By Mark Jaffe | Colorado Sun
It seemed like a good idea. Put a large solar array on 640 acres of sagebrush and cedar about 30 miles northwest of Telluride. There was already a transmission line running through the property and only some cattle poking around in the shrubs and trees.
The Colorado State Land Board, owner of the parcel, had made siting renewable energy facilities a priority and even amended the lease on the Wright’s Mesa land to give solar panels precedence over cows. What could possibly go wrong?
And so, on a May evening last year, Seattle-based OneEnergy Renewables held a community meeting at the public library in Norwood, the mesa’s only town, to unveil a plan for thousands of solar panels and a 500 megawatt battery.
Norwood is home to about 550 people and all told there are about 2,000 folks living on the 30,000-acre mesa, so when more than 200 people packed the library and another 50 tuned in on Zoom, it was clear something was up.