[Cello Music] We live on a planet which has greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.

We are grateful to those greenhouse gases because they keep the temperature of the planet at a level which supports life as we know it.

Extracting, processing, and combusting fossil fuels is increasing the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.

And what this does is simply increase the capacity of our atmosphere to retain heat.

Yes.

So when we look at sustainability in terms of energy, we can see finite resources such as coal, such as oil that we're using up, and these resources are depleting.

But it's not just about the fact that they're not gonna be there forever.

It's also that these resources tend to have health and well-being impacts, causing climate change as well as local pollution.

It's gonna have to be a transition to renewable energy, solar power, wind power.

We have tremendous potential in the state and are producing solar.

We're producing wind.

About half of our electricity is actually hydro.

We're looking at renewable hydrogen, our geothermal options, and we're looking at offshore wind.

It's far more sustainable and a better choice for all.

The planet will go on without us, so it's up to us to decide what role we want to have on this planet.

Energy Horizons is made possible in part by the Elizabeth Maughan charitable Foundation, the four way community foundation, and by the Members of Southern Oregon PBS.

Thank you.

People unfamiliar with Oregon often think of it as a rainy place.

The most well known parts of the state along the coast and around the Portland area certainly create this impression.

But these wet environments are the exception rather than the rule.

The majority of Oregon's land exists east of the Cascade mountain range and consequently gets little annual rainfall.

Klamath Falls, for example, usually experiences about three hundred days of sunshine each year.

With vast expanses of territory exposed frequently to the light of the sun and a population that's overall excited to adopt renewable energy, Oregon, like much of the US, has experienced a boom in its solar energy market.

Look around neighborhoods in Oregon, and it's hard not to find solar panels in your line of sight.

But why has solar energy managed to shoot ahead of other renewable energy technologies?

What has made the explosive level of adoption possible?

What trends are ahead for solar energy?

Our team is traveling through Oregon to talk to experts, community leaders, and everyday citizens about the solar revolution.

Sounds good.

I'm Derek DeBoer I'm the owner here at TC Chevrolet in Ashland, Oregon.

Fantastic.

And, we're talking about your solar array here.

When did you get that installed?

Yeah.

Aren't they cool?

It's only been, about a year since these have been installed.

Jeff with Stracker, he's the creator of these, and we've been talking about doing solar for quite a while.

And when he came and presented these, it sort of was just a no brainer.

There are so many benefits to these.

It's hard to, like, rattle them all off.

I mean, for me, there was everything from being green and kind of putting our money where our mouth is.

I'd also been wanting to put, like, a carport in the front line here to create some shade for the cars.

They happen to do that.

And then as far as the solar and the green side goes, they create almost 50 to 70 percent more power than just putting solar panels on the roof.

So we're actually far ahead of even Jeff's projections as far as when they'll pay off.

Saying somewhere between 3 and 5 years will be ahead of the game from what we spent.

So they're pretty impressive.

Rolling on that one.

Rolling on that one.

Just to sync them all up.

You've done this before.

Oh, yes.

Solar collection is clean.

It's quiet, accessible for most people in our culture, and it can be hooked directly up to distribution grids.

The solar industry has come a long ways.

Price is a tenth of what they used to be.

The production that we're getting out of our panels is greater.

We have a lot of people coming to us wanting to go net zero, wanting to, be able to offset all of their electricity bills or their energy bills.

The Straker units are a pretty bold testimony to the owner's commitment to technology, renewable energy, and helping address the climate situation we're in.

The solar field is more efficient on sunny days, and when it's operating, it supplies about 30 percent of the campus needs.

The power that's generated is sold to Oregon Tech at a reduced rate, so it's cost benefit to Oregon Tech, and it's also a very good teaching tool for our students.

The solar field there, it was built 2011, about ten thousand panels occupying about sixteen acres of land.

What I have here is the most typical silicon solar cell.

This is mainstream technology right now.

As you can see, this is wafer thin.

I mean, like, it's actually less than one millimeter.

It's like sure.

It doesn't take much to break this.

Even with my hands, this one just splashed into pieces.

And it's, well, don't worry.

This solar cell is about maybe $3 each.

I mean, like, it's not that expensive.

So the photovoltaic principle is basically we create a situation where the silicon can accept certain wavelength of the sun and create electron movement.

So with the electron that is moving inside the material, then you convert it into power.

So we're in Owen Hall.

We do thin film materials research, and we have a solid foundation of equipment for the full fabrication of thin film devices from start to finish.

Will this be your first time to wear these suit?

This was my first time.

Yeah.

Okay.

Never gotten to do this before.

Thin films are a huge worldwide industry that encompasses everything from, computer chips to photovoltaics.

Those thin films can be as thin as a few atoms thick.

In this lab, the thickest that we produce are probably up to about a micron thick.

The classic analogy of a human hair being about 70 microns, so we're talking about extremely thin layers of material.

This is a silicon wafer that has 1,200 thin film transistors on it.

In our work, these would be considered very large, and, they're still visible to your eye.

