If you’re thinking of a motorized cake stand that runs on solar, or maybe one of those awesome little cupcake cars (I recommend YouTube), I applaud your imagination–but come on now folks, you can’t have solar powered cake. Seriously. What you can have is a new Cake album recorded in a solar-powered studio. As the band’s press release on Tuesday stressed, the album is being “written, rehearsed and recorded entirely with solar power.”
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Solar Panels on Cake's Sacramento Studio
Not only do the Borrego Solar-installed solar panels make it possible for Cake to go very, very green, they also allow the band to make a little green on the side. When production exceeds demand, the net-excess generation (NEG) is sold back to SMUD, their utility provider in Sacramento. In an interview with the Sacramento News and Review, lead singer John McCrea said,
It’s just something I’d wanted to do for 10 or 15 years but just really hadn’t had the time or the money to be able to accomplish it. Then, we just looked at the situation and realized there was no reason not to do this. Germany is the No. 1 solar-energy producer in the world. I’ve been to Germany; Germany’s cloudy most of the time. People like me, naturally, already have a lot of annoying details in their lives, so it’s counterintuitive to [initiate change], but getting a sense from people who had already gone through with solar installations helped quite a bit, realizing that it didn’t have to be this “Grizzly Adams” type of situation.
In the press release, McCrea added,
It just seemed like the right thing to do…I believe in science, and science is telling us that we need to make adjustments. Living in California, it seemed like a waste not to take advantage of all the free electricity.
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