Skip the Grid is an interdisciplinary Cal Poly student project that trains and sends 20 students and 4 faculty into the Navajo Nation to install solar systems in student-family households. The project brings together three major entities: Cal Poly, Heart of America, and Solv Energy.

     Cal Poly provides students and faculty that travel to the reservation to do installations, and it is run through the Construction Management department. Heart of America (HOA) is a nonprofit focused on educational inequality throughout the U.S. with many projects in the Navajo Nation. Solv Energy is a solar engineering, procurement, and construction company with three utility-scale solar fields on or next to the Navajo Nation. One of their goals is to employ local community members to operate and maintain the solar fields helping to strengthen the relationships with the locals. Solv and HOA partnered around 2017 to start a project called Light Up Navajo to focus on providing electricity and lighting to Navajo student families. Roughly one-third or 14,000 homes in the reservation lack access to electricity, leading to issues with education due to the use of technology at home.

     Skip the Grid was formed to provide Navajo student families with home solar systems and lights to provide access to electricity. The current system includes four 100W solar panels connected to a 1000Wh battery and two LED lights, all made by Goal Zero. The current retail price of all the components in this system adds up to roughly $1700, not including any labor and installation costs. Over the last three years, Skip the Grid has installed 12, 27, and 24 systems, respectively. Our goal is to use our $500 system to triple the amount of families helped by this project. Travel to the “Our System” page to learn about the details of our design, and explore the “Our Outlook” page to learn about our plan to teach the Navajo students to do the installations themselves.