This particular machine combines electron beam evaporation, thermal evaporation, and sputter deposition all into the same chamber.

This machine was used extensively for research into ultra high efficiency absorbers for photovoltaics.

It'll process 6 inch wafers, we call them a hundred and 50 millimeter wafers.

So when we talked to, doctor Arief Budiman, he had example of solar cells that were literally, like, 6 inches across.

He sort of demonstrated us how delicate those can be because of their extreme thinness.

I guess this is the type of device that you produce that kind of technology in.

We have deposited thin films in this machine as thin as 10 nanometers thick.

At that point, we're talking about, dozens to hundreds of atoms thick.

Is it good?

Break another one.

It's not basic science, but it's how to implement widely.

This solar energy, if it is just like some small project here and there, it's not gonna help much.

It has to be pretty massive in scale.

So it used to be that the cheapest resources were coal and gas to create electricity.

Since then, you've seen the just dramatic decline in the cost of solar and wind, so that now the cheapest next resource to build for a utility is a wind or a solar plant.

In Oregon, we've got 3,000 megawatts of solar proposals waiting to go through the approval process because it's the cheapest resource.

The solar industry in Oregon is rapidly unfurling on two fronts.

Large megawatt scale arrays, which you'll find sprawling out in rural Oregon, and rooftop solar, which is appearing on homes all across the state.

If you live in Oregon, you could lower your electric bill to less than $30 a month.

Sunshine solar is giving southern Oregon homeowners the freedom to own your power.

Work with our team at True South Solar so you can power your life with clean, renewable energy.

The solar industry is on a really hot path and trajectory is steeper than any of us expected.

And it is really being fueled right now by the federal tax incentives, so the people that have tax equity are are jumping on board.

There's tax credits for energy efficiency.

There's tax credits for heat pumps.

There's tax credits for solar, up to 30% of the cost which is pretty dramatic.

That's one of the biggest incentives for residential solar systems.

Individual reputable solar installers can help customers deal with those.

We have a lot of information on our website for our Pacific Corp customers on how they can take advantage of those.

We have a solar and storage incentive program that has a particular call out for people who are lower income Oregonians.

We don't want only people who have resources to be able to have solar on their homes.

We wanna make that available to people who are moderate income or low income so the incentive is much bigger for those folks.

Another IRA program from the Biden administration, it's called Solar for All.

Basically, be able to incentivize people to put more solar on their businesses and their rooftops, again, with a big emphasis on low to moderate income because of equity issues.

It is what it sounds like.

It's gonna be grants particularly targeted at low income groups and low income communities.

It's very good for southern and eastern Oregon because we got a lot of sunshine and it's a good fit.

We are trying to help people who wanna be early adopters and need a little bit of extra help.

But when you see that and you start to think about the ability to control something about your own environment, to be able to produce your own energy, to be able to get a little break, annually on your energy bills.

If the subsidies are deep enough, that's a really attractive proposal.

So I think you are seeing people dive into that much more.

Maybe you can map out for me how when somebody has solar on the roof, they're actually getting a credit on their utility bill for that?

Yeah.

It's actually an old program in Oregon.

I was involved in actually setting it up.

It's called net metering.

It's a program where if you put a solar project on your house, it basically runs your meter backwards.

So you're getting paid the retail rate, whatever you're paying your electric utility, for that power that you're generating.

It helps you pay for that system by every time you generate, you're making money.

It's called net metering because it should only net out what you use.

So if you only use 10,000 kilowatt hours a year and you generate ten thousand hours, you're net zeroed out.

Most of the customers are on kind of an export credit tariff, which means that for electricity that they produce over what they use, they can export that to the grid, and that tends to be used kind of in their local area.

And they get a credit on their bill for that.

One of the things that's been changing is when those programs were originally developed.

They were developed so that customers were reimbursed at the retail rate.

That did introduce a subsidy inside the residential class of customers.

The way rates are calculated, that meant that customers that weren't using solar systems were subsidizing those that did.

It was a conscious decision by utilities and the regulators to do that as an incentive to get rooftop solar started, And it's been very successful because the cost of systems have really declined.

Utilities are moving toward a more cost based model.

That does reduce the export credit that customers get for their excess power.

We want to avoid an intraclass subsidy so that those customers are paying the full cost of their use because they're not only using the utility system to provide power to them when their system isn't generating, They're using the system to export energy, you know, to the system for which they receive benefit.

In trying to move that arrangement to a more cost based system, we have faced a lot of questions because it results in a change in the economics of a solar based home system.

The big utilities have not always been as receptive to rooftop solar as they could be.

Some of that is how does that move into the grid, and how does it really benefit the distribution of energy within the grid?

It's important that those systems be designed so that the costs that customers introduce onto a utility system are costs that they paid for.

The retail rate has a whole bunch of other costs embedded in it.

It's got customer service costs.

It's got transmission systems.

It's got generation.

As we have worked to adjust the export credit, it has been a difficult discussion with some of our customers.

We're making progress.

That industry is a little bit more robust than it was in its early days.

It's time to make those adjustments so that customers who don't choose to use solar are not subsidizing those who do.

