You look at the forests on the mountainous edges of SouthWestern Colorado’s San Luis Valley, and you see this dull orange hue.
"broad swaths of dead trees killed by the spruce beetle."
When Larry Floyd started fighting fires here in the mid-1990s, conditions were different.
“We didn’t have as severe a drought, we didn’t have as much bug kill.”
So there is a lot more wildfire fuel out there, those dry dead trees. That’s a concern for the tiny town of Del Norte, but not for the reason you might think. The San Luis Valley itself is open and flat and pretty much a desert and Del Norte’s kind of plopped right in the middle of it, far from the forests. But the town’s public works supervisor, Kevin Larimore, says there is a risk to their power supply.
“Most of the valley is actually served off one line coming in the valley.”
One major line, coming in through the mountains, through the trees.
“If that line was to go down, then most of the valley I think would lose electrical power.”
Del Norte, though, it’s covered in solar panels.
“They’re at the town hall, the town shop and the police department.”
The city government installed them a couple years ago, to try to save money on electric bills.
We’re driving over to the two biggest systems, powering the town’s water supply.
“Coming up here to the right there…”
Great, since they’re generating all this power--Del Norte’s ready for a wildfire, right? Well, no….the same thing that could cut Del Norte off from the outside world, it would sabotage their solar system, too.
BOYCE: “If there’s a wildfire that knocks out the power infrastructure, these solar panels won’t power the town.”
LARIMORE: “No, to my understanding they won’t.”
Weird as it sounds, Del Norte’s solar panels are actually dependent on the grid. And this is how it is the vast VAST majority of the time.
James Newcomb studies this kind of stuff for the Rocky Mountain Institute in Boulder, Colorado. He points to Hurricane Sandy thrashing the East Coast nearly two years ago.
“In New Jersey there are hundreds of megawatts of solar power.”
During Sandy there were widespread blackouts--sometimes for weeks. But all those solar panels, nothing.
“Because it’s been connected to the grid in a way that it can’t operate if the grid isn’t up.”
More severe weather events have been leading to more power outages. And we can actually show that change over the last fifteen years. Inside Energy compiled this data for the first time. And you can see it all on our website.
So having to deal with more of these power outages, and staring out at rooftop after rooftop of useless shining solar bricks--that’s irritating community planners. James Newcomb says it is set up this way for a reason--for safety.
“So we typically have built the grid and operate it as one big system.”
And if you have a bunch of workers out fixing power lines after a blackout, the lines need to be dead. There can’t be a bunch of solar energy running up the wires the wrong way. It’s possible to modify that though.
“And the transition we’re now talking about is one that makes it possible to operate some small pieces of the grid independently.”
What he’s talking about are called microgrids. Little tiny grids (in falsetto) , and these could allow you to not only power your town’s water supply, but maybe your town hall, the police station, or the hospital. Newcomb says to create a micro grid you need what are called smart inverters.
“Inverters are kind of the gateways in the electricity system.”
And smart inverters can sense when the larger grid has gone down, lock off the part that needs to be fixed, and power the rest with whatever resources the town has available, whether it’s generators or the country’s quickly growing fleet of solar panels.
“Yeah, if we can go back here, I’ll show you the inverter…”
Del Norte, Colorado still has dumb inverters. So they have to rely on a diesel generator to backup at least the town’s water supply. But, the technology to create microgrids is advancing. Meanwhile the price of solar is dropping--a lot. And the way our country has been powering itself for more than a century could get totally flipped on its head because of those two factors. We’ll dig into that in the next story in this series.
