newsminer.com

Photo by Jillian Rogers

As the sun rises higher and higher in the Fairbanks sky each day, Pete Reynoldson can hardly contain his excitement.

Reynoldson, a lifelong Alaskan, is energized to see the sun return, not because it brings with it the promise of warmer days and the prospect of summer camping trips, but because he has big plans for the sun and its power.

Reynoldson, 33, is one of eight Goldstream Valley residents in the Spinach Creek Subdivision who are spearheading a community-owned solar power initiative. The project will not only benefit Spinach Creek residents but all Golden Valley Electric Association customers as well.

The ultimate goal is build a 25-kilowatt solar array in the Spinach Creek Road vicinity. That’s enough power to light up an entire subdivision. But an array of that magnitude will cost between $250,000 and $300,000. To pay for the system, which would be the biggest solar array in the state, Reynoldson and his neighbors formed a limited liability corporation called Solar North Cooperative.

The plan began about five years ago when the borough proposed new development on a 165-acre parcel of land in the Spinach Creek Road area. The borough decided to auction off the parcel, and Reynoldson, along with his friends and neighbors in the area, started Uncommon Ground Neighborhood Initiative LLC and raised enough money to buy the land at auction. They still have to develop it, but at least they have a little more control in the decision making, Reynoldson said.

“We knew we had to do something good with this land,” he said. “We are mandated to break it up and sell it, but it will be on our terms.”

The group’s green vision means dividing the parcel into spacious lots with a limit on how much of the land can be cleared.

“We’re trying to incorporate energy-efficient housing, too,” said Reynoldson, who works at the UAF Large Animal Research Station.

The original plan was to seed individual solar-power systems on each lot and tie the whole thing into the grid via GVEA’s Sustainable Natural Alternative Power program. Various solar companies encouraged the group to instead build one big solar-array system and divide it into shares, thus making a cooperative.

“It’s not just people living in that neighborhood who benefit. You could have the worst (sun) exposure down in a swamp and you can benefit from this solar array,” he said

But, like GVEA’s SNAP program, if you don’t want to be part of the solar initiative, you won’t see a difference on your power bill.

“But the benefit that you’re still getting, even if you don’t want to be part of the LLC, is that clean power is still being produced and fed into the grid,” said Reynoldson. “Some people have the misunderstanding that we will be producing and then storing and using this power directly, but that’s not the case. It’s tied into the SNAP program, which means at our peak production, maybe GVEA gets to turn the throttle down a little. And the more of these kinds of things that exist, the more GVEA can turn the throttle down.”

The array would consist of a series of panels on poles and a building to house inverters. Solar North is hoping to build the facility not on the land they purchased, but on borough land higher up on a hillside in the area of Moonlight Acres Subdivision. That location is higher and on a natural plateau, thus making it a better place to collect solar energy. There are still many details — legal, logistic and financial — to be worked out, but if all goes well, Reynoldson said he hopes to start building Phase 1 this spring. The group of environmentally conscious folks would also like to have the system, even if it has to start smaller than 25 kilowatts, online by the end of 2008 to take advantage of a 30 percent federal tax deduction. The group will plead their case to the FNSB Planning Commission on why they should receive a conditional-use approval to lease the land to build the project at a public hearing tonight at 7 p.m. at the borough building.

“This is a chance to show our local government how many people really do think (renewable energy) is important,” Reynoldson said.

Reynoldson hopes other residents will come to the meeting to show their support for this and other sustainable energy projects. There are plenty of concerned people out there, he said, but there is so much more we could be doing.

“What we want to do is really just small peanuts on a global scale, but we’re decades behind here,” said Reynoldson. “This has really taken on a life of its own; people are interested in it and that’s encouraging.”

So far Solar North has eight member but at least 70 other Fairbankans have shown some interest in getting involved, Reynoldson said.

Though in the very early stages, Reynoldson is optimistic that Solar North will flourish.

“This is the first time that I’ve had the feeling that people are starting to change their minds about the way they use energy,” Reynoldson said.

“It feels like there’s some momentum and that’s really exciting.”