You know, one of the challenges, the big picture challenges we have, is that for our investor owned utilities, there is money to be made in producing and using your own power.

That's something that really benefits people who are ownership roles in your company.

So it's not as attractive to buy energy that somebody else is producing for you.

Now that we have clean energy goals, I am hopeful that the need to meet the goals will mediate that a little bit because I just don't think that our big utilities can do this all with power that they're producing themselves.

I'm hopeful that they will start to need to be a little bit more open to alternative energy sources that are produced by independent folks.

Customers who want to generate some of their own power or all of their own power are free to do that.

The only barrier to that is the cost of installing the system.

Whether or not that makes sense for customers is a decision that they can make.

We have programs that enable them to do that.

Tax credits and utility incentives and other incentives are better than they've ever been.

People are able to install large systems for about a third the cost after these credits and incentives.

We see typical paybacks of 2 to 5 years on installations in terms of them paying for themselves with the energy savings from what would otherwise be spent to the utility company.

Are there any, like, challenges when it comes to transitioning to solar?

The cost, the initial investment is high.

You have to think of the return on investment.

Often, that is based on the economic return on investment.

I think the return on investment should also consider the social and environmental side.

I mean, that's where you bring in the externalities, and you think about holistically what is this doing.

And when you think about the challenges of climate change, we should put a monetary value on the impacts that we're seeing by not moving to solar and not moving to renewable electricity.

The returns of investing in solar are worthwhile, but the fact remains much of the population is not in a financial position to afford that investment, even with tax incentives and net metering.

Bringing more people into the solar revolution will require some alternative models.

I know not everybody can put solar panels on their roof, but there are other ways of doing that through community solar.

Recognizing that it may not always make sense for one individual to have solar panels on their home, but it may make sense for a group of neighbors or a group of impacted people to get their energy from a shared facility, and that's really the concept behind community solar.

We buy into a solar farm that is generating solar power over here, equivalent to what we use in our homes, which is an incredibly effective way for people who are rental occupants or have roofs that simply are not amenable to solar panels.

Yeah.

Community solar is very cool.

There's a couple of them in existence.

For instance, you get a low income mobile home park.

You put a big solar array, and it generates power.

That flows back into the grid, and the park gets the income for it.

But everybody is a part owner and shares in the value of that.

So they get the benefit of that solar project in that community.

And you could do that on top of a multifamily house where everybody gets a part of the business.

It can be very cost effective and really beneficial to the community.

In Southern Oregon, the nonprofit Solarize Rogue has found success as an early pioneer of community solar.

At first, we were just telling people the benefits of solar solar energy and helping them figure out ways to install solar panels on the roof.

But pretty soon we realized that the problem was much larger than what we thought.

There were a lot of people who didn't have a suitable roof because the roof was too old, the building was too old, they were in the wrong orientation, they were in the wrong location so you have a hill next to you or the forest or something else like that.

That just doesn't work.

But wait a minute, not everybody's a homeowner.

What happens with people who live in a rental?

Right?

Happens to people who live in a mobile home park.

How do we help them come up with access to solar?

And so that's how we got started.

We didn't quite realize at the time that the state of Oregon had already been thinking about something like this, and in 2016 passed a law that said that people could actually pool their resources together, build a solar system, and then partake on the energy.

Finally, in 2020, the Oregon PUC actually published the actual program implementation manual for the community solar concept.

When that came out, we said, Here's our here's our opportunity.

So we started approaching the Oregon Shakespeare Festival because they have a very large building in Talent with a huge roof.

And we thought that would be a perfect site for us to locate a community solar project.

And we wanted to do it small because we didn't really know where this was going to go.

The concept was, we're going to ask people to pay for their panels and they were gonna take all that money, build the system and then the energy that the system generates which goes directly to the grid, it doesn't go to the people's houses, goes directly to the grid, get bill credits as a proportion of the amount of ownership that they have on the system.

The minimum size for a community solar in Oregon was twenty five kilowatts, which is very small.

I mean, just to give you an example, a typical house uses about five kilowatts, or could use a five kilowatt system.

We set a stretch goal for sixty kilowatts.

We had to close it down at a hundred and forty one kilowatts because we ran out of roof space, right, within three weeks.

And so that was very, very good.

We tried to do solar panels on our house here, but we were told that we didn't have enough sun, but we could cut down a tree.

That didn't go over too well with with us.

So fortunately, a few years later, we heard about this community solar project through a friend of mine.

I'm very concerned about climate change, and I knew we needed to dramatically increase solar energy in every way possible.

My roof wasn't right for solar.

If you take a look at this house, you can see that there's some trees that are kinda blocking the southern side of it.

I found out I could participate in this community solar system that Ray was putting together, the solarized rogue.

We had a couple conversations, and I gave him our energy usage bills, and then he told us how many panels we could get.

We put in a down payment.

This was in 2020, and so it took us until 2022 to actually flip the switch because it's a lengthy process.

I mean, it's not as simple as putting solar panels on your roof.

You are considered a power plant.

