A Personal View of Regional Renewable Energy Projects
It’s the last full moon in August, 2023. A blue moon and a super moon. Is this why I’m not sleeping?
As I toss and turn, all kinds of people wander through my restless night. Are these ghosts?
Historic figures come out of the night to haunt me on this recent super moon: Millard Fillmore, Henry Rowe Schoolcraft and Daniel Boone. They seem dreamworld travelers guiding a transition one age into another.
A surprising person also entered my dreamworld. I’ve never met Joel Davidson, but I’ve read his book and joined the solar revolution in part because of it. The New Solar Electric Home: The Photovoltaics How-To Handbook came out in the early 1980s. It describes his experience living off the electric grid near Pettigrew, Ark., in the 70’s and 80’s.
Joel now lives in southern California, still working in solar energy. I talked with him while putting together my book Ozark Voices. I was hoping to include a chapter about him and his friend Edd Jeffords, who published The Ozark Access Catalog in 1973.
“Edd was one of my very best friends,” Davidson said when we talked a few years ago. “It was a great loss for me and the whole Ozarks that Edd Jeffords lost his Arkansas funding and had to move to Texas. He had a great career but died far too young.”
I met Edd long ago at his home in Eureka Springs. He was full of energy to start new projects. Luckily there are recent books describing aspects of the solar revolution and the back-to-the-land movement, Hipbillies: Deep Revolution in the Arkansas Ozarks by Jared Phillips and Thomas Kersen’s Where Misfits Fit: Counterculture and Influence in the Ozarks.Both capture the diversity of new Ozark settlers.
As might be expected from the title, Phillips’ book does not attempt to describe similar social change across the border in Missouri. Kersen’s book combines memoir and recent interviews with early homesteaders. Both these studies give an excellent overview of the free spirit of the Back-to-the-Landers. My paper focuses on the early attraction during this period of renewable energy for homesteaders.
In the beginning, solar was a hands-on technology. This attracted me and others to solar projects. It was something you could do yourself, save money and be connected with the natural rhythm of nature.
Ozark renewables fit in because few communities had building codes but often had pioneers willing to try something new. Solar has been 50 years in coming. Now the solar revolution is finally here!
This long journey remains controversial. I want to celebrate aspects of our renewable energy growth, how they relate to national developments and what more can be done.
X X
It’s necessary to go back to the mid-1970s for context that may not be obvious with national news now fixated on Donald Trump and Joe Biden:
- Fifty years ago we were still at war in Vietnam with often 400 Americans and more Vietnamese being killed weekly;
- OPEC’s energy crisis resulted in sales of gasoline on odd or even numbered days depending on the buyer’s license plate number;
- Stagflation created the worst economy since the Great Depression.
No wonder young people in the ‘70s turned to the most free-spirited, happy music we could find. It was so much crazier back then!
More positive signs beyond rock-n-roll from the ‘70s include the Civil Rights Movement; women’s liberation, development of the world’s first commercial microprocessor, and increasingly efficient silicon photovoltaic modules to power satellites in space as well as homes on earth. Renewable energy dovetailed with rock-and-roll to make technology cool.
Working as a reporter for the daily newspaper in Rolla, Missouri, a university town in the northern Ozarks, I could not help but be aware of solar energy developments in the early 1970s. Professors in academic engineering departments were excited to research renewables. Local builders were retrofitting homes with bread box solar heaters or solar greenhouses on the south-side of residences. Magazines like Home Power and Mother Earth News provided inspiration for average folks to get involved in energy projects.
Now known as Missouri University of Science and Technology, UMR in the 1980s and ‘90s sponsored a variety of research on everything from sustainable building to solar cars. It has maintained a solar village of individual homes on campus where undergraduates, like my niece Anna Osborne, lived while completing her degree in environmental engineering.
One organization I discovered through friends was New Life Farm then based in the countryside near West Plains. I took some early training a on building solar collectors. Eventually NLF became the Ozark Resource Center, based in West Plains.
As a 501c3 organization, ORC has sponsored a wide variety of projects, including The Oral History of the Ozarks Project, which made video. We piggy-backed on ORC’s tax-free status to raise funds. Our award-winning Treehouse: An Ozark Story, about Ralph ‘Treehouse’ Brown’s canoe rental and his neighbors along the Huzzah Creek in Crawford County, is available now on YouTube.
