Kirkwood gets on the wind wagon

KIRKWOOD MOUNTAIN, Calif. – California’s Kirkwood Mountain Resort is hoping for a major installation of wind turbines.

Plans call for an array of 20 turbines that altogether will be able to deliver 600 kilowatt hours daily. Later, if all goes as planned, the blades on the turbines will be retrofitted, allowing the turbines to convert more wind into electricity, 2 megawatts altogether.

In comparison, Massachusetts Jiminy Peak last year installed just one turbine. It is, however, much taller, and produces 1.5 megawatts of power.

Jiminy’s turbine has a maximum height of 375 feet, but is below the summit. Those at Kirkwood would also be hidden somewhat, and would be much shorter, 100 feet tall.

Kirkwood’s situation is unusual. It is off the electrical grid that connects most of North America. Instead, electricity is produced by burning diesel. As such, the wind turbines are competing against high-priced fuel instead of the more difficult market of coal-fired electricity, such as is the case in the Rocky Mountain states.

Reno-based Synergy Power Corp. is the developer and will sell the power to Kirkwood. The area has strong winds year round, says Synergy vice president Greg Jones, a skier who grew up cutting turns at Kirkwood. The turbines operate at an optimal performance of not quite 10 mph.

Higher on the mountain, winds can sometimes be ferocious –reaching 190 mph twice last season. In such blasts, blades on the turbines designed by Synergy can lie parallel to the ground.

Kirkwood officials claim they will be able to eliminate fossil fuel generation for all but four months a year. “We could go almost eight months carbon-free as a resort community with 600 to 700 residents,” chief executive Dave Likins told theSacramento Bee.

Kirkwood has signed a deal with a California company to improve the energy efficiency of that power plant, to capture waste heat.

Wind turbines are also being studied at Snowmass and Vail.

Aspen goes after subterranean heat

ASPEN – You go deep enough underground, even in places blanketed by snow half the year, and the rocks get hot. The question is how deep. In Aspen, there is at least anecdotal evidence to suggest the heat can be found relatively close to the surface.

Why this matters is that Aspen dearly would love to further shrink its carbon footprint. The community heats its homes and businesses primarily by burning natural gas. Natural gas releases half the carbon dioxide for a given amount of energy as compared to coal, but that’s still a large carbon footprint.

Anecdotal evidence of underground heat and water is found in the testimony of miners who favored the 100-degree temperatures during winter months found at the bottom of the Smuggler Mine.

To further test the hypothesis of underground heat, Aspen may drill down as much as 3,000 feet below ground. Phil Overeynder, Aspen’s public works director, suggests there may be enough heat available to heat up to 1 million square feet of commercial space at costs at least comparable to natural gas.

The Aspen City Council is enthusiastic, but city officials say more tests are necessary before they’re willing to commit to the test. Estimated costs of moving forward are $1 million.

Pagosa Springs, a few hundred miles to the south, already taps hot water found near the surface for heating of buildings.

Teton Valley real estate market tanks

DRIGGS, Idaho – While the real estate market in Jackson Hole is holding up in value, if not sales volume, that’s not the case on the west side of the Teton Range in Idaho. There, in Teton Valley, the market has cooled, with a few scattered projects potentially suspending sales efforts.

Idaho’s Teton Valley can be called the poor man’s Jackson Hole. High-end real estate buyers in Jackson Hole normally pay cash. But they usually need financing in Teton Valley’s fast-emerging resort real estate market.

There is a lot of inventory. A place of broad meadows, the valley was run by officials who vehemently disliked planning procedures that would limit the rights of private property for sales and development. As a result, explains theJackson Hole News&Guide, 9,000 housing units have been authorized.

“Certainly the national economy is playing a factor, but that is not the whole story,” said Jeff Klausmann, a project manager

for a company, Intermountain Aquatics, in Driggs. The broader story, he said, is that the market currently has too much supply for the demand.

Jeff Russell, developer of J Lazy H, said Teton Valley could be looking at a 20 to 30 years before demand catches up with supply. He predicts sales will worsen even more before recovery begins.

Others, however, argue that if Teton Valley sales are sluggish, it’s worse elsewhere. Elsewhere was not defined.

Steamboat cultivates location-neutral

STEAMBOAT SPRINGS – The phrase “location-neutral business” has been heard often during the last several years in Steamboat Springs. Local economic development officials think that such businesses are already important there, stabilizing and rounding out the economy.

Noreen Moore, business resource director of the Routt County Economic Development Cooperative, supervised a 2006 study that found three major types of location-neutral businesses: 1) those that could have started anywhere but chose Steamboat; 2) employees who work for a company outside the area; and 3) people who sell their services to clients out of the area.

People come to Steamboat because of the lifestyle, she explained to theSteamboat Pilot & Today. “They’ve shopped comparable towns, and then they’ve picked us, because we are a ‘real town.’”

There are, of course, gradients in this. John Peretz owns a company called Fireball Marketing. He tells thePilot that only 10 percent of his business comes from Routt County. Amy Gregorich, who runs a firm called Rock Gurl Website Consulting out of her home, has mostly local clients.

David Moon, the principal at KittyHawk Partners, an aerospace consulting firm, said location-neutral businesses in Steamboat Springs might benefit from an office park with shared facilities.

California talking about fire tax

SACRAMENTO, Calif. – California is talking about ways to tax people in rural areas for the cost of fighting wildfires. The cost is huge, about $950 million in the last year. The state has a budget deficit of more than $17 billion, reports theWall Street Journal.

Christine Kehoe, a state legislator from San Diego, tells the newspaper that frenzied building in rural areas increases the burden on state firefighters to defend homes and property. Defending homes substantially increases the cost of firefighting. She says that people who choose to live in exurban, rural areas must shoulder more of the firefighting costs.

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has proposed an insurance surcharge on all property taxes. But the state’s Legislative Analyst’s Office says the tax would be unfair to people who don’t live in rural, exurban areas. It instead wants the tax levied only in areas protected by the state’s firefighting agency, called CalFire.

The issue again highlights the long-simmering dispute about rights and responsibilities of development – not just in California, but across the mountainous West.The Journal points out that local governments that approve the development bear little fiscal consequences for the cost of fighting fires.

“Local land-use approvals for residential development in the backcountry should be tied to the future cost of firefighting,” says Kehoe, the legislator. “If they want to approve a new development, they should be required to plan for ongoing fire prevention; otherwise, this problem will continue without interruption.”

Steamboat offers baggage incentive

STEAMBOAT SPRINGS – Deep in the heat of summer, the marketing team for Intrawest ski resorts is at work in Steamboat Springs, plotting out how to confront a weak economy and rising oil prices that have made flying more expensive.

One plan being rolled out for flights to and from Steamboat is a promotion in which kids fly free, and so do bags.

“Our mechanism is basically to be giving people a card precharged with that amount of money to take care of their bags at check-in,” Andy Wirth, Intrawest’s vice president for marketing, toldThe Steamboat Pilot & Today. “American Express has given us a very smooth mechanism for this.”

If the deal works well during the first 45 to 60 days of operation, the baggage promotion could expand to other Intrawest resorts, Wirth said.

“The game’s won or lost in spring or summer,” Wirth told the newspaper. “Even though it’s 85 degrees outside, we’re very much in the heat of battle for the dead of winter.”

– Allen Best