Under the power plant regulations, there's a lot of red tape that you have to go through.

We had to work with Pacific Power and the PUC because nobody knew how this worked because we had just invented it.

Right?

It's cool that he stepped forward and had some success, but it hasn't been easy.

They were finding things as they went along that that extended the whole process.

Pacific Power owns that energy.

They buy it from the system and they pay a certain amount of money for that.

You turn on the lights in your house and you, at the end of the month, you get a bill.

Pacific Power looks at this energy that they purchased and said, oh, well, you know what?

Keegan owns a certain percentage of the system.

So a certain percentage of the money that I paid for that energy has to be assigned into Keegan's bill.

Say for example that the utility owes you $80 for that energy that they purchased and your bill was for a $100, then you only pay $20 on your monthly bill.

On your power bill, it'll say, like, how many kilowatt hours I got from the system, and we get credited, like, nine point $0.77 per kilowatt hour, and I would get, throughout the year maybe over $600 worth of credit.

Yep.

It has your solar credit right there.

Yep.

Right there.

And then that'll say here.

So a $190.49 was a credit for the it says the Oregon Shakespeare Festival Co op Project.

So I put out a little over $9,000.

Alright?

And it pays for about half of my power.

In some ways, I would like to get even more, but it's gonna pay for itself, in only 13 years.

The typical installation of solar panels in a house costs between $15,000 to $20,000.

The average home in Oregon requires about a 5 kilowatt system.

If you were to translate that to a community solar project and you bought 5 kilowatts of panels, the cost would be somewhere between $7,000 to $10,000 compared to the $15,000 to $20,000 So it's cut, again, cut in half.

It's simply a matter of economy of scale.

If I'm going to build a 200 kilowatt system, it's gonna be much cheaper to build that one system than to build a series of 5 kilowatt systems on other people's houses.

At the end of the day, you're paying less because it's cheaper to build.

The federal government is giving participants a 30% tax credit.

When you think about, well, maybe the system is gonna cost me, let's say, $10,000.

Now take over the the 30%, that's $7,000 If we actually are able to get grants like we did for the OSF building and whatnot, you know, those costs keep going down.

Our goal is actually to make these investments much more approachable for folks.

It's sometimes difficult to find the right people who wanna be a part of that.

I think there are some challenges with the receptivity of the utilities to take and buy that power.

So it's not a fully developed program, but I think it's one that has a lot of interest.

So, yeah, you're starting your own community solar program more locally just here in Ashland.

Can you tell me about that?

I retired as a high school teacher in 2020, and I looked around and I thought, wow, we should have community solar happening in Ashland.

We struggled to find a good model.

Solarize Road came along and they assisted us.

Now nothing's been easy.

It's like, I've been working on this almost for 4 years.

I can't even believe that.

We have a huge roof in Ashland, and we got a grant for, like, $167,000 from the USDA, and we're really gonna have our first system.

And I don't know if we would be here without Ray, you know, kinda holding my hand and assisting me and and saying, you know, look, we did it.

You know, you guys can do it.

You know, just keep at it.

At Ashland Solar Co op, we're trying to do that.

I'm really lucky to have him as a colleague and a friend.

The model that we built now can scale up.

We have currently three projects that are in the interconnection agreement conversations with Pacific Power.

We're constantly looking for new buildings, new properties that, might be of interest to us to build additional systems.

We do have a waiting list.

When we actually flip the switch and say we've gotta go, we need to sign people up very quickly.

Put your name in there, sign up, register, that doesn't obligate you to do anything at all.

But that simply tells us that you have interest and so then when we start saying, okay, we need to start talking to people, we know where to go.

Basically, it's people that wanna have solar but they can't do it because they've got the wrong roof for it or they're a renter.

There's a lot of people that are very concerned about climate change and wanna do the right thing.

Community solar is for them.

Whether it's through community solar or a traditional rooftop array, solar energy can provide clear benefits to one's personal finances.

But from a more practical, short term survival standpoint, solar can also be one of the best tools for preparedness against natural disasters and other unexpected events.

Mother nature can be unpredictable.

But with Oregon solar and battery, you'll never have to worry about losing power.

More and more of us are getting comfortable with the idea of putting battery storage into our home.

Off grid system, battery backup.

I think it's so critical that people really take a look at the battery backup systems over than just having a solar system.

I think there's increasing desire to look at that localized energy because of resilience issues.

Our community is one that is at high risk of wildfire.

In other places, it's it's ice storms or other issues that may interrupt the power flow.

If those local on your roof operations can start to actually be tapped when your power is down, there's a big resilience argument there.

One of the pieces of legislation that we passed in 2023 was a bill that I put forward that will give each county in Oregon that wants to participate $50,000 to do an energy resilience plan.

When the power goes down, where do we really need some sort of resilient power source?

Obviously, you have hospitals and institutions, but if you look at the map, the landscape of any individual community, where are people gonna go?

What is it they're gonna need?

And if we do that mapping exercise, then it'll help guide investments in resilience.

The Phoenix Talent School District put a million dollar solar installation in, and they incorporated batteries into that so that the Talent Middle School could operate during a crisis and be resilient.

