Novel startup banks on 'smart grid'

Never mind the doom and gloom spouting from economic forecasters these days.

A group of visionary people working out of a green building collective's office in Whitefish is laying the groundwork for a bright energy future in manufacturing solar panels in the Flathead.

Great Northern Solar - the business blueprint sketched by Dave Fischlowitz and Eric Edelen six weeks ago - is not just a promising technology. It's a business structure innovation for the Flathead: a community-owned private sector company.

And, Edelen is happy to explain, it all ties into President Barack Obama's plans for a nationwide 'smart grid."

"There will be a fundamental change in the economy," Edelen said. "Electricity, which is now treated as a service, will become a commodity to be traded."

As the sun generates electricity from solar panels, the owner can tap into his or her own power, then click on a computer program to switch to coal-sourced power, a wind farm, hydropower or another source at night or when the price is cheaper.

Stored solar-generated electricity will feed back into the power grid from batteries when it's not being used. Plug-in hybrid cars can charge batteries from solar or another source, then supply the grid while they're parked in the garage.

"Basically it is the Internet for energy," Edelen said. Replace traditional electric meters with smart meters that report electrical usage in real time and, as a market-driven commodity, the price of electricity begins to vary with the time it's used.

The global financial crisis may have been an unintended way to usher in the transition. Suddenly, hard-hit sectