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Earth Week: A Solar rebirth in Santa Fe

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Jon Marquez hands off a solar panel to Nick Martine during a rooftop installation project April 8 at Amy Biehl Community School at Rancho Viejo. Marquez and Martine are both with Mosher Enterprises Inc. and Consolidated Solar Technology of Albuquerque. Luis Sánchez Saturno/The New Mexican
Updated  | By Staci Matlock
The New Mexican

In the 1970s and early 1980s, Santa Fe enjoyed a boom in solar tourism.
“They would come in by the busload from Germany, China, Italy,” recalled Bristol Stickney, who was among New Mexico’s young solar pioneers at the time.
The visitors were drawn to the City Different by an eclectic bunch of national lab engineers, architects, high school dropout inventors, software designers and tinkerers who were at the forefront of solar home design, solar heating and early solar electric systems. The group experimented, analyzed data, noted their failures and published their successes in papers and books that became the solar bibles for the rest of the world. Their efforts were buoyed by the threat of a foreign oil embargo and generous government tax credits.
The group launched the New Mexico Solar Energy Association, now 40 years old, and had two dozen staff members. They published a newsletter filled with groundbreaking data about solar design. People around the world read the stories and came to study Santa Fe’s passive-solar homes.
“New Mexico was trying just about everything you could think of in solar as it became available,” Stickney said. “To my knowledge, NMSEA was the center of all that activity in the nation. It was a center for solar enthusiasm.”
Then Ronald Reagan was elected president. “He killed solar,” Stickney said.
Reagan removed the solar heaters installed by his predecessor at the White House, Jimmy Carter, and with the threat of an oil embargo temporarily over, Congress killed the solar tax credits. A few dishonest companies that wanted the solar tax rebate without doing legitimate work didn’t help, Stickney said. Europe and China took over as the solar leaders of the world.
Fast forward four decades. Solar and energy-efficient homes are a big part of the city of Santa Fe’s Sustainability Plan and its goal to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions. Many of New Mexico’s early solar pioneers, who never stopped exploring the boundaries of the technology, are still in the state, building successful businesses and creating jobs.
Solar has had a rebirth. But a state that ranks near the top in the nation for the number of sunny days per year is still a long way from utilizing its full solar potential.
Passive solar abodes
Rocket scientist Peter Van Dresser built one of Santa Fe’s oldest passive-solar homes in 1958 and founded the New Mexico Solar Energy Association a dozen years later. Among its early members were inventor Steve Bauer, Los Alamos scientist Doug Balcomb, architects Mark Chalom, Ed Mazria and Bill Lipscomb, and Benjamin Rogers, who was credited with coining the term “passive solar.”
“The exciting thing about passive solar is it worked without any expensive pumps or special knowledge,” Stickney said. “You just built windows pointed in the right direction and built it out of the right materials, and you could live in a solar collector and be comfortable.”
There were failures along the way. Designers had to learn how much shade to provide so a passive-solar house didn’t overheat in the summer, for example. They looked for ways to build affordable passive-solar adobe homes.
By the 1980s, Mazria had produced a how-to guide for building a passive-solar home. Balcomb had designed a building modeling software called Energy 10 for predicting how a solar home would work in all kinds of weather. Balcomb went on to the cutting edge National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Colorado. Susan and Wayne Nichols developed the first commercial solar subdivision south of Santa Fe. Decades later, some of those early passive-solar homes are still operating fine and cost far less to heat and cool than many newer homes.
But passive-solar homes, though proven 30 years ago and built with New Mexico’s greenest building material, adobe, lost traction among both “green builders” and affordable-home advocates. Even the early national sustainable building programs such as LEED and HERS penalized adobe homes because the organizations didn’t understand them, said Quentin Wilson, a longtime adobe builder. Adobe gave way to wood-frame houses. Manufactured homes became the least expensive, quickest house option for many low-income people.
Despite its long history in New Mexico and around the world, adobe became seen in Santa Fe as the wealthy person’s building material. “Santa Fe has legitimized adobe, but at the same time made people think they can’t afford it,” said Wilson, who runs the Adobe School at Northern New Mexico College, the only adobe certification program in the country.
At the same time, many developers stopped designing homes that utilized the sun’s free energy effectively.
Wilson sees signs of a return to favor for adobe and passive-solar design. He said builders are using it again in Las Cruces and Albuquerque, and not just for high-end homes. Santa Fe Community College will begin offering an adobe home-building curriculum developed by Wilson and colleagues with the Earth Builders Guild.