It becomes the natural disaster and emergency shelter and point of ensuring people can go to and be safe and charge their phones and get warm and get some food.

That program that we have, the Community Renewable Energy Program, we've got sixty of those projects around the state.

For distributed generation in residential and commercial systems, many of those solar systems are designed such that they need the utility connection in order to function because they don't have storage associated with them.

Most of our solar customers don't have storage.

If you're thinking about disaster preparedness, it's important to be able to design a system so it has two things, storage so that you can run your household on energy that you've stored, but also that you can disconnect your system from the utility system.

In a power outage, when linemen are out repairing things, you don't want voltage from a distributed system getting on to the utility system to pose a danger for the repair people.

Battery storage is a technology still developing.

We have it as part of one of our solar projects coming up where we're gonna have battery storage adjacent to the Hawke dining, and we'll have that switched on in the event of an emergency natural disaster to be able to provide food for the SOU community and first responders if necessary.

As technology comes on, I would love to see more of that battery storage as part of our solar arrays.

It really does give energy and community resilience.

So in some instances, you might use it in the event of an emergency, but in others, you might use it So then you are storing the excess energy and using it at nighttime when solar might not be producing.

Rooftop solar and community solar are more familiar to many people because they're close to home.

But most solar energy being generated today is in large solar arrays, which tend to be far away, out in the wide open rural areas of Oregon's countryside.

Rooftop solar, residential solar is has been a growing part of our system, but it is dwarfed by the larger utility scale wind and solar systems.

The system was built for large generator locations exploiting a resource located near a transmission interconnection.

Due to its abundant solar resource and the presence of robust transmission interconnections, Klamath County has become a hot spot for utility scale solar energy development.

So okay.

What are we looking at over here?

This is the solar fields.

The 65 acres here and a 160 acres down there.

These were class five soils, so they're not high value, soils.

So I don't have a problem with the solar panels.

The viewscape is a little different, but I don't live up here.

You get down by the river and there's huge solar fields.

So we're we're producing a lot of solar power at Klamath.

I believe I've heard that this is one of the sunniest places in the entire state of Oregon.

Is that correct?

They say we get 300 days of sun.

I think my personal feelings are somewhat irrelevant.

It is this is the way that the state and, you know, the world really is is headed.

And so if we want to be a part of it and benefit from the new developments of these new projects, then we're gonna have to figure out a way to embrace it.

One of the things that we did is we passed a ordinance that lines out if you want to develop solar in Klamath County, here's the guidelines.

This is how you want to do it.

That informs developers that yes, we are receptive and we want to develop it in Plymouth County, but you're also gonna have to respect us and our way of life.

Laying that out ahead of time so that they know what they're getting into when they come here has made things so much cleaner, so much smoother.

The community is now benefiting in a way that's acceptable to, you know, the citizens at large because we went through that process to say, it's gonna happen.

What do you want it to look like?

And it was, well, stay off of the best farm ground.

If you're gonna take acres and acres and acres, you know 500 acres of of fertile farm ground and cover it with solar, that makes no sense.

Let's put it where it does make sense.

But I don't like it on good farm ground.

They said, you're gonna do class five, six, seven fields, that's fine.

But don't put it on class two and three and four fields.

That's just not the way things should work.

That's what we eat off of.

We're we're welcome to development.

We we want to grow as a community.

We need development.

We need new taxpayers.

However, it belongs where it belongs.

Once you start to really narrow down site specific, that's when you find, more of the opposition because people like the idea in general.

They just don't wanna look at it.

But that's not always going to work.

Right?

People don't find it necessarily attractive is what we hear the most of.

And then of course, the argument on the other side is, well, it's all in the eye of the beholder.

You know, some people really think it's beautiful.

I don't necessarily get that, but it just belongs where it belongs.

And we have I mean, Klamath County is 6,100 square miles.

We have plenty of room to put projects that we don't necessarily wanna stare at.

Klamath County has made great progress in shaping rules to direct solar development into spaces with minimal conflict, though it hasn't always been perfect.

Land use has often been a significant aspect of conflicts throughout Oregon's history.

This bill guarantees that Oregon's coastline will remain secure for generations to come Truckers tied yellow ribbons to their vehicles and some put spots on plastic owls, a symbol of the animal they say environmentalists are using as an excuse not to cut down trees.

New construction to accommodate a fast growing population butted up against the farm and forest land that Oregon is known for.

The proposed greater Idaho would encompass all or parts of 17 counties in eastern Oregon.

They wanna have a stand.

That's what we're here for.

We're gonna we're gonna take the water one way or another.

We'll take it.

The solar revolution is adding one more thing, competing for space and resources on Oregon's physical landscape.

I mean, you have seen the solar farm that we have in OIT.

It requires a lot of land.

What is ideal for solar photovoltaics, it will be like a large area, flat, sunny, with easy access to water.

We are going to need a lot of land.

Problem is those kind of lands, flat, large, sunny, with water, are occupied already a lot by agriculture, which is also important.

Agriculture is basically our food.

