The Outer Sunset

If you’re ever flying around San Francisco on a sunny day look down at the giant empty parking lot in the southwest corner of the city. You can’t miss it. Giant empty parking lot. No cars. That’s the top of the Sunset Water Reservoir which has got one of the best views of the sunset and may soon be the largest municipal solar generating project in the country.

The city is brokering deals with a private company, Recurrent Energy, to spend up to $40 million dollars and put in 12 football fields of solar panels by next year. It’s a pretty ambitious project and a great use of a giant empty parking lot that’s just been soaking up sun anyway.

Here’s what the Sunset Water Reservoir looks like today.

It will be interesting to see what the project looks like when it’s done.

This has got to be one of my favorite landmarks and one of the best places to catch the Sunset.

Normally it’s pretty windy up here, but during the heat wave earlier this week everyone was just wearing shorts and a shirt. You didn’t even need a jacket.

I actually like the 10 minutes or so after the sun has set the most. That’s when on some days Mother Nature puts on a Pink Floyd caliber light show; it really brings out the colors in the skies.

I love the urban sunsets; that changing of the guard as the natural light of God is clocking out for the day and the artificial man-made lights are starting to wake up for their shift. It’s easy to forget about them during the day or night, but during those few moments of transition between day and night the light really brings out all of the urban wiring of the city. Living under all that spider web of cables and wires it sometimes feels like all of San Francisco is some lost pirate ship.