gas emissions). Every year the ennvironmental offsets, as they are called, will contribute to a cooler climate on our planet earth. So in addition to generating green electricity for the Bob's operations, the solar panel system will help the planet.

The Bob’s solar installation will produce 39 MWh (mega watt hours) of electricity. This is enough green energy to offset the electrical demand of about seven homes; the elimination of CO2 offsets 57,000 miles driven per year and the equivalent of 78 trees planted and carbon sequestered for the life of those trees. Other environmental technologies applied at Bob’s include recycling and energy efficient lighting.