We cannot have all the renewable energy that we want, but not eat.

It will if it is not already right now, it is already con competing with the agriculture.

Land use does not always necessarily have to be a choice between one thing or another.

It turns out that the relatively newer tech that is solar is benefiting from an age old practice, sheep herding.

Grazing among the nearly half million solar panels covering the 1,200 acres that is Pash Wyewet Fields in the heart of Gilliam County.

It's like Thanksgiving for them every day.

Right?

You'll find Cameron and his flock.

And we raise Rambouillet sheep that are suited for our arid eastern Oregon climate.

Some farmers have started experimenting with ways to make land productive for both agriculture and photovoltaics, leading to the rise of agrivoltaics.

He's still able to get his wool.

He's still able to get his meat.

And the sheep, as they grate pass through here, are their droppings are making the soil better with microbes and nitrogen.

So it's just a big win win for the whole company.

The question comes very clear.

I mean, do you want solar panels or do you want food?

We can actually do a lot of things with the land under the solar panels.

Right?

Grapevines don't wither with the sun, lettuce grows better because it's a little bit shaded, there's less water consumption, the sun is not really evaporating every I mean there's some advantages to building something, agriculturally speaking, underneath those panels.

How can we take advantage of these different opportunities and have a win win for everybody?

The idea is the same plot of land.

We can use it for agriculture, that is to produce crops, to produce our food.

The same plot of land, we can also use it for photovoltaics, generate renewable energy.

We will have both on the same plot of land.

The crops will have to be on the ground because they need the soil.

So then we need to elevate the solar photovoltaics so that we put the panel with some elevated structure.

With the our conventional solar panel, as you can see already in the solar farm, they are heavy.

The structure need also to be very strong.

So we are doing this kind of novel design of PV panels.

We use different kind of material.

I can even make it with some sort of transparent polymer that is as strong as glass.

It can actually curve.

It can actually follow some contour.

It's the same for ourselves.

Instead of a glass and metal aluminum, we use just lightweight material.

With that lightweight solar PV, then we don't need to build, like, very heavy structure.

In fact, we can just build some sort of, like, a greenhouse and put the solar panel integrated with the greenhouse, and that's what we call agro, photovoltaic dome.

We plan to build a real size, actually, somewhere on the campus.

That's one of the project.

Hopefully, if we meet again two years from now, that's something that we can visit and tour and discuss.

The land use issue has inspired innovation, both in academic and private circles.

Straker Solar, based in Ashland, was founded on a desire to keep the land occupied by solar generators open to other uses.

Started in the solar industry back in 1976 with my dad.

We put bread box water heaters on roofs in the San Joaquin Valley.

We started Stryker in 2016 after working in California under their proposition 39 program to help Northern California schools start renewable energy programs.

We were installing a six tracker installation down in Grenada Elementary in Northern California using dual axis trackers from all Earth renewables, and we were really impressed that we were actually seeing 70% greater energy gain using the same panels.

At the same time, we saw that we were having to fence off large areas of the school grounds to be able to do these installations.

And that's when the light bulb came on that, you know, if we can pull them out these things and make them robust enough, we won't need fencing below, and we can maintain these playing fields down below.

So we started designing and testing a pole mounted structure here locally at Oak Street Tank and Steel and developed what's now become the Stryker system.

It is becoming the premier elevated dual axis tracking system in the country.

Strykers are the most efficient solar harvesters available anywhere right now.

They produce 50% to 70% more energy than fixed rays, and they open up a whole new array of installation areas that were otherwise previously unopened to solar.

You know, for instance, you you see your current solar farm installations, massive expanses of solar farms, just all these fences and you can't access anything.

The Oregonian in me, you know, I'm like, man What about the animals?

You know, what about how the animals gonna get through or what about natural habitats or whatever?

You have to protect it from other people, which means fencing.

Well, when you have a solar panel 20 feet in the air with no access to it unless you have a bucket truck, you forego the need for fencing.

There's no safety hazards or anything really to concern yourself with the fence spout.

You're not disturbing natural habitat.

The animals that are native to the area still have free access to do whatever they need to do, go where they need to go, and, you have this massive energy production monster over your head.

These are being installed in this parking lot, and you have a 650 square foot solar array above your head, but you only have a 3 square foot footprint that's being taken up from our foundation.

The utility solar market has set the bar for what is the best way to generate electricity, what is the most cost effective way to do that.

Originally, those large fields of solar panels that you saw 20 years ago were fixed mount solar, and that has given way over the last 20 years to single axis tracking because they could get 30% up to 40% more power than the fixed panels.

So as fixed solar transitioned to single axis tracking, so shall single axis tracking evolve into dual axis tracking.

We maximize the amount of solar that can be gotten out of any particular solar panel.

And by doing that, we reduce the number of panels we need to produce and the waste associated with those panels 30 years down the road.

Dual axis trackers tried to compete with single axis trackers back in the 70s when utility solar was starting to take root.

Because it was a race to the bottom for the cheapest way to get things in the ground, corners were cut, and dual axis trackers earned a poor reputation in the industry.

