FW: Thinking Neutral: Small Towns Look to Hybrid Renewables to Reduce Reliance on the Grid

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L-Thursday-May3-2012

Thinking Neutral: Small Towns Look to Renewables to Reduce Reliance on the
Grid By Dave Levitan, Contributor May 2,
 
The town of Fowler, Colo., (pop. 1,087) sits in a 150-mile corridor between
Pueblo and the Kansas border that boasts about half a million head of
cattle. A few years ago, Fowler, like much of the country, faced a difficult
economy and rising energy prices. Local government officials decided the
cows and the energy weren't so unrelated as they seemed. They started
thinking about how cattle – and the other features of the region – might
help the town's fortunes.

Soon Fowler had become a standard-bearer for towns looking to become green
town by going grid neutral, or producing as much or more power than it uses.
They looked at a variety of renewable energy technologies, from putting the
2,400 tons of cow manure that are produced every day in Fowler into an
anaerobic digester to make methane gas, to a wind farm to bedecking town
buildings and grounds with solar panels.

Town leaders started exploring renewable energy first as a preserving the
town coffers, according to Wayne Snider, a former executive with Grumman
Aerospace, who was the town's administrator during this period. The economic
development and environmental benefits were an added bonus.

"I think the impetus behind everything at first is to save money," Snider
said in a recent interview. "Then they can see also that there's potential
for creating jobs."

Fowler and a handful of small green towns and cities across America are on
the vanguard looking to lower electricity costs, draw state and federal
dollars or simply turn the community a nicer shade of green. But they face
considerable challenges in realizing energy independence.

Big Plans in Fowler

Snider's team sifted all of the options for renewable energy in Fowler. They
installed an anemometer to measure the potential for wind power in the
region and got to work on an initial solar project to get residents on
board. That project included about 600 kilowatts of photovoltaic panels at
seven sites around town on municipal property – from water pumping stations
to a cemetery ("People thought that was weird," says Snider). Denver-based
Vibrant Solar, Inc. built the $1.2 million project and sells the electricity
back to Fowler at about half the rate of the current utility.

The efforts attracted notice from all over – they got help from Colorado
State University, the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, and others. They
celebrated the solar arrays' commissioning with a visit from then Gov. Bill
Ritter.

"We hooked it up to show the public how much money could be saved, and it
worked, the town is saving money," Snider says. "It should have saved
somewhere in the neighborhood of $20,000 the first year."

A Dream on Hold

The hope was to follow up with a 2-megawatt solar array to the south of the
town, and the anaerobic digestion plant that would not only bring Fowler
closer to grid-neutrality but also add 45 jobs or so to the struggling
economy.

So far, these bigger plans haven't come to fruition. The town's leadership
changed over, the company that installed those first solar arrays dissolved
after state solar rebates disappeared, and the grid-neutrality goal stalled.

The story isn't unfamiliar. One of the more high profile efforts to go
grid-independent is Reynolds, Ind., the self-proclaimed BioTown, USA. The
project began in the mid 2000s with a stated goal of getting all of
Reynolds's energy – not just electricity, but heating and vehicle fuel as
well – from renewable sources. Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels got on board,
and just as in Fowler, a number of big ideas started to take shape.

Reynolds had designs on an anaerobic digestion plant, a perfect match for
the 150,000 pigs within a 15-mile radius. But again, logistics got in the
way; last year a large plant went online at a nearby cattle farm, but it is
outside of Reynolds and feeds electricity to the grid. Still, it does
produce more power than Reynolds uses, so the original dream did result in
some renewable power generation. It's just not how planners imagined it.

And there are ancillary benefits: Companies are looking at siting new
projects in the area. "The publicity from it is positive, it's kept Reynolds
on the radar," says John Heimlich, who was the president of the BioTown
Development Authority when the ideas were being formed.

Spreading the Word

Fowler's Snider is now working with other towns in Colorado – Olney Springs,
Ordway, and others – to develop wind and solar projects. They are still also
seeking to build a regional anaerobic digestion plant.

"If you get to a point where your town is not quite off the grid, but you're
able to offer a utility to your residents that's less than the current rate,
you can see that attracting people wanting to move to your town" Snider
says. If Fowler had built the 2-MW solar plant it had planned, he says they
could have locked into a super low electricity rate of six cents per
kilowatt-hour; now, the utility rate is closer to 15 cents.

Tempered Expectations

The lesson of Fowler and Reynolds may be simple: keep expectations
realistic.

Wade Yost, the town manager of Poolesville, Md,, says they have started with
energy-saving LED street lighting in the town center, and hope to grow their
renewable projects from there.

"Ultimately, we were looking at being independent of the grid itself, but
that's very difficult to do for a town our size," Yost says (Poolesville's
population is a bit over 5,000, about ten times bigger than Reynolds). "So
now we're doing the best we can."

The next project for Poolesville is a 1.5 MW solar array for the town's
wastewater plant. They are currently accepting proposals from industry to
build it, with the hope of taking a big chunk out of the $65,000 spent on
electricity for the plant every year.

"We're just trying to tie it all in and be a really green community," Yost
says.

Dave Levitan is a journalist focused primarily on energy and the
environment. His work has appeared at Yale e360, OnEarth, and IEEE Spectrum,
among other places.

This article was originally published on ecomagination and was republished
with permission.

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