The Colorado Sun originally published this story at 3:32 a.m. on January 14, 2024.
Folks in the San Juan Mountain community of Silverton, who know a thing or two about snow, called a day last February “Snowpocalypse,” and it was bad. Very bad.
Total white out, snow blowing sideways, and two mountain passes on U.S. 550 closed, cutting off the high-elevation town. San Juan County Sheriff Bruce Conrad issued a stay-in-place order to residents, and then the lights went out.
The power went down at 8:30 a.m. on Feb. 22 and took with it the gas pumps at the service station and the electronic cash register at the grocery. Town Hall was shut. At Silverton Medical Rescue, it was a struggle to open the heavy garage doors, which relied on electric motors.
Homes with gas furnaces went cold, though many in town have wood stoves, and some still heat with coal. The water or sewer service went down.
Sheriff Conrad managed to set up a portable generator outside the grocery store and run an extension cord to the register.
“This way anybody who needed food, water could get it,” said DeAnne Gallegos, a spokeswoman for the San Juan County Office of Emergency Management. “Part of it is psychology, you want to know there are some resources when the passes are closed, and we are snowed in.”
It took almost eight hours for the town’s electric cooperative, the San Miguel Power Association, to get the lights back on.
While Snowpocalypse was extreme, it was just one of a string of blizzards, avalanches, and power outages last winter suffered by this one-time mining town — elevation 9,318 feet, population 650, give or take.
Two weeks earlier, the substation in town went down during another snowstorm. The facility is operated by the Tri-State Generation and Transmission Association, but the association couldn’t get a crew over Molas Pass from Durango.
In advance of the blizzard, San Miguel Power sent an extra lineman to Silverton — reinforcements for the town’s one resident lineman — and with some coaching from Tri-State, the two fixed the problem.
About two weeks after the Snowpocalypse, there was another storm and another outage, but the lineman and the town’s one ambulance were both in Durango and needed a state snowplow to convoy them back to town.
In all, Silverton weathered half a dozen blizzards in a row and six outages. “It was a major wake-up call,” Gallegos said. “We knew we had to do something.”
Small-scale solar system for light in the storm
That something is to create a comprehensive resiliency plan for the town. The centerpiece is a microgrid — a combination of solar panels and a large battery — to provide backup power for the entire community.
San Miguel Power Association, or SMPA, is promoting the use of microgrids in Silverton and three other mountain towns (Ophir, Rico, and Ridgway) as a way to cope with the outages that chronically plague these remote communities. Since June of 2020, Rico — elevation 8,825 feet, population 350 or so — has had 21 outages.
The aim is to put a microgrid in each town, creating a local source of electricity to feed the local wires with at least six to eight hours of power, more if the solar panels can replenish the battery.
“The community-scale microgrids we’re working on are really unprecedented,” said Terry Schuyler, the SMPA account executive overseeing the program. “We can do that because our communities are somewhat small.”
“It could become a national model,” Schuyler said, “a solution that could be replicated in other communities.”
Smaller-scale microgrids are also being installed in the region to guard against blackouts. The San Miguel Sheriff’s Office already has its own microgrids at its headquarters and jail, with solar panels and batteries. Telluride High School plans to install one, and SMPA is putting one in at its headquarters.
The growing interest among rural communities in the use of microgrids as power backups is being buoyed by significant federal and state dollars to finance them.
In July, the U.S. Department of Energy announced a $14.7 billion funding opportunity to bring microgrids to underserved and Indigenous communities, and some of that money is already making its way to Colorado.
Five communities — Parachute, Basalt, Granby, the Ute Mountain Ute Reservation, and Silverton — each won a $100,000 Energizing Rural Communities prize from DOE to promote microgrids and clean energy projects. Silverton is using it to fund its resiliency program and microgrid planning.
The Colorado Department of Local Affairs and the Colorado Energy Office received $17 million from the federal 2021 Bipartisan Infrastructure Bill funding for grid resilience.
The state energy office is using $7 million to develop a rural microgrid roadmap for the state, as well as programs to fortify rural grids. “The question we are trying to answer is what are the policies and financing that need to be updated to promote deployment of microgrids,” said John Parks, a Colorado Energy Office policy consultant.
DOLA is using the other $10 million for grants in its Microgrids for Community Resiliency Program, which was created in 2022 by state legislation with a $3.5 million appropriation.