What we've done with strackers is just in the last few years, the material strengths, the manufacturing tolerances, and the control systems have finally got to a place where we can put a robust tracker that we know will be able to handle a 120 mile an hour winds on the top of a 20 foot pole.

Pretty multipurpose shop right here.

Their primary purpose is doing steel tanks and whatnot, but we have partnered with them for the last six or seven years.

These are some components right here.

These are our our axle tubes, which is, basically, like, the main structural component that holds the rest of our rays above it.

These guys rotate to follow the sun.

We got these guys welded out drive cores right here right now.

This is basically step one of the fabrication process.

After we get our material, they obviously need to fabricate it, and then we have to get it sent off to get painted just so it can withstand the test of time.

We use American made steel, which is really strong, but as you know, steel rusts, so we gotta make sure it's protected from the elements all the time.

This just some more raw steel right here.

It's gonna be our striker main beams, the c beams that are, again, holding our array.

What you're looking at right here is what that gentleman over there is actually welding.

It's your piece that gives everything movement.

It's probably our ugliest tracker just because these are our prototypes and stuff and we have some extra gear attached to that one so we can actually monitor it as it goes, but, you still get the basic idea of what they look like when they're moving, you know.

In the morning as the sun's rising, the striker tilts and turns to face the exact spot that the sun is rising.

And then throughout the day, by rotating on its two axis's, both its tilt and its azimuth, it follows and keeps its entire solar array perpendicular to the sun.

So it's getting the absolute most power it can get all day long.

Each unit has a GPS antenna and a GPS card in it so it knows where it's at.

Using that in conjunction with a special program that's actually written by the government as far as tracking the sun goes, knows exactly where the sun's gonna be out throughout the day, and every 7 minutes, it corrects itself.

So it's perfectly perpendicular with the sun, and it's guaranteed to be within 0.1 degrees of the sun at all time throughout the day until it goes to bed at night.

When it goes to bed at night, that's when it it goes into its stow position again?

Yeah.

So our systems know when sunrise is and when sunset is.

So when the sun comes up in the morning, they're gonna be flat.

But then when that sun comes up, it wakes up and meets the sun first thing in the morning, follows it throughout the day.

And then once it's down past the horizon, it once again goes flat and orients itself in proper stow position for the evening.

All of our installs, we keep, stow switches on our units so that for whatever reason, they need to get underneath it or need the clearance, they have the ability to actually put our units in a flat stow mode.

Push it and wait a couple seconds, and then she starts moving.

It's not a fast process.

I mean, obviously, when you're dealing with this much weight, you have really high torque or high ratio of motor, so it's like 280 to 1 as far as the the gearing and the slews go, but it makes for a nice smooth efficient movement that's pretty much impervious to the influences of wind or whatever outside forces don't want it to move.

Very reliable.

Super low maintenance, we grease them once a year, they've been doing great, there's an anemometer on top of each unit, we have a program in them to where if the wind goes over a certain speed we have them set at 25 miles an hour, it detects it and automatically goes flat and won't raise again until it's detected 30 minutes without a high speed wind gust.

So try to build a little bit of safety into the systems just because, you know, you don't wanna spend a bunch of money on a solar array and have your investment get ruined by the weather.

So you're gonna put something on the weather, it's gotta withstand the arrays themselves are about 28 foot wide by 24 foot tall.

We have up to 15 kilowatts worth of solar panels we can put on that.

These are the Z Shine Solar 450 bifacial panels.

We're actually putting these on a job right now.

We gotta come and pick this box up a little bit later.

I'd open it more, but just gonna make it harder for us in transportation.

We do have an active job site going, and if you guys would like, you're more than welcome to follow me on over and watch me tell people what to do.

Yeah.

By all means, let's go.

Well, we're pretty excited about our local clients.

We have TC Chevy that was our first retail dealership installation, car dealership.

Franz Bakery is using us for their distribution center, intend to use us elsewhere.

We have Ashland Family Dentistry and Colin Beck Enterprises that have turned their systems into net zero medical offices.

Yes.

I'm a dentist here in town and we built these in 2020 to power the office.

In 2010, we decided to look into solar, but we couldn't ever make enough power to power that building.

It burns about 50 to 100 kilowatts a month.

So there was no technology at the time.

Stracker meets that need.

So here we are.

Is a dentist office, like, more power demanding than other types of businesses?

Well, we have 2 servers and 40 computers, so yes.

And we have a lot of pumps and compressors, so they use a lot of power.

So this is, we call it the service center six.

This is for the city of Ashland.

We were awarded a grant, earlier last year to get this all done.

This project is gonna showcase 6 of our strikers right here in this parking lot.

With the addition of a massive battery backup system and 2 level 3 EVCS units, electric vehicle charging stations.

Level 3, it's as good as you can get, you know, just shy of a Tesla supercharger, you know, it's a 120 kilowatt charging system, so it's gonna be a very a big showcase project, you know, for the city of Ashland So what are we looking at here?

So we call this flying the array.

Array.

