Tuesday, September 15, 2009 at 12:02:22 PM - by Nate Lew

In Brighton, Colorado, the solar leasing paradigm (your land/roof, someone else’s panels) has been turned, if not upside down, at least on its side by United Power, which offers to lease panels set on United Power acreage and compensate lessees for the energy produced.

United Power’s Sol Partners Cooperative Solar Farm is reportedly the nation’s first rural electric cooperative solar farm, and represents a growing trend among rural electric coops, or RECs, to support renewable energy technologies.

RECs are largely non-profit utilities owned by members living in rural areas. Because they are small, and without significant discretionary budgets, they are frequently exempt from the renewable portfolio standards, or RPS's, imposed by state public utility commissions on the larger, investor-owned utilities. Colorado is an exception, with an RPS for rural coops of 10 percent by 2010.

United Power, which serves 65,000 Colorado businesses and homes on the north, east and west sides of the capitol city of Denver, is an example of how even small coops can play the renewable energy game without making massive capital investments in land and equipment.

Using only the land it already owns in Brighton, United Power offers customers who want to go solar the opportunity to lease a single, 210-watt solar photovoltaic panel for a 25-year period, at a cost of $1,050 (or about $5 per watt). The return on investment, calculated at about 3 percent, or $32 per year, is credited against a customer’s utility bill.

Customers can lease up to two panels under the Sol Partners agreement, and United Power takes the responsibility for maintenance, insurance and permitting, making the Sol Partners Cooperative Solar Farm an ideal solution for renters, homeowners who don’t have roof space (or can’t afford the up-front costs of their own solar arrays), and those whose roofs and/or property don’t have the right conditions for optimizing solar irradiance.

The Sol Partners program was funded through the Governor’s Energy Office and opened on April 1. The initial offering was for 48 210-watt panels. Once all those have been leased, Phase II of the program extends the limits to 10 kilowatts of PV power for residential subscribers and 25 kilowatts (per location) for commercial participants.

Environmentalists applaud developments like Sol Partners as a paradigm switch for rural electric cooperatives, which are viewed as being enmeshed in the coal and fossil-fuel generation model of their origins during the 1930s, when the Rural Electrification Administration, or REA, was founded to power America’s farms and rural homesteads.

United Power has been trying to escape that model for several years, first by establishing a Green Power platform through Tri-State Generation in Westminster, and then, in 2007, by offering free compact fluorescent bulbs to their customers. But it never had the kind of funding to provide incentives to customers who wanted to install their own solar systems, unlike regional utility Xcel Energy, which offers $2 per watt installed through its Solar Rewards program, as well as $1.50 per watt in renewable energy credits, or RECs.