Eight grants for microgrid planning have been awarded — Ophir, Ridgway, and Rico each got about $30,000. Further down the road, there will be up to $1 million for each construction project. Other grants went to projects in Larimer, Delta, Pueblo, Huerfano, and Jefferson counties.
“We are seeing a lot of demand,” said Julia Masters, the DOLA microgrid program manager. “They are thinking of microgrids as a path to resiliency, energy independence, and self-reliance.”
The federal law on solar tax credits was also broadened to enable a nonprofit, like SMPA, which does not pay taxes, to get credits as direct payments.
“What really stimulated our interest in microgrids was the unprecedented availability of grant funding, without which we wouldn’t have the capital to go after these projects,” Schuyler said.
The key, Schuyler said, is that the cost of the projects and the electricity they produce must be lower than the price of the wholesale electricity the cooperative purchases from Tri-State. If not, the rest of SMPA’s customers would be subsidizing the four mountain towns.
The microgrid could also be key to solving a fundamental grid problem for the co-op. Utilities look to provide redundancy with a “looped feed,” so if there is a downed line, say, on the east side, they can send electricity around on the west.
But Silverton, Rico and Ophir have only single lines into town. Electricity dead ends. If the line goes down, the town is out of luck.
Ridgway’s story is different. It is on a circuit, though it depends upon a line precariously snaking over Red Mountain Pass, parts of which were installed in the 1920s.
The largest of the towns, with a population of 1,200, Ridgway needs backup since it is home to a medical clinic, the Ridgway Fire Department, Ouray County Emergency Services services, and the Colorado Department of Transportation road shop for Ouray County.
Backup generation plan stopped cold in Ophir
Despite the flood of state and federal dollars and enthusiasm for microgrids, the experiences of the mountain communities show that, to a lesser or greater degree, installing the systems may be tricky. Consider Ophir’s story.
Ophir, another old mining town in a valley 13 miles from Telluride, is hemmed in by two thirteeners: Lookout Peak and Yellow Mountain. The town sits at almost 9,700 feet, with the power line running over the pass of another thirteener, Lizard Head.
“Coming into Ophir, you cross six different avalanche paths,” said Jon Wontrobski, the town manager. “So, folks in Ophir are used to being cut off and to outages. The longest was three days.”
The town’s website puts the population at “180 humans, 51 dogs.”
“The dogs are definitely part of the makeup of the town. You know them almost as well as your neighbors,” said Andy Ward, Ophir’s mayor.
In 1875, gold was discovered in the valley, and by 1885 there were 200 people in the mining camp, whose name comes from a town mentioned in the Old Testament. In Hebrew, Ophir is translated variously as gold, riches, wealth.
But the mines closed in 1910, and by 1970 there was only one recorded household living in Ophir. Then came a resurgence. “In the late ’70s and early ’80s, it was mostly filled with, you know, guys and dogs,” said Ward, who came to town in the early ’90s.
Families started moving in, and the number of children, 40, is now approaching the number of dogs. Most folks commute to jobs in Telluride, though Ward said Ophir is “less a bedroom community and more of a Telluride refugee camp.”
The avalanches also cut off the town’s children from school down in Telluride, but when it’s safe the kids, led by adults, have walked over the avalanche path to rendezvous with a school bus.
Given all this, one would think Ophir would welcome the $30,000 state grant and the idea of a microgrid in town. But one would have to think again.
Ophir is one of only two municipalities in Colorado with a general assembly form of government, casually called a GA. The other is the Boulder County community of Ward. There is no town council, planning, or zoning boards. Whoever shows up at the monthly meeting — and is a registered voter with an Ophir address and has lived in the town for 22 days — gets to vote on town business.
And so, when there was a motion to give SMPA the go-ahead to do a microgrid feasibility study, it provoked a long debate and some considerable pushback during November’s general assembly.
“The spirit of Ophir is protecting Ophir and its environment,” one speaker, on a recording of the meeting, opined. Among the ideas floated at the meeting were whether the town should reach out to Tesla or consider green hydrogen.
There were 28 votes to move forward, 26 votes against, and two abstentions. Abstentions count as no votes under Ophir rules, and the tie vote defeated the motion.
Then there was much discussion of whether the two abstainers understood they were really casting no votes. “One of the perils of GA government is that people make votes without knowing what they are voting for or against,” Wontrobski said.
