Finding Ways to Reduce Grid Usage In Small Towns

Thinking Neutral: Small Towns Look to Renewables to Reduce Reliance on the Grid

By Dave Levitan

The town of Fowler, Colo., (pop. 1,087) sits in a 150-mile corridor between Pueblo and the Kansas border that boasts about half a million head of cattle. A few years ago, Fowler, like much of the country, faced a difficult economy and rising energy prices. Local government officials decided the cows and the energy weren’t so unrelated as they seemed. They started thinking about how cattle – and the other features of the region – might help the town’s fortunes.

Soon Fowler had become a standard-bearer for towns looking to become green town by going grid neutral, or producing as much or more power than it uses. They looked at a variety of renewable energy technologies, from putting the 2,400 tons of cow manure that are produced every day in Fowler into an anaerobic digester to make methane gas, to a wind farm to bedecking town buildings and grounds with solar panels.

Town leaders started exploring renewable energy first as a preserving the town coffers, according to Wayne Snider, a former executive with Grumman Aerospace, who was the town’s administrator during this period. The economic development and environmental benefits were an added bonus.

I think the impetus behind everything at first is to save money.

“I think the impetus behind everything at first is to save money,” Snider said in a recent interview. “Then they can see also that there’s potential for creating jobs.”

Fowler and a handful of small green towns and cities across America are on the vanguard looking to lower electricity costs, draw state and federal dollars or simply turn the community a nicer shade of green. But they face considerable challenges in realizing energy independence.

Big plans in Fowler

Snider’s team sifted all of the options for renewable energy in Fowler. They installed an anemometer to measure the potential for wind power in the region and got to work on an initial solar project to get residents on board. That project included about 600 kilowatts of photovoltaic panels at seven sites around town on municipal property – from water pumping stations to a cemetery (“People thought that was weird,” says Snider). Denver-based Vibrant Solar, Inc. built the $1.2 million project and sells the electricity back to Fowler at about half the rate of the current utility.

The efforts attracted notice from all over – they got help from Colorado State University, the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, and others. They celebrated the solar arrays’ commissioning with a visit from then Gov. Bill Ritter.