Wilson said passive-solar adobe homes make sense in New Mexico. “They are big, solid, powerful. They are fireproof, termite proof and bulletproof,” Wilson said.
Solar heating
Early solar adobe houses went hand in hand with solar water-heating systems. Stickney was among those at the forefront of testing solar heating systems. Through Solarlogic, the company he helped found in 2008 in Santa Fe, Stickney now has five patents for solar heating components.
The simplest version of solar heating is a black box with solar collectors that heats water for household use and for radiant heating systems. Stickney’s latest patent is for a solar heating system that cools itself as needed. The company also has designed systems that allow Solarlogic or the homeowner to control a solar heating system remotely.
The company received a $10,000 economic development grant from the city of Santa Fe, which built a lab where they can test new solar thermal products.
Stickney said solar heating systems make the most sense for people on propane, allowing them to heat water and their homes for a lot less money. He said that in general, a solar heating system adds 20 percent to the cost of a water and space-heating system. Solarlogic helps customers figure out whether the cost will be worth it in steady utility savings.
Solar thermal, like solar photovoltaics, qualifies for state and federal tax credits, which helps reduce the upfront cost up to 30 percent. “It turns out that the cash flow usually turns positive the second year, and in some cases days after the project is running,” Stickney said.
Solarlogics’ latest research project is based on an ancient Persian technology called “night sky radiant cooling.” Adobe walls built in Iranian deserts actually form ice with the method. He and Chalom did a two-year research project on the technique as part of former Gov. Bill Richardson’s Energy and Water Savings Initiative. They ran solar thermal collectors backward at night, sending heat back to the night sky and cooling a building’s interior. “It turns out it is effective and cheap to do,” Stickney said.
Now all of Solarlogic’s solar heat collector systems are wired with a pump to run the system backward and cool a house.
Solar electricity
Solar photovoltaic systems, better known than solar heating, have gained a lot of traction in Santa Fe in the last decade. Still, most of the power Public Service Company of New Mexico supplies to Santa Feans is from coal, natural gas and nuclear sources. Part of the city’s Sustainability Plan is to switch to renewable energy.
The renewed interest in solar electricity combined with much cheaper photovoltaic panels, generous tax credits and a small payback from PNM is driving solar sales and helping local solar businesses.
In 2002, none of the city’s operations was powered by renewable energy. By the end of this year, city energy specialist Nick Schiavo hopes 20 percent of the city’s power needs will come from the sun. That puts him halfway to the city’s goal of 40 percent renewable energy.
The city is waiting for permission from PNM to add another megawatt of solar at the Buckman Direct Diversion and 500 kilowatts of solar at the Genoveva Chavez Community Center parking lot, Schiavo said.
On their own, more than 700 PNM customers have installed solar photovoltaics on their own roofs, producing all or most of their own electricity.
Community solar also holds a lot of promise for Santa Fe, but only if PNM agrees to the idea. Schiavo and others are negotiating with the utility currently to build a 5-megawatt community solar project at the old landfill site. The city would use at least half of the energy. Businesses or residents in the city who can’t put solar on their rooftops could lease the rest of the energy produced by the system at a fixed energy price over 20 years.
Santa Fe County also is adding solar. The new county courthouse has a 113-kilowatt solar PV system that powers about 15 percent of the building. “We’re looking at the feasibility of adding solar to other county buildings,” said Craig O’Hare, a county energy specialist.
Santa Fe Public Schools has jumped on the solar electric bandwagon. Voters approved a $2 million general obligation bond for solar on district buildings recently. The money will build a 200-kilowatt solar PV system at Capital High School first. It will help put a 50-kilowatt solar PV system on a parking lot structure at the new Agua Fría Elementary School on South Meadows Road. Another solarized parking structure will go up at Piñon Elementary.
“We like the idea of affording shade and solar electricity at the same time,” said the school’s conservation program director, Lisa Randall. “We’re not big on putting them on rooftops because of maintenance issues.”
As Santa Fe’s primary power provider, PNM also is adding renewable energy. It is mandated to provide 20 percent of its retail electric sales from renewable sources by 2020. The utility increased its use of wind and solar from almost zero in 2002 to 10 percent now, but it is playing catch-up to meet the state’s renewable energy requirement.
Contact Staci Matlock at 505-986-3055 or smatlock@sfnewmexican.com or @stacimatlock.