Weld's new energy park may feature solar panels

Mar 3 - McClatchy-Tribune Regional News - Bill Jackson Greeley Tribune, Colo.

A proposed energy park in northern Weld County that Weld commissioners will consider this month could feature energy storage facilities, 200 acres of solar panels and an area that could be used to recycle water pumped from oil and gas wells.

The planning commission on Tuesday unanimously approved the proposed development west of Rockport and east of Carr north of Weld County Road 126 on a square-mile section of ranchland. The Niobrara Energy Park plan goes before county commissioners March 16 for final approval.

Dag Nummedal, director of the Colorado Energy Research Institute at the Colorado School of Mines, dubbed the Weld proposal a "hybrid energy park" in a support letter.

The 640-acre project, which is being developed by Craig Harrison of Harrison Resource Corp., could also house research facilities and a 200,000-square-foot data center for computer servers. Harrison said one example of a data center is a Facebook center in Oregon where millions of photos are stored on some 60,000 servers. Google is another business that uses data centers.

"But that (Facebook) center is 85 percent powered by coal, which is drawing some criticism," Harrison said. The data center he visualizes in northern Weld would use natural gas combined with solar and possibly wind power. Data centers, he said, currently use 6 percent of all energy generated in the U.S., and that is expected to increase to as much as 20 percent in the near future. Data centers, he said, require redundant or backup power supplies.

"If the electricity goes out, a data center cannot," Harrison said. And since data centers need to be kept cool, the location of his park could utilize natural air for cooling versus a powerful air conditioning system in the Arizona desert, for example.

The remoteness of the area, he said, also provides the security desired by those who operate data centers.

"With only nine parcels spread out on 640 acres, there's a lot of open space included," Harrison said.

Nummedal said the park could become "a national center of learning in how best to manage" the fossil plus renewable energy infrastructure that will be necessary as the world moves toward new energy systems. That is driven, Nummedal said, by the dual needs for greater energy security and lower environmental impacts.

What makes the Harrison plan stand out, Nummedal said, is his option of adding energy storage facilities on the site, which is counter-cyclical to daily and seasonal demand patterns.

"This is where your park concept moves beyond anything planned elsewhere in the U.S.," Nummedal wrote.

Harrison said his vision is to combine the use of renewable energy with clean fossil energy -- natural gas from the rapidly developing Niobrara field in northern Weld -- to provide electricity at peak demand times. That would include a solar farm on site of the park, with about 200 acres of solar panels, making it among the largest in Colorado. And, he said, that would tie in with the efforts of Colorado State University. CSU has one of the largest solar plants of any school in the nation. It provides about one-third of the electricity needs on CSU's Foothill Campus.

Another aspect of the park will be a natural gas-powered turbine, which will be used to meet demands Nummedal talked about at night, when solar power is not available, or during days when wind generators can't meet "those demands on a hot, summer afternoon when all the air conditioners and irrigation pumps are running," Harrison said.

Yet another aspect, he said, will be providing services for the oil and natural gas exploration, including an area that can be used to recycle water that is pumped from oil and gas wells -- cleaning that water and returning it to the wells.

"I can see where we would take in 500 barrels of water from wells in the area one day, siphon off the remaining oil which would go to a refinery, then return 450 barrels of clean water to the wells the next day," Harrison said.

Another site on the 640 acres could house a fleet of oil and gas service vehicles serving the Niobrara field, instead of having those vehicles on area roads going to and from current locations.

But perhaps the biggest benefit, Harrison said, is that the park could become a national, if not international, site for research in the renewable energy field. Noting that he never had "the privilege of going to college, this excites me the most."

Once construction starts, several hundred jobs will be required, but once operational, there won't be many people at the park, which means there will not be a large increase in traffic.

Larry Burkhardt, president and CEO of Upstate Colorado Economic Development, also sent a letter of support for the proposal.

"It seems clear that extraction of oil and gas from the Niobrara has the potential to stimulate the creation of perhaps thousands of jobs and hundreds of millions of dollars in investment in Weld County. As such, we believe that if completed, the park could serve as a stimulus for sustained economic activity throughout Weld County," Burkhardt wrote.