So down on the ground on the racks, we work and wire up all the modules, connect everything, make sure it's all working properly, and then we set the poles, get those level, bolt tightened down, and then we pick up the whole array, bolt it to the top.

Next stage is we'll hook up the wires at the top of the pole.

We already have our underground wiring in and commission that, and and then we're just set.

Once we power up, she'll start flying.

Fantastic.

Start working.

Nice.

Is it a challenging process?

We're getting it down.

We're getting it down.

It's it's fun.

Nice.

Jeff's a good friend of ours.

And hopefully we'll put some trackers in some of our projects as well for projects where you don't have the ability to put ground mount.

His system is very, very good.

It's just a matter of trying to make sure that the pricing and cost benefit analysis for the users is really there.

What you don't want to do is having a system that costs so much money that people never see their payback.

I paid $110,000 for them, so 55,000 each, which is 26 kilowatts of power, and they will be paid off essentially in 5 years of the payback with the tax credits.

Tracker is easily one of the, important area in solar PV implementation.

Tracker is expensive, but I think just like with any other technology, once it's, fully developed, then they will be mass produced, then, it will make economic sense.

It's a big nut.

If everything is good in the supply chain and we don't we're not backed up on other projects, don't have anything to wait for, realistically, from the time we get an order to the time we can have it all manufactured, you're looking at probably about a month from order to manufacturing.

And then once we get out here, you know, if there's one striker, we're in and out in two days, like, completely.

You know, it depends, and it it looks like we're about to be extremely backlogged with manufacturing.

So have new orders for this stuff ramped up?

Yes.

And we have a lot of big things in the works.

Don't wanna count our chickens before the eggs are hatched, you know, but, yes.

Orders have picked up.

We have another six pack going up here in Ashland here in mid December.

So the pace is definitely picked up, and with what we have on the horizon, it's gonna be very crazy.

And we're pretty excited about the national expansion that we're in right now.

We've got some large installations planned for microprocessor chip up in the Portland area.

Some tribal installations lined out.

We're talking to some large megachurches back east that have acres of parking lots they'd like to cover and several of the universities from Southern California all the way to Minnesota.

Well, I think Straker is totally cool.

You know, they're taking a different approach in terms of their installations.

Straker is gonna make an imprint regionally and, probably across the country.

But I track their success just by looking at the number of Stryker poles that I see around the community.

What I mostly hope is that Stryker stays in Southern Oregon as they expand and go off to the rest of the world.

Well, Jeff seemed like a a very Ashland guy.

Yeah.

So I hope he stays around too.

Some of the core technologies, the actuators and the control systems, I think, will still be produced here in Southern Oregon.

But we will be fabricating the bulk of the steel structure, the poles, the frames, the rails in shops that are local to where the installation is going.

And by doing that, we bring a measure of economic development, community development to each of the communities that we serve.

Apprenticeship programs are gonna be a big piece of everything that we do, and we're really working and committed to provide living wage jobs for all of our employees and associates.

How many people across all of your activity do you think you employ?

We have about 10 people here locally, and we have subcontractors all over the place.

The potential for this, just once word gets out to the appropriate places, it's it's industry upsetting potential.

You know, it's a very, very amazing product.

I I believe in it a hundred percent.

I think we have the technology to do this.

I think the biggest challenge that we have is trying to understand how do we transition from a fossil fuel economy to a let's call it renewable energy economy without leaving too many people behind.

We're humans.

We're good at what we do.

And I happen to believe that if we wanted to solve the problem and bring everybody with us, we could.

If we put our politics and other preconceptions behind us, we can do this.

We can do this.

And when my dentist, who's a terrific person, but not necessarily a democrat, put Stracker Solar in his side yard, I knew that we had burst through some of the concerns about solar or renewable energy.

I'm believing that climate change is the toughest issue of our time and believing that if we come together as a culture, with our policies, and with our expectations, we're gonna be able to turn this thing around The future is that, solar panel will not just be flat and put on the rooftop.

It will be everywhere.

Some people will say, well, you're doing this because you're trying to help with the climate, Right?

And and try to remove yourselves from fossil fuels.

Well, that's true, but if you can also prove that whatever you're doing is financially beneficial.

Money seems to convince a lot of people.

Wherever they stand in the spectrum of climate change, money will always be one of those things that will say, oh, tell me more.

You don't have to identify as being progressive politically to understand what the benefit of having solar that's flowing in and providing your own electricity and reflecting on your energy bills is gonna have for your operation, whether it's a home or a business.

Glad that I'm here in the beginning stages of it, you know, just watch it take off.

We're on the launch pad completely fueled up just waiting for that countdown, you know, and it's starting.

I still am hopeful that we will have a grassroots movement that will get us there for people like your sake.

I mean, some of us are already past our prime, but, for younger people, for younger generations, we have to do this.

I think it's just such a good way to like show push boundaries and show that, you know what?

If we all play our part, we can rewire America and have a much better, more sustainable way of living.

I'm believing as a culture and as a species, we're gonna be able to make those changes and that we're gonna come together and set the policies to get this on the right track while there's still time.