Providing electricity for Northern New Mexico
The Laboratory is part of a technical and business case team on a project designed to provide electricity from solar energy for a large area of rural Northern New Mexico.
The Kit Carson Electric Cooperative Solar Photovoltaic Project is being unveiled at 5 p.m. today at the University of New Mexico's Taos campus.
The project’s case team was formed under the direction of Elmer Salazar of the Technology Transfer (TT) Division as part of Los Alamos’s Northern New Mexico CONNECT’s LINK Program, a plan that fosters economic development through enterprise networking. Sandia National Laboratories and various partners from the private sector are partners in the effort.
"Kit Carson Electric Co-op has been a national leader in new business development,” Salazar said. “It has constantly strived to better serve its members by branching out into Internet Service Provision (IPS) and propane, and now into solar photovoltaic (PV) energy generation. [The Laboratory] was asked to help the co-op think through the technical and business case for successful distributed production-level deployment of solar photo voltaic electric generation with a direct grid connect approach,” he said, adding that the project represents a wonderful opportunity for national laboratories to collaborate with private industry to generate clean power for New Mexico.
The project will deploy one megawatt of distributed solar photo voltaic power destined for Taos (400 kilowatts for UNM/Taos; 150kw for the Kit Carson facilities; and 100kw for KTAO, the Taos solar radio station) and El Rito (350kw for Northern New Mexico College). The project is, to date, the largest deployment of production solar PV in the state.
The production system consists of a direct grid connect system where power exceeding the immediate needs of on-site customers goes directly into the local grid for distribution and use by co-op members. Energy accumulated in the grid during the daytime is fed back to consumers during the night hours, guaranteeing seamless around-the-clock service, Salazar explained.
The project was designed and built by the California office of American Capital Energy (ACE). ACE will oversee installation and maintenance through local contractors and Kit Carson operating staff in order to develop and build local solar construction and maintenance capacity in compliance with objectives set by the Kit Carson Electric Cooperative (KCEC) and the project team through the request for proposal process.
Los Alamos and Sandia labs and private sector partners helped Luis Reyes, president and CEO of Kit Carson Electric Cooperative, and the trustees of the KCEC Board develop the project, which is intended as a model for other rural electric co-ops nationwide. Already, the project team is helping Springer Electric Co-op, which is bidding on a 500 kilowatt system that will be centrally deployed with a direct grid connect at a substation near the town of Springer, to set up a similar solar energy project.
