For
reasons I can’t fathom (which means they’re probably economical and political),
someone decided that Rutland was going to be the Solar Capital of Vermont and a
leader in solar power in New England, the United States, and who knows, probably
the world.
I
can’t fathom this because our region, of which Rutland is center of commerce,
has so little sun. I can’t find firm statistics to support this, but compared
to other regions we have cloudy skies well more than half the time. My own fifteen
years of trying to garden here move me to claim that we don’t have sun most of the time.
(Even
my physician supports this. When I asked how much vitamin D I should take along
with my calcium, she said there was no upper limit because Vermont just doesn’t
have enough sun to worry about it.)
So.
For the past two years, we’ve been seeing solar farms popping up all over. The
nearest one fills an old farm field on my way into Rutland to shop. Whoever
used to own that land, or still does and is leasing it, is probably making way
more money than they ever did farming. Same goes for people with bony hills
that are now home to cell towers.
These
things are ugly, but I’d sure rather see them than housing developments. Which
is the last I thought about it until today.
In
the past six days, we spent three of them with no power, thanks to a winter
storm that knocked down lines throughout the state. Some areas were so damaged
that they’ve spent all six days without juice. The entire period has been
sunless. We are forecast for partly sunny for a day and a half starting
tomorrow, then the next weather system moves in for two–three days. A fairly
normal pattern.
Which
is why I was thinking about it today. As I drove to the supermarket, along
miles of road lined with bowed-over trees so saturated with white that it
looked like they’d been blasted by a snow gun, gleaming against gunmetal-gray
sky, I passed the solar farm. The arrays all had their backs to me, so I couldn’t
see whether they were snow-pasted as well, though I did see some dump piles at
their feet which suggested that they had shed their load.
Point
is, what power were they collecting? What power were they making? Acres of
field with nothing to do. To the best of my knowledge, these are grid-tie
systems, so there’s no huge battery bank storing the power they create on nice
days to help us out on the bleak ones. I was looking at a giant field of
dormant, expensive hardware.
What
good is solar power when the grid infrastructure is broken? If we’d had to rely
on solar to keep us going during the outage, well, we’d be very cold and would
have lost a lot of food and had to poop in the woods, not to mention been
unable to do the work that enables us to pay the power bills. The biggest blessing
of our outage experience was that the village store had power so we could get
fuel to keep our generator going until it nigh melted down. Good-old evil fossil
fuel, the same stuff the store was using to keep their generators going.
If
I had to do it all over again, I’d get a propane generator because that fuel is
more reliable than ethanol-blended gasoline, and doesn’t destroy small engines.
Still, it’s a fossil fuel. Looking ahead in time to a “green” future, what’s
going to keep us going when the grid is down? Tell me solar, and I will laugh
in your face.
One
can argue that the millions invested in solar arrays might be better invested
in putting the grid underground so we don’t suffer days or weeks of economic
upheaval every time Nature throws us a curveball. But that would still leave the
macro problem of global depletion of fossil fuel, so green alternatives must be
pursued.
Too
bad they’re not worth a damn for year-round, all-climate reliability!
