Why Aren't Prisons Paragons of Infrastructure Change?

Hi readers!
I was sitting here during a count, listening to a TED talk entitled How to harness abundant, clean energy for 10 billion people | Julio Friedmann, and it got me to thinking:

How do you move an entire prison to sustainable energy sources?

With prisons, you have a reasonable need to ensure your build-outs are modified for security. Making sure that it is implausible for an inmate-resident to damage the hardware in order to gain personal benefit is necessary, but I feel much of it is already doable.

Let's use the Central Florida Reception Center as an example facility for building out a sustainable energy system, shall we?

When I was there, the facility had eight dormitories for inmates in a few shapes. One approach would be to overlay solar panels over the dorm roofs, preferably with enough height to allow the inmates who must complete work on rooftops to work underneath them instead of removing panels to complete work. This allows for repairs to be done to a roof without needing to dance around solar panels.
In addition, use large solar panels as awnings, covering part of the recreation field with something that serves dual purposes: provision of shade in high temperatures and provision of clean energy throughout the day.

But we also need to store that energy for nighttime usage, right?

Guess we could, oh... train inmates on how to build power storage from lithium batteries that were harvested from EVs. Give them access to learning a skill that is already necessary and potentially the in thing for the next decade or two: we, as a planet, want to reduce our negative climate change impacts. Here we are now, teach us.

Why teach prisoners?

We are a largely idle potential workforce, not likely counted when the news agencies bleat, "Unemployment is x% lower this month!"
The public give me the impression of wanting to work prisoners, to make them earn their keep behind the fences, but the truth is, there isn't a lot of work for us, and little of what IS available is for pay to us.
Some of us, certainly, would gladly work, were we given an opportunity to earn a few dollars. After all, how else are we to afford our $2.80 packs of stale saltines from Keefe Commissary Network?

Oh, that's right. We inside largely rely on you outside to put funds on our Prisoner Express cards, because we don't have work that pays anything.

Imagine a wall-mount battery pack for a house.

Consider with me for a moment, please. People in the free world have learned that with appropriate hardware and lessons, one can harvest battery cells from older laptop batteries and cable modems with battery backup packs: these are usually 18650 cells. These are 18mm wide, 65mm long, nominal voltage of perhaps 3.7v, holds 2400-3200mAh of power per cell.
You can take a lot of these cells, with proper testing and planning, electronic balancing components, strips of nickel, and a spot welder, and put together big packs of batteries that you can then set up for offsetting one's home or business power use, or even run your home on these entirely.
One person I used to watch on YouTube, Jehu Garcia, went into a lot of detail, sharing his journey as he built one of these and converted an old VW Kombi to run on electricity. He himself said in his videos that he had no formal training.
If he's out there, rocking that green life, why can't we who wear blue also learn that being green is good?

What if we were building 50 pound battery packs for portable emergency power, usable when this state has these dire problems from increasing weather problems?

Or maybe a larger, 250 pound pack to deliver more juice to a home or small business? We could go bigger, go modular, sticking multiple packs together, and feeding them sun power, eagerly beamed down to us from Sol every day. And, you would be encouraging those of us here to learn a new skill -- one that is NOT Sit and Watch TV all day.

It's obvious:

Our starship, Earth, is in trouble. We have the means to solve much of the issues, but the approach we can take will make all the difference.
You have us behind the wires who, despite the shortcomings we may have had that put us here, have hearts that desire to do positive for those of you on that side of the fence.
All eight billion of you.

Let's put together a plan to do better for our planet, shall we?

Until the next time, dear readers. 👋🏾