June 2000 issue

 NWCouncil.org NeWs    June 2000 index

Customer's renewable resources complement island utility's power

Richard Greaves hunkers down into his heavy coat and wool newsboy hat. It is cold and windy on the wide-open slope of land he and his wife Becky are homesteading on Orcas Island, one of Washington’s San Juan Islands. A moderate rain starts to fall, and Greaves breaks into a smile. "Oh good, it’s starting to rain," he exclaims. "Having hydropower changes your perspective on the weather."

Just about 13 years ago, the Greaves bought this 107-acre farm and began carrying out their dream of independence here. They would grow their own fruit and vegetables, mill their own lumber from trees on the land, and generate as much of their own electricity as possible using the cascading ponds that begin at the top of the land and sidle halfway down the hill. They would even install solar panels and generate electricity from the sun.

Unlike most dreams, it appears the Greaves’ have all come true. Their house runs completely off the electricity they generate from a 3-kilowatt micro-hydropower project and a comparably sized solar photovoltaic array. A greenhouse and cold frames ensure year-round crops of at least some key foods. They are still making use of timbers they milled when a freak windstorm blew down thousands of trees around their house. They have pretty much disconnected from the support systems most urban dwellers depend on.

Not far across the island, Kaj Enderlein pulls his chair closer to the woodstove that heats the home he’s about to rebuild, and jokingly admits his more modest dream: "to have a warm house." Like the Greaves, Enderlein, a young, pony-tailed semi-retiree who saved his money when he was a high-paid engineer on a remote Alaskan Island, has a solar-electric home and is installing a micro-turbine hydropower system. Like them, he plans to grow his own food and live as close to a life of self-reliance as he can. But he describes his purpose from another side. "I am manifesting a childhood dream of reconnecting with the sources that support me," he says. "I want to be part of the grid, part of the vast abundance of electricity to run my shop and all my power tools. But I also want to be self-reliant to a degree."

Enderlein walks out to his workshop and over to the gray electrical box on the wall. He pulls a lever. The lights in the shop go out. He pulls another lever. The lights come back on. "I just switched over from the grid to my solar power," he explains. "It’s that easy! Isn’t it wonderful! The power company is the mother lode of electricity to nurture me in the dark nights."

But the Greaves and Enderlein homes don’t just take electricity from the power company, they sell it back. The two households are among a handful that are serving as micro-utilities – independent generators who sell their home-grown electricity to Orcas Island Power and Light Company, the utility that serves the San Juans.

"Just about any solar electric system on these islands will be fully charged by about 11 a.m. every day in the summer," explains John Mottl, the wizard every solar enthusiast on these islands reveres. "After that, everything they generate could be sold to the utility." Mottl, a solar systems designer, has left his mark on nearly every photovoltaic generating project in the San Juan Islands and hundreds across the rest of Washington. "This is a great time to be involved in solar," he admits. After more than 20 years in the business, he says he’s finally able to make a living at it.

"A lot of people put in their own solar systems, or small hydropower projects as backup systems because there were a lot of power outages out here," admits Doug Bechtel, general manager at the Orcas utility. Until about a decade ago, the Orcas Power and Light Company was known as Occasional Power and Light. The company, which buys nearly all its electricity from the Bonneville Power Administration, had to deliver it on overhead power lines that were at the mercy of falling trees every time the wind blew.

"It was more than a flickering problem," says Greaves. "Power could be out for days, sometimes more than a week."

Orcas solved the reliability problem by investing millions – about 10 times more per customer than mainland utility customers – to run the power lines underground. Everyone agrees that stopped the power outages. Nonetheless, customers would like the reassurance that more of their electricity was being generated closer at hand, on the islands themselves.

Bechtel says his customers also want more renewable resources in the utility’s power supply – green power "that’s generated right here, not something that comes over from the Bonneville Power Administration."

The answer from Bechtel’s point of view is to use those independent power generators as suppliers of electricity for his system. Orcas buys their output directly, unlike net-metering agreements common elsewhere in which the customers’ meter runs forward or backward depending on whether they are generating their own or using grid power. When these customers need electricity, they pay the going rate. What they generate goes directly onto the grid, and the utility pays them a premium for it.

The arrangement works for the utility because it saves the money it pays Bonneville for the electricity and still collects the premium customers pay to buy the green power. "We pay generating customers 5.6 cents per kilowatt-hour for their renewable power, and we make about a third of a cent on each kilowatt-hour," Bechtel says, "which we put back into the fund to help connect more of these projects up to the grid. It still doesn’t pencil out for the solar owners because these are expensive installations, but it helps them a bit."

The renewable power generators are a perfect complement to the utility’s needs. "They sell us electricity during the day, when we need it to serve our peak loads," explains Bechtel, "then they turn around and take electricity from us at night, when we can supply it easily." If Bechtel is successful in his plan to sign up 800 generating customers with 1,000 kilowatts a year to sell to him, he’ll be able to serve his current green power market entirely with island-made power.

That’s his dream.