drove north from Alamosa on Highway 17 looking for the unlikeliest of landmarks. It was New Year’s Day, the temperature had bottomed out at 35 degrees below zero, and I was looking for an outdoor alligator farm.
I found it — along with the conviction that creative thinking and a somewhat daring approach may be the answer to our nation’s energy problems.
The alligators are an unconventional yet practical solution to an ecological problem. In 1977, Erwin and Lynne Young hit on the idea of using the 87-degree water from the geothermal well on their property to raise hybrid Rocky Mountain white tilapia. The venture went well, and they worked their way up to selling several thousand pounds of filets per week.
Their problem was figuring out what to do with the 70 percent of the fish that did not end up as part of the filet. The traditional solution would have been to bury the remains, but they would have run out of room eventually — and all of those dead fish would have attracted a lot of flies.
So the Youngs came up with a novel idea that tapped into their available natural resource: the geothermal wells. They brought in 100 baby alligators from Florida to act as biological garbage disposals for the fish waste. The gators have thrived in the warm waters, and they now number around 400.
Once you get used to the idea of alligators in a high mountain desert, they start to look extremely practical. They dispose of unpleasant waste without contaminating the environment; they provide the farm with tourist dollars (for $10, farm workers will take your picture with the gator and then get him to chomp down on a “certificate of bravery” to emboss it); and they provide even more income if they are turned into alligator filets and purses.
The idea is starting to catch on. A geothermal fish farmer in Idaho is raising tilapia and alligators, and officials in Iceland are said to be looking at the “Krocodil Plan” since that country has the two things required: geothermal resources and a lot of fish.
Across the road from the gator farm is an operation with an equally unconventional idea, one that can solve many of the nation’s most pressing economic and ecological problems. It also requires a leap of American imagination, even moreso than that of bringing sub-tropical reptiles to one of the coldest places in the nation.
I drove past the “Colorado Gators” sign and started looking west until I saw them: 80 acres of flat, black panels tilted to catch the rays of the sun, which was setting behind the curved outlines of the San Juan Mountains. From my vantage point, I could see the metal understructures of the panels, looking like row upon row of bleachers, a stadium set up for some sort of cosmic show.
In a way, it is a show, and the sun is the star. It is the largest solar photovoltaic plant in the U.S., an 8.22 megawatt facility built by SunEdison, delivering enough energy to power 1,500 homes.
Right now, the planet is facing an ecological and economic problem greater than a few thousand pounds of dead fish. Our burning of fossil fuels is turning this world into a dirty, hot, expensive, and dangerous place to live.
The conventional way to cope with these threats is to try to cover up the mess as best as we can. We’ll do what we’ve always been doing, just tweak it a bit. We’ll put on better pollution controls, sequester the carbon underground, build more nuclear plants and store the waste as best we can.
Others are calling for more unconventional ideas. They have visions of solar plants and hydrogen highways, wind turbines and electric cars. The SunEdison plant will generate enough clean energy over the next 20 years to offset the carbon emissions from 765 million miles worth of driving. According to the Governor’s Energy Office, just 2 percent of the optimal land in this sun-drenched mountain valley can provide 50 percent of Colorado’s energy needs.
Keith Hay, an energy advocate for Environment Colorado, insists that this idea of solar power plants providing half our energy is no pie-in-the-sky vision. “We can absolutely do it now, using current technology. We need to prioritize need and present a picture to the utilities of what they should be doing.” He maintains that solar is going to be the best long-term investment choice for Colorado. “It’s not the cheapest way to go today, but it will be the best long-term investment. Colorado needs to invest in solar resources for clean, safe, homegrown power.”
Similarly, a team of U.S. scientists argues in the January issue of Scientific American that large solar plants in the American Southwest could provide 69 percent of the nation’s electricity and 35 percent of its total energy (including transportation) by 2050.
Americans like the idea of solar power. In April, the Nuclear Energy Institute conducted a poll through Bisconti Research Inc., and asked people to predict which source of electricity “will be used most in the U.S. 15 years from now.”
Seventy-two percent chose solar, making it the top choice over every other possibility, including wind, hydropower, coal, oil, gas, or nuclear plants.
But we aren’t putting our federal money where our hopes are. Currently, the Energy Department plans to spend $159 million on solar research, half as much as it will spend on nuclear research and just a third as much as it spends on coal.
Right now, less than 1 percent of our energy comes from solar. If we don’t invest in research in a big way, Energy Department officials estimate that we will only get 3 percent of our energy from solar power in 25 years.
For every person who imagines a future transformed by solar energy, there is someone who says that it is only a pipe dream, that the technical hurdles are too large, the time frame too long. They’d rather manage the mess the traditional way.
There, where I stood on a dirt berm outside the humming solar power plant, my breath was starting to freeze. The sun had set, and as I drove back toward Alamosa, I noticed that the air was no longer clear. It smelled of smoke, and a haze lingered in the street lights. Driven by higher heating prices, more and more people in this small town were harvesting wood from the mountains to heat their homes.
It occurred to me then that they could end up negating all the gains from the clean power plant down the road.
I’m hoping this nation will have the social and political will to go beyond just managing our energy mess, to think of something completely unconventional, yet practical.
Something as imaginative as alligators on ice.
Ellen Schroeder Mackey (emackey61@yahoo.com) of Littleton is a librarian. She was a member of the 2007 Colorado Voices panel.
