In St. Paul, a solar inaugural on Friday, October 23, featured officials from both Twin Cities (St. Paul and Minneapolis), who agreed to ignore the rain and their traditional rivalry in order to celebrate a $2-million project to install solar panels on the roof of RiverCentre.
Half of the cost will come from a grant from the U.S. Department of Energy, or DoE; part of $10 million in funding via ARRA (The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009) to be distributed among 25 U.S. cities, many in the northern tier of states.
The aim of DoE funding is to facilitate the adoption of
solar power, create a renewable energy-skilled American workforce, and enable new renewable energy technologies which drive down costs.
The other half will come from District Energy St. Paul, a non-profit utility which operates the nation’s largest biomass-fueled hot water heating system in North America. District Energy also burns natural gas and coal.
RiverCentre, a state-of-the-art convention center, contains 15 meeting rooms, a Star Tribune ballroom named after Minneapolis’s leading daily newspaper, and 100,000 square feet of exhibition space. It was built in 1979 and fully renovated in 2001.
Energy generated by the solar panels will be used to heat water for District Energy, and also to create electricity to meet RiverCentre’s electrical needs. Essentially, however, the system is an experiment to see whether biofuel and solar energy can work and play well together. No one has been able to demonstrate this synergy in Twin Cities politics.
The RiverCentre solar project is expected to generate 1,000 kilowatts, the biggest solar system in Minnesota, and the anticipated completion date is December 2010. The 1-megawatt (rated) system will be larger than a 575-kilowatt system in the pipeline at St. John's Abbey in central Minnesota, even though original plans called for the St. John’s solar installation – funded by a $2-million Renewable Development Fund grant from Xcel Energy and comprised of about 1,820 panels – to be larger.
The DoE also gave $30,000 to NRG Thermal LLC to study integrating solar energy into its Minneapolis steam-heating system. NRG was spun off Minneapolis-based Northern States Power (NSP) in 2000 in order to facilitate its merger with Colorado-based New Century Energies, which became Xcel Energy.
The RiverCentre panels are reportedly manufactured by SolarSkies, measure 4 feet by 6 feet, and will likely cover most of the roof of the convention facility.
Minneapolis, not to be outdone, is issuing a request for proposals (or RFPs, effective Nov. 2) for a 600-kilowatt system on the roof of the Minneapolis Convention Center that, if completed, will up Minnesota’s solar capability by a whopping 87 percent.