Solar gardens to bloom on Colorado rooftop, farm field and parking lot

Where do you plant a solar [3] garden? In Colorado [4] they’ll be found on the roof of an old airplane hangar, on pillars hovering over a vegetable field and a school parking lot. Those are a few of the places that the first solar gardens – photovoltaic arrays that residents will able to buy shares in – are set to be built under a new program [5]. Xcel Energy, the state’s largest electricity utility, Tuesday announced that it had awarded contracts for its first 10 solar gardens – totaling 4.5 megawatts. “This is very exciting for the solar industry,” said Blake Jones, chief executive officer of Namaste Solar, a Boulder-based installer participating on two of the projects. Only about a quarter of the nation’s rooftops are big enough and sunny enough for rooftop solar, according to the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Golden and not everyone can afford a rooftop array that can cost $12,000 to $180,00 in Colorado. Solar gardens enable people who don’t have a sunny roof or the money to buy a full array to buy or lease a piece of an array — in some cases for as little as $1,000. The Colorado Community Solar Garden Act was passed in 2010 to promote the community solar installations and directed the state Public Utilities Commission to include gardens in renewable energy plans. Xcel’s new incentive program for 18 megawatts of gardens in the next two years came out of that effort. Xcel opened it program on August 15th and within 30 minutes had three times as many applications [6] as it could fill. Operators will get paid on a sliding scale — 14 cents to 10 cents — for each kilowatt-hour the garden produces. Residents will get a credit on their bill of about 6.8 cents a kilowatt-hour. The Carbondale-based Clean Energy Collective, a private developer specializing in solar gardens, will develop six projects. Among them are two gardens in Denver, where space is at a premium. One 400-kiolwatt array will cover the curved roof of the Lowry Hangar 2 and another 500-kilowatt installation will form a parking lot awning at the Evie Dennis school campus. At the Golden Hoof Sustainable Demonstration Farm, in East Boulder, the collective will build a 500-kilowatt solar garden on pillars over a farm field. “We’ve looked for innovative solutions for each community,” said Paul Spencer, chief executive officer of Clean Energy Collective. The collective’s other solar gardens include one 108-kilowatt project in Arvada and two 500-kilowatt units in Breckenridge. Solar Panel Hosting, Namaste Solar and Solar Power Financial teamed-up to win 497-kilowatt projects in Aurora and Saugache County. “Installation will be similar to any other array,” Namaste’s Jones said. “The more complex aspect will be dealing with subscribers.” Community Energy Solar, a Boulder-based project developer, and Bella Energy, another Boulder-based commercial solar installer are developing two 500-kilowatt projects in the City of Lafayette. The projects will be on municipal land, one is adjacent to Lafayette’s water treatment plant and the city will be the prime customer for the garden, said Community Energy’s Eric Blank. Lafayette officials and Community Energy executives are planning to donate output to low-income families, who would become subscribers to the garden for free. “These ten projects are in areas that serve a million people, so the gardens will only be able to take a fraction of a percent of the potential customers,” said the Clean Energy Collective’s Spencer. Information about the projects can be found at Xcel’s solar garden site [7].