Sopris Sun THE
VOLUME 1, NUMBER 39 • NOVEMBER 5, 2009
Gazing to the future Locals pursue a esh vision for large-scale solar By Terray Sylvester
From left: Steven Conger, founder and CEO of P4P Energy, and his staff, Devin Lammers, Danny Hundert and Louis DeRudder, gaze into the future of solar energy development from their office in the Dinkel Building. It's a future they'd like to help shape. Photo by Jane Bachrach
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n the push to find an alternative to fossil fuels, a big wake-up call is that large-scale renewable energy will bring its own environmental impacts as well. According to the Bureau of Land Management, more than 2 million acres of sunny, federally owned acres in the southwestern U.S. – where the best solar resources in the country are located – have been leased for solar energy development. But some are wondering whether it makes sense to develop those projects on previously undisturbed land. Many of the leases may never see a project, but those that do will come with new land impacts, and not just from the solar collectors themselves. Since much of the terrain is far from population centers, plugging in the new energy sources will require new transmission lines, which will bring impacts of their own. But an architect who works in the Dinkel Building on Main Street thinks he has dreamed up a piece of the solution. It’s an innovation that will make it easier for moderate-to-large-scale solar electricity installa-
tions to be placed in developed areas where the electrical grid already exists, and where the panels might be used not only to generate electricity, but for other purposes as well. “We're emerging really quickly and we're based in Carbondale,” said Steven Conger. “Which proves that in our new world you can do something from anywhere.” Conger is the founder and CEO of the recent startup P4P Energy, LLC, and he holds a patent for mounting solar panels on cables. Conger says no one else is doing anything quite like it. As he describes it, when compared to the more conventional post-and-beam structures for mounting solar panels, the cablebased setup brings one main advantage: the places where it touches the ground are relatively few and far between. According to the staff of P4P, the foundations for their system could, at the widest, be spaced in 30foot-by-200-foot intervals. With that much space between them, their footprint is light enough to co-exist well with the inhabited landscape.
At the same time, Conger says, his system uses building materials efficiently, potentially weighing less than 3-pounds per square foot, where post-and-beam installations might be lucky to tip the scale at twice that.
Dreaming big Conger has a background in eco-friendly innovation. He has been working in renewable energy architecture, and architecture in general, in the Roaring Fork Valley for about the last 30 years. In that time, he has worked with some of the key renewable energy and energy efficiency innovators in the area and beyond. “I designed the Rocky Mountain Institute and built it with volunteers,” he said. “I helped start the Windstar Foundation with John Denver and the purpose for the Windstar Foundation was to help start a sustainable future. So that’s still the project I’m working on.” And Conger says part of the inspiration for the cable-based design came from the in-
fluential futurist and inventor Buckminster Fuller, with whom he had the chance to study – one-on-one – in the early 1980s. Fuller often emphasized that the resources we rely on are finite, Conger said. “He [Fuller] said to make artifacts that make it possible for humans to live sustainably on spaceship Earth,” Conger said. “He would say, ‘This is a limited environment and we have to figure it out. There’s no other choice.’” The suspension design seems to be a response to that sense of limited space. To hear Conger explain it, perhaps the most important part of his design is its ability to serve multiple purposes – to coexist with parking lots, aqueducts, city parks and fields of crops. “If we can use the long span to actually be useful for something aside from solar, the value of the system becomes the value of the solar plus the value of the other use,” Conger said. “When you get these multiple benefits, the cost of solar can change.” SOLAR INNOVATION page 8