On a brisk January afternoon as much of the country thawed out from a brutal arctic blast, the sun shone brightly on this stretch of rolling plains in far northeast Aurora. Temperatures only hovered in the 40s, but there wasn’t a cloud in the bright Colorado sky.
As it is most days, sunshine is abundant at the Solar Technology Acceleration Center, known as SolarTAC. More than 300 days a year the sun shines bright here, giving the scientists ample sun to work with as they try to harness the sun’s energy and turn it into reliable electricity. Eight companies and government agencies have a stake in the 74-acre site, some testing projects that are just a few years from market, others perfecting technologies that are already in use.
There was a time city officials saw that sun beating down on Colorado’s third-largest city and saw dollar signs. The thinking went that Aurora would be a place investors and scientists viewed as an ideal locale for their new business, somewhere with ample sun and a thriving solar scene packed with some of the industry’s best. Think Aurora, think solar.
To an extent, that’s happening. But the city’s solar scene has had some bumps along the way. And the crown jewel now is SolarTAC, a place that isn’t so much a job creation hub as it is a thriving research facility.
Leaders believed in Aurora’s bright solar future so much they made it a point to bring the industry here. First the city broke ground on SolarTAC in 2009, part of the 1,762-acre Aurora Campus for Renewable Energy, known as ACRE, on the city’s far northeastern edge.
Then in 2010 the city lured the EcoTech Institute, a trade school focused on jobs in the renewable energy sector, including solar power. The school moved into a high-profile storefront just east of Interstate 225 where passersby can see the various renewable energy technologies working there everyday.
Then came the big news in 2011: Aurora had landed General Electric’s $600-million solar panel manufacturing facility, PrimeStar Solar. It was supposed to bring 350 jobs. Like they did with EcoTech, city leaders crafted a sweetheart tax incentive deal to lure GE: They would get $9.4 million worth of tax rebates once they opened for business.
That project was supposed to cement Aurora as a capital in the country’s fledgling solar scene. A marquee name in American industry making Aurora its solar manufacturing home. City leaders beamed when they made the announcement. Now not only was the industry choosing Aurora for its ample sun with projects like SolarTAC and EcoTech and a handful of other solar arrays, but now they wanted Aurora’s workforce for manufacturing purposes.
But last summer — on one of those bluebird Colorado days — GE scrapped the plan. GE spokeswoman Lindsay Theile said at the time that continued struggles in solar panel pricing were the reason for the project’s collapse and said a year after delaying PrimeStar, GE realized it wasn’t viable.
“Doing it now is really in the best interest of the community and of our customers,” she said.
Since the project won’t happen, the company will never see those rebates. The GE flop stung. And it came on the heels of some other rough headlines for solar.
A great many pundits have been eager to write the obituary for the solar industry. Failures like GE’s — and to a larger extent Solyndra’s — are regularly tossed out there by supporters of traditional fossil fuels as proof positive that solar doesn’t work now and won’t work in the future. But under that harsh Colorado sun at SolarTAC, the other side of Aurora’s solar tale is being told, a few hundred mega watts at a time.
“You don’t have to be an environmentalist to know that making energy from the sun is a good idea,” says Dustin Smith, the executive director of SolarTAC.
Since the site opened it has grown to include a few high-tech solar panels — including 13 massive, 65-foot-wide panels — and a variety of other devices that could one day power your home. It’s attracted some big names in solar, including Amonix, Abengoa Solar, SunEdison and Hitite Solar.
Some of the companies are testing projects so new, they remain a secret. Hitite has one of those projects hidden safely behind a towering white tent, safely out of view from its competitors. And Xcel Energy has a project that mirrors power needs of a suburban neighborhood, allowing the company to track how best to deliver solar energy to power average homes.
The outcropping of towering solar devices on an otherwise desolate patch of land near Interstate 70 and Hudson Road is a little oasis of technology on the windswept plain.
On any given day, the solar panels out here far outnumber the people. Smith says that’s by design. The only permanent employees are Smith and his assistant, and they spend the bulk of their hours at the Aurora Municipal Center. Each member company is different, too, some assigning a few employees to regularly visit the site, others installing their equipment and only stopping by intermittently after that.
But that leads to a big question: How many jobs has the site created? If good-paying jobs are the end goal of the city’s efforts to lure solar, shouldn’t there be a hiring surge by now?
Smith says that’s the wrong question. SolarTAC isn’t meant to be a job creator. It’s a research hub, a place companies can use to quickly test new technologies and perfect others that one day down the road will create those jobs.
“SolarTAC isn’t here for making money, it’s here to help competitors get on top of an industry that we just have to have as a country,” he says.
And that part is working.
Amonix used SolarTAC as a testing ground for its photovoltaic systems, adjusting them to Colorado’s weather conditions and maximizing their output. With that knowledge gained at SolarTAC, they built a massive system deployment in Alamosa, the largest concentrated photovoltaic project in the world. That project is expected to create jobs for years to come.
The long game is always a tough sell, and Smith knows that. But he also knows that the site is steadily growing, and adding to its list of success every day.
And beyond SolarTAC, local economic development leaders haven’t wavered on whether solar will succeed, and succeed in Aurora.
“Overall, we are very, very optimistic about the industry,” Dick Hinson, executive vice president of the Aurora Economic Development Council, said in the days after GE announced the demise of Prime Solar. “The potential is tremendous.”
Hinson points to SolarTAC and EcoTech as examples of what the city has accomplished, and what it can continue to do.
“Having that here in our backyard makes it very convenient for people who are interested in the solar industry and interested in maximizing use of that knowledge,” Hinson says.