Grande River Vineyards 70% of Energy Supplied from Solar Power

Grande River Vineyards 70% of Energy Supplied from Solar Power

Thursday, January 14, 2010 at 9:43:46 AM - by Danny Vo
In western Colorado, a regional vineyard has chosen solar photovoltaic panels to reduce its energy burden and deliver clean, renewable energy.

Grande River Vineyards, near Palisade on the Western Slope, was founded in 1987 when Denver growers Stephen and Naomi Smith decided to take advantage of the Slope’s arid hillsides and moderate winters to produce some of the finest wine grapes in the nation.

Under the hands of vineyard manager Jim Mayrose, the enterprise was a success, and by 1990, Grande River Vineyards gave birth to its first crop of grapes, one third devoted entirely to house wines. In an average year, Grande River bottles between seven and eight thousands cases of wine.

Grande River is not alone; since the mid-1970s, Colorado’s wineries have grown from one to more than 70. But Grande River is the first vineyard in the state to take advantage of solar energy, an equally productive “crop” given the Western Slopes dry winters and generally sunny climate.

The Grande River solar array consists of 144 ground-mounted solar photovoltaic modules, angled to catch the maximum amount of the region’s solar insolation, which averages about 5.0 (on a scale of 2.5 to 6.5 in the continental United States).

Add to this the Western Slope’s average 3,200 hours per year of sun (on a scale of 1,600 hours in northern Washington State to 4,000 hours in some parts of southern California and Arizona), and one sees the perfect climate not only for crops but for solar electricity.

These 144 PV panels are expected to eventually provide about 70 percent of the electricity the vineyard uses to transform grapes into wine, and the installation, by Syndicated Solar Inc. of Grand Junction, guarantees that the array will perform as expected throughout its approximately 25-year lifetime.

The cost of the system is unknown, but Naomi Smith says her company took advantage of tax credits provided under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, which provided more than $6 billion in potential funding to businesses and homeowners, in the form of tax credits.

For businesses, the credits come either as energy investment tax credits (30 percent of the project’s cost) or production tax credits, up to 2.1 cents per kilowatt hour. A businesss may not claim both, but may elect a third option, the renewable energy grant, for property placed in service in 2009 or 2010.

At 144 panels and an unknown number of rated kilowatts, the system is about one-sixth the size of the solar array recently installed at New Belgium Brewing of Fort Collins (870 panels, 200 kilowatts), makers of Fat Tire Amber Ale, but it is the first at a Colorado winery.