EcoAction Partners, a nonprofit funded by Telluride and San Miguel County to promote sustainability programs, is the lead agency for community outreach for the microgrid projects.
But keeping Ophir on track and away from green hydrogen or power walls has been a challenge, said Kim Wheels, the group’s energy specialist and an Ophir resident. “It has been hard to keep the discussion focused on what the planning would bring. A lot of people are focusing on what their personal point of view is.”
Ward said, “We rolled out the project, not in a very effective way, and so, boy, that really crippled us in the beginning.”
The vote was particularly perplexing, Wheels said, since in 2018, Ophir passed a resolution to achieve 100% greenhouse-gas-free electricity.
“It wasn’t our intent to create divisiveness,” SMPA’s Schuyler said. The co-op and town officials are now looking for an alternative approach, such as a standalone battery or more emphasis on rooftop solar.
Until then, Ophir is at the risk of more blackouts. “When it does go down, a lot of people actually enjoy that time,” Ward said. “You know, you go to candles or lanterns or whatever you use, and it’s something that people actually look forward to, at least for short periods.”
Folks in town also see avalanches as a form of entertainment. “It’s almost like a celebration,” Ward said. “You get to watch, you know, as the avalanche comes down and crosses the road. It’s pretty exciting.” YouTube is replete with Ophir avalanche videos.
Mind your western exposure
The problem SMPA has run into in Rico, which is 37 miles south of Telluride, hasn’t been local opposition but geography.
“The valley runs north to south, so all the east-west sites are on slopes,” said Chauncey McCarthy, the town manager. A nice flat acre or two with good western exposure is what a solar array needs.
SMPA has combed the Dolores County valley for an acceptable location. “We are running out of sites,” Schuyler told the Rico Board of Trustees in December.
The Rico project may also have to be rethought. “We are learning as we go,” Schuyler said.
Rico has a gas station and a café, but no grocery store, so when the power is out or the town gets cut off, there aren’t many resources.
“What’s really challenging for us as well is that we have one cell tower in our town fire station, and it has a battery backup,” McCarthy said. “The battery backup probably … has anywhere from one to two hours of communication. But once the battery backup goes out on the cell tower, we lose all connectivity in terms of any phone calls, and we also lose all emergency response capabilities.”
A tree came down during a snowstorm on Jan. 18, 2023, knocking out power in Rico (the same storm led to an outage in Ophir from, you guessed it, an avalanche). It took SMPA four hours to get the power back on.
While the Ophir and Rico plans are facing hurdles, and the Ridgway plan is in its earliest stages, Silverton is out in front in planning and funding after getting the DOE prize in collaboration with SMPA, EcoAction, and the county.
“We are trying to figure out how to be more sustainable and resilient,” Silverton town administrator Gloria Kaasch-Buerger said.
“The outages primarily happen in the winter, which is a very scary time, and it’s usually during a blizzard or really low temperatures with high winds, which puts our vulnerable population at risk,” she said.
Backup generators have been sprouting up around town. The fire department has one. The school has one. The senior center is about to get one. A generator for the water treatment plant has been on order for a year. Some homeowners have them.
Adding to the imperative is the fact that Silverton is seeing rapid growth as a tourism and recreation destination — with the summer population swelling to as many as 1,000 people — and the year-round population slowly rising.
“Our school is a great kind of litmus test on our population,” Kaasch-Buerger said. “In 2021, I know it was somewhere around 80, and now we’re up to 90 kids.”
Silverton calls its resilience project GOLD — Goal of Less Dependency — and it has four objectives: prepare a resiliency plan for disasters, build a microgrid, find ways to move the old, inefficient infrastructure to electricity, and join a regional climate action plan to transition to sustainable energy.
Jim Donovan, the San Juan County emergency manager, who describes his job as coping when things get to “the worst of the worst,” is overseeing the resiliency plan. Silverton is the county seat and only incorporated town in San Juan County.
The resiliency plan, Donovan said, “is building a framework to update our electric grid, bring in renewable energy that will have battery backup” and at the same time developing plans for residents so “they can get through any rough patch we have.”
It is early in the planning stage, so town support is high, and everyone has their own worst blackout story. Not long after taking over as town administrator Kaasch-Buerger oversaw a special election in October 2021.
“It had snowed a foot, temperatures reached zero, and we were without power for 12 hours,” she said. “So, it was a horrible Election Day.”
