CARBONDALE — Standing in front of a line of massive solar panels pointed skyward on Tuesday, Gov. Bill Ritter and Sen. Ken Salazar praised a new solar array built on the edge of town as a model of collaboration in pursuing renewable energies.
About 200 people gathered at the private Carbondale Rocky Mountain School to celebrate the opening of the new solar array, a project paid for by the Aspen Skiing Co.
The array is the largest of its kind on the Western Slope, but it will be dwarfed by an even larger project under construction in Rifle.
“Carbondale is proof that the new energy economy is working,” said Ritter, using the buzzwords for his goal to produce energy in Colorado from a mix of clean fossil fuels and renewable sources.
“(Renewable energy) has to absolutely play a role in how we think about the energy economy,” Ritter said. “So we’re going to drive this agenda as far as we can drive it and be responsible in doing so.”
The 147-kilowatt array would produce about enough power for one school building and about 20 homes, organizers said. SkiCo paid $1.1 million to build the project, and will sell the power back to the Colorado Rocky Mountain School, which donated the land for about 30,000 square feet of solar panels on its pasture. CRMS is buying the power at a fixed cost for 20 years, and then will own the array.
Even the project’s boosters acknowledged that the power the array generates won’t go far in reducing the area’s dependence on fossil fuels, but they hope it will be a step toward creating more such projects.
David Frey/Aspen Daily NewsGov. Bill Ritter speaks at the dedication of a new solar array at the Carbondale Rocky Mountain School in Carbondale, paid for by the Aspen Skiing Co. Ritter praised the project as a collaborative approach to create more renewable energy sources.
“It’s not world-changing,” said Jim Crown, managing partner of the Aspen Skiing Co. “We’re not ready to change the name of the town to ‘Carbon-free-dale.’ But it is encouraging to know you can plan something and have it work out.”
It wasn’t easy. The project began last year when the Carbondale-based energy nonprofit Community Office for Resource Efficiency asked the town to take advantage of federal renewable energy bonds that became available. Trustees were supportive, and town voters got behind it. So did the energy company Excel, which was bound by new state requirements to get 10 percent of its power from renewables. CRMS agreed to provide the land, but when town officials found out they would have to subsidize the bonds for more than a decade to make them attractive, Carbondale backed out and SkiCo stepped in, using government incentives to private entities for renewable power.
“It is symbolically telling the world, yes, we can do it in ski areas, we can do it at a school, we can do it in a community like Carbondale,” said Salazar, who like Ritter is a Democrat.
The project joins other renewable initiatives across the state, including a massive 10-megawatt project in Salazar’s own San Luis Valley and a wind farm on the Eastern Plains able to fuel 50 homes. Rifle, surrounded by a natural gas drilling boom, is building a 2.3-megawatt system to power its new water and wastewater plants.
“For us, it’s a stable energy source that goes beyond the extractive fossil fuel economy,” said Rifle Mayor Keith Lambert.
dfrey@aspendailynews.com
