After five-years of inactivity, the solar garden south of Leadville on County Road 10 came back online on April 15. Cloud City Conservation Center (C4) purchased the facility on April 30, 2024 with the goal of repairing its equipment and bringing solar energy back to its subscribers.

The solar garden is fenced-facility that sits across CR 10 from Fire Station II. It contains sun-tracking solar panels that rotate throughout the day, following the path of the sun to maximize the amount of energy it can generate. The panels can operate year-round on their own and create enough warmth to melt any snow. 

C4 projects the solar garden to produce about 960,000 kilowatt hours per year. That energy is transferred to Xcel Energy’s grid and the solar garden’s 26 subscribers are given energy credits by Xcel. The subscribers include local governments, organizations and individual homeowners. 

In 2020, the facility’s inverter which makes solar energy compatible for Xcel’s grid broke. The company that owned that solar garden at the time, Clean Energy Collective, filed for bankruptcy that same year and was unable to fix the inverter.

C4 purchased the facility for $1 and received funding from its three largest subscribers, the Board of County Commissioners, Parkville Water District and the Town of Breckenridge, as well as a grant from the Denver Foundation’s Renewable Energy Trust in order to repair the facility. C4’s executive director Emily Olsen said that C4 had encouraged people to purchase subscriptions when the garden was first built and they felt a responsibility to make sure it operated.

“The situation that this garden was in at the time was really the worst possible case scenario and we didn’t want that to be the story of solar in a similar county because it actually can be much more successful here than in other counties,” Olsen said. “It also aligns with our energy program work, it was definitely a shift in how our organization approached our work but it is in line with our mission, our vision and our goals to help reduce green house gas emissions in Lake County.”

In addition to the solar garden in Lake County, C4 purchased nine other similar facilities in the front range of Colorado using another grant. Olsen said that across all of C4’s solar gardens, five percent of the energy produced will go to low-income households. Olsen said that C4 is working to enroll Lake County residents to enroll in the programs for their gardens. 

“In 2023, we set a goal as an organization that Lake County would meet the state’s goals for greenhouse gas emission reductions. The goal is net zero by 2050 which is a very ambitious goal so this is one way that we’re working towards that,” Olsen said. “In general, in Lake County, we pay a significant amount for energy whether its electric or gas especially because of our old environment, so that really is in alignment with our mission and our entire energy program is making sure that that energy is renewable and is supporting the health of our planet and our community and making sure that it is affordable for our community.”