Top Green Rating for No. Carolina Hotel

It’s the same idea as regenerative braking in hybrid-electric cars like the Toyota Prius and Honda Insight.

There are 100 solar panels on the roof — they cover some 4,000 square feet of roofop and produce enough hot water for one hundred homes. The solar panels provide more than half of the hot water needed for guests to shower and the restaurant to wash the dishes. And the hotel saved two million gallons of water the first year it was open thanks to high-efficiency plumbing fixtures.