Over McClure Pass, between Hotchkiss and Delta, one of the nation’s most innovative photovoltaic power projects is complete and will have a grand opening Sept. 30. It will be the largest solar farm on Colorado’s Western Slope. The Garnet Mesa Solar project has tracking photovoltaic panels over 400 acres of former cattle pasture, but now sheep will be grazed beneath them.
Similar “solar grazing,” a subset of agrivoltaics, is practiced on 130,000 acres nationwide. Here, in a first, the fields underneath will be irrigated with drop nozzle sprinklers beneath tubing supported by the solar racking system.
At 400 acres (just under half the size of Carbondale), the Garnet Mesa Solar project will generate about 200,000 megawatt hours per year, about five times the town’s annual consumption.
By early next year, two slightly larger solar projects will be completed. One is the 600-acre Axial Basin project halfway between Meeker and Craig on coal company land and beneath the powerlines between Craig and Rifle. The racks are installed over sagebrush and grass and divided into five sections separated by wide wildlife corridors. The similar Dolores Canyon project is under construction southeast of Dove Creek.
Closer by, 40-acre solar projects are nearing completion near Mamm Creek and Parachute Creek. Garfield County has been successful at squeezing solar into our narrow valleys, but applicable areas are limited by the steepness of our topography. Slightly further afield is an innovative project north of Alamosa, where failed panels on a quarter of Xcel’s pioneering 2007 solar farm will be replaced. These were unique concentrating panels, the other three-quarters were conventional and are still in service.
However, during the past year, counties have denied land-use permits for five large solar projects. These averaged 500 acres and were located near Norwood, Cortez, Craig, Alamosa and Durango. Combined, they would have displaced 5% of Colorado’s coal-generated electricity, thus reducing emissions of CO2 by 2 billion pounds per year and reducing evaporation of water at the power plants by 2,000 acre-feet of water per year.
Visiting all these locations requires trips off the standard tourist tracks of Colorado. They are on differing types of land, sometimes within a “viewshed” but those views always included existing powerlines or substations. In the San Luis Valley, water over-appropriation has led to the fallowing of 25,000 acres, a 10th of their irrigated land. A 500-acre solar project was proposed on some dry land there and rejected by Alamosa County.
While Colorado now generates 50% of its electricity from solar and wind, it’s in last place among the Four Corners states for solar electricity generation in 2024-25, possibly due to land-use restrictions.
On-site solar constitutes about 20% of solar in most of these states. In Colorado, this is 4% of all electricity supply. In Carbondale itself, owing to years of residents’ efforts this fraction is over double at almost 10%. There is more potential, but also hard physical limits.
Near-term additions of solar on the West Slope are difficult to project. The largest is the Ute Mountain Ute’s Sun Bear project for 2029. “Solar moratoriums” are in place in Montezuma and Montrose counties. In Montrose County, Scott Mijares, one of the commissioners who supports extreme restrictions, is facing a recall election.
An electrified future for Colorado could be powered by solar on about 0.5% of the state’s crop and pasture land along with tripling our current wind turbine capacity. Still, many of the objections to solar projects concern the loss of agricultural production. Projects like Garnet Mesa assuage this concern but incur some added construction costs. The grazers are paid to bring the sheep, but that cost is usually similar to mowing.
Cattle have grazed successfully under raised solar arrays for a decade at a few ag college sites. These solar designs have been expensive to construct, but more affordable systems are being tested by builders.
There will be a celebration of and rally for solar power at Carbondale’s Chacos Park on Sunday, Sept. 21, at 11am and a short film on agrivoltaics at the Carbondale Library this Friday, Sept. 19, at 5pm. Both are part of national Sun Day events.