Aspen’s new solar farm fires up

CARBONDALE – The new solar farm at Carbondale was a scene of triumph on July 1 – and a sobering reminder.

High-ranking politicians and titans of industry were on hand for the ceremonial flipping of the switch for the half-acre of panels that will produce 200,000 kilowatt hours annually.

“We understand that really it’s our responsibility to find cleaner ways to power our lifts,” said Mike Kaplan, president and chief executive officer of the Aspen Skiing Co. “It’s that simple.”

Aspen Skiing financed the solar farm, investing $1.1 million. Some of the electricity, explains Scott Condon ofThe Aspen Times, will be used directly by the Colorado Rocky Mountain School, on whose grounds the collectors sit.

Colorado Gov. Bill Ritter, who made the “new energy economy” the center of his campaign two years ago, commended the installation, the largest array of solar panels on Colorado’s West Slope.

U.S. Sen. Ken Salazar took the occasion to link the solar panels to patriotism. “America today is at the end of a noose hanging from a tree where that noose is controlled by the Middle East and those countries that have the global reserves of those fossil fuels,” he said.

Actually, the solar panels will not displace imported oil, but instead the burning of coal, which is abundant in Colorado. At issue are the greenhouse gases and other pollutants created by burning coal. There is no way yet to prevent that pollution.

Closer to the mark was Jim Crown, managing partner for the family that owns Aspen Skiing. “This is a small step, but it is a powerful one because we are finally doing some things about alternative energy besides talking about it,” he said. “It’s not world-changing just yet. We’re not ready to change the name of the town to Carbon-free-dale.”

Energy expert Randy Udall, also of Carbondale, told theTimes that the solar farm is both a “triumph and an example of how much work we have ahead of us to build a sustainable energy system.”

The solar farm will only produce enough electricity to meet the needs of 20 to 30 conventional homes. The infrastructure to fully eliminate the need to burn coal and natural gas, said Udall, will be huge.

Future of oil and gas up for debate

RIFLE – Colorado will soon be convulsed in a debate about whether to impose higher taxes on the state’s oil and gas producers and more tightly prescribe drilling operations to limit impacts to water and wildlife.

The industry is assembling a war chest for the November election, at which time these issues will be decided. Recently, at a confab in Grand Junction attended by 2,000 people, it made clear what its talking points will be.

But Peter Shelton, who writes for theWatch newspaper out of Telluride, finds the industry’s arguments stray far from the facts of the case. One of the arguments is that the regulations would be so onerous as to drive industry away.

“The truth, of course, is that the industry is going nowhere. Colorado is where the gas is,” Shelton writes. The big companies “are making enormous profits. They can afford to use best practices and technologies to protect our air and drinking water and wildlife habitat. They’d just rather not.”

The energy boom is starting to overshadow the giant resorts along the I-70 corridor. One joke is that with the downturn in resort real estate, the oil-and-gas industry workers may start buying up the real estate in the Vail and Aspen areas. If that is perhaps an overstatement, it does suggest how rapidly things have changed from five years ago, when Rifle and Parachute – now oil patch towns – were considered spare bedrooms for the resorts.

Bear proofing comes at a high cost

ASPEN – Inmates at the Colorado State Penitentiary in Cañon City have perhaps an odd connection with that slice of paradise called Aspen during the summer. They make trash containers that are now required by city authorities who have been trying to reduce the lure of garbage to bears.

For some years, the city has had a growing problem of marauding bears, some of them now so brazen they let themselves into houses and condominiums when no garbage is available elsewhere.

To help break the bear-people connection, the city now requires bear-resistant containers or, if the containers are kept outside day and night, bear-proof containers. The difference,

explains theAspen Times, is in the armoring – and also the cost. Resistant containers can be made of plastic, but bear-proof containers are of metal.

Prices range from $170 for the plastic bear-resistant containers to $450 for the sturdy metal containers.

One manufacturer of bear-proof containers, BearSaver of Ontario, Calif., proves the sturdiness of its containers by filling them with trout and honey or peanut butter on the lids in an enclosed area with grizzly bears. The grizzlies have an hour to penetrate the containers. If they fail, the containers are good for public consumption.

Bear-proof trash containers placed on the streets of Aspen cost $750.

City ponders peak power demand

PARK CITY, Utah – A power outage in Park City has officials talking about infrastructure. The problem, utility officials tellThe Park Record, is a simple one of supply and demand – and unless more transmission lines are built from Wyoming to deliver electricity, outages will become more frequent after 2010.

Park City and other communities in an area called the Wasatch Back have been growing rapidly, about 7 percent annually as a region. Also, people are using more electricity per person, up 26 percent from only 20 years ago, said David Eskelsen, a spokesman for Rocky Mountain Power.

“We have to build to match that peak demand,” he said.

Reverse logic is being cited in Telluride, where a new utility board member argues that the essential task is to shave peak demand.

Idaho newspaper sides with developer

KETCHUM, Idaho – For the last six years, Ketchum has been talking about how what it needs is a good hotel, the better to revive its flagging tourism sector in what, ironically, was the nation’s first destination ski town.

Leading the hurrahs has been theIdaho Mountain Express, which now likens the latest hotel proposal as being in the ninth inning. That project, Warm Springs Ranch, located at the bottom of the Bald Mountain ski trails, is a rather massive affair, but loaded with the hotel rooms that the city craves.

Yet the local planning and zoning board wants the developer to replace the for-sale penthouse suites with more hotel rooms. The developer, Stan Castleton, says that request/demand is likely a deal breaker.

Defer to the developer in this case, says theExpress. “It’s the ninth inning. If Ketchum again heaps requirements that are impossible to meet on a hotel project, it would be the city’s third strike. The city could find itself out of the game.”

British Columbia levies carbon tax

WHISTLER, B.C. – While the U.S. government this year distributed stimulus checks in an effort to caffeinate the economy, the province of British Columbia is busy distributing $100 checks.

The checks are intended to soften the impact of a new carbon tax, which went into effect July 1. Taxes are being levied on all carbon-based fuels at a rate of $10 for every ton of greenhouse gases produced when burning them.

In Whistler, the call is going out to contribute the checks toward construction of an 80,000-square-foot greenhouse. The purpose of the greenhouse would be to grow lettuce, cucumbers and other vegetables and herbs for use in Whistler, reducing the greenhouse gas emissions caused by transporting those foods to Whistler.

Toad study underway in Jackson

JACKSON HOLE, Wyo.—Research is under way in Jackson Hole to determine why the boreal toad, also called the Western toad, is doing so well along the flanks of the Teton Range, while going down the toilet in Colorado.

For several decades, scientists have studied the severe die-off of the toads in Colorado and New Mexico. The specific cause is a fungus called chytrid that impairs the functionality of the toad’s skin, which the toad uses to regulate moisture and to breathe.

Amphibian researcher Peter Murphy of Idaho State University tells theJackson Hole News&Guide that many of the boreal toads in the Tetons carry the same pathogen, but they didn’t seem to be affected by it. His goal is to figure out why.

– Allen Best