I also attended some early sessions of what local organizers called the OACC, the Ozark Area Community Congress, a regional gathering of people interested in ecological projects of all kinds. In addition to workshops and special interest groups, OACC had plenary sessions where resolutions were passed almost like a New England town meeting.
This seemed great. The Ozark Resource Center still supports OACC to inspire new ideas. Through both these groups I met lifelong friends.
Focus on energy issues inspired me most in the Back-to-Land movement. Young people moved to the Ozarks because it was affordable, manageable and peaceful, unlike cities which were going crazy with riots and folks fleeing to suburbia. Solar energy was something you could understand through simple logic and implement at your own pace.
Renewable energy, besides being readily available in different formats, either active or passive designs, is not difficult to use on a small scale. Agriculture has a higher opportunity cost to make into a full-time career. Solar more than farming became an active Ozark focus.
X X
But Arkansas and Missouri both presently lag behind Midwestern states in developing renewable energy. This may be because our cost of energy is cheaper in the Ozarks than in northern states. This may be in part due to our mild climate, but Missouri historically has been a heavy user of coal to generate electricity.
Energy is no longer a project area for the Ozark Resource Center, but the board still supports science projects. In recent years, major funding has been protecting groundwater in the Ozark karst topography through video and fieldtrips for local people and students.
One person who credits New Life Farm with helping him develop a career in renewable energy is the late Ron Hughes, from Little Rock and a long-time Ozark resident. Before dying this summer, Ron and his family drafted his impressively thoughtful obituary, which is posted on the Ark. Democrat-Gazette website and elsewhere. It states,
In the mid-1970s while still living on a farm in Missouri, Ron became interested in energy conservation, which was to become the bedrock of his career for the next 45 years. He took a class on the energy efficiency of houses and he became part of a Missouri non-profit that designed air coolers and solar heaters. Ron worked nationwide with state energy offices to develop similar systems and eventually set up his own company to evaluate and improve residential energy efficiency. Over time he became known in the industry as “the father of HERS (Home Energy Rating Systems).” His mission was for every new home in the country to have a label telling the buyer how much it would cost to heat and cool the house. To date, over 3.4 million homes in the U.S. have been HERS tested and labeled.
The non-profit Ron Hughes helped start and sustain was then known as New Life Farm. It inspired many people to develop interest in useful careers by hosting workshops and demonstration projects.
I remember Ron as enthusiasticly encouraging people to become involved in new projects. Part of this came from his leading the Hot Mulch Band that played at local gatherings. More of his feelings for energy related projects came from being involved with building efficient structures on the farm where he lived along Bryant Creek in Ozark County, MO.
X X
In its early days, energy was the main focus for New Life Farm and for Edd Jefford’s Ozark Access Catalog published from Eureka Springs, Ark. Renewable energy, still a distant, bright possibility in the 1970s, attracted people to get involved. Now photovoltaic technology has made solar power often cheaper than the grid and possible everywhere.
Another organization inspiring me and others was the Wisconsin-based Midwest Renewable Energy Association (MREA). It’s a bit like the ORC on steroids. While the ORC has evolved to help start or maintain a variety of projects, the MREA focuses solely on renewable energy issues. Their annual gathering near Stevens Point, Wisconsin, attracts 20,000 visitors during most summer solstice weekends. Home to the state university’s major conservation and wildlife departments, this rural environment attracted young people to become local homesteaders. The northern Midwest has a more challenging winter than the Ozarks. Perhaps this, and a large population used to Nordic cooperative economic planning, suggests why the MREA has developed such a focus on renewable energy.
During the late ‘70s in Rolla I met an architect designing earth-sheltered solar homes. Tim Montgomery used technology developed by Mike and Dan Chiles from Springfield to move heat from roof-installed solar water heaters into our massive concrete floor to provide steady warmth all winter long. We also had a small boiler in our wood stove to help heat water circulating the special radiant floor tubing the Chiles brothers developed. The Chiles also helped develop the Meadow Creek project near Fox, AR, as a demonstration center.
We received a solar tax credit from President Jimmy Carter’s federal Department of Energy to build our solar house near St. James. Missouri’s Department of Natural Resources also had grants which helped pay for renewable technology.
Building the house and maintaining the solar energy features proved to be an intellectual and physical challenge. After 25 years we could see major renovations would be best for Okra Acres, as we affectionately called the place. We decided to sell and move to the wilds of Shannon County. Before putting the house on the market, we calculated our total heating expense compared to the cost of a similar house with conventional heating. Our solar house proved to be a little cheaper than the average home. Sometime after the MO DNR ended their residential solar grant, I inquired at the agency about doing an oral history of home owners who used state grants for new homes. The records had been thrown away.
I thought it would be fascinating to see how people felt about the state aid to go solar. But I had to assume it was a relatively small program that hadn’t attracted much attention, at least in state bureaucracy.
X X
Until recently going solar has been an individual household decision. Now more options are becoming available for families and organizations.
One of the newer options is community solar. All northern Midwest states have active community solar programs. The MREA has started a program called ‘Rise Up Midwest’ to encourage more renewable energy in their communities. The federal government this year also has a new effort to encourage more solar power, the $10 million Community Power Accelerator Prize.
Community solar gives local customers a way to invest in renewable energy without necessarily having PV panels on their property. Community solar allows energy users to subscribe to a shared system of solar panels.
So far Missouri and Arkansas have been slow to adopt community solar projects. One investor-owned utility in Saint Louis, Ameren, has seen more than 2,000 of its customers sign up for power generated from its Montgomery County Community Solar Center near the northern Ozark border. More generation is planned on the site as more customers sign up.
In Springdale, the Ozark Electric Co-operative has been serving northwest Arkansas and northeast Oklahoma for 80 years. They’ve developed a community solar project to oversee installation of PV collectors on residences or allow customers to buy power from a solar generating facility.
Undoubtedly other projects are being considered elsewhere in the Ozarks.
In April this year the federal Department of Energy announced the 25 initial winners of its Community Power Accelerator Prize of $50,000 for each winner. One of the winning submissions came from an Ozark group led by AV3 Energy, a Rolla-based developer which has completed one community solar project earlier among its other renewable energy projects.
Their plan calls for two facilities, one in an abandoned Rolla landfill, another in unutilized corner in a St. James industrial park. The DOE prize allows the Phelps County group to complete predevelopment planning for these two community solar projects.
A friend from long ago in St. James has taken the job of doing this planning. Phyllis Meagher has been a computer specialist, a grape farmer and winemaker, but now retired from all that, she’s been active in a variety of community projects.
I first met Phyllis on a solar home tour a group of friends organized in St. James and Rolla in the 1980s. Now, 40 years later, she’s still interested in and involved with solar.
“We’re starting a community solar farm association,” she said when I asked for details. “Our project is a way for people to pool money to have solar power and put more renewable energy into the grid. It’s an exciting, challenging project. We competed with 180 communities around the county to reach the funding phase of the federal program. If our business plan is approved, we will receive a $200,000 grant for final implementation of the process.”
It’s a lot more sophisticated than the workshops New Life Farm developed to build solar collectors four decades ago. But in some ways it’s not that much different. New technology needs local people involved to assure benefits of development can be shared equally and fairly. The future of the Ozarks depends on energy equality. Rural folks must afford getting to town and back again.
X X
Maybe in the next few years some young Ozark scholars and activists can put together a 50-year re-appraisal of Ozark renewable energy developments and associated in-migration, on which Edd Jeffords focused in planning a May 1976 Conference in Eureka Springs. The proceedings of that conference make fascinating reading five decades later.
Jeffords did a great job encouraging several hundred people to discuss the future of the Ozarks. He brought together inspired academics with famous names including the geographer Calvin Beal, novelist Donald Harington, and Joel Davidson, the solar expert. Davidson wrote on the Ozarks as a colony exploited by timber and railroad tycoons as well as by contemporary real estate developers and sometimes transitory, clueless back-to-the-landers.
The published proceedings have some 20 different papers in 200 pages on social change in the Ozarks, plus workshop dialogue transcripts, other feedback, and media responses to the conference. It would be worth reprinting.
It might also be worth having another conference on the Ozark’s future. Surely some major corporations based in our region could kick in a few bucks to make this happen. We have many large businesses that have helped change life in our region, sometimes for the better.
These corporations know where future development is likely to go. We need transparency for our future and environments health.
Most of us hillbillies just pray we’ll be able to tap into some reasonably priced energy and have juice to keep cell phones and autonomous driving vehicles powered up. As Ron Hughes and his band mates wrote in their classic song, Ozark Mountain Mother Earth News Freak:
Self-sufficient that’s the name of the game
gonna get myself a system self-contained,
a wind mill to give me my electricity,
no phone in my dome, I’ll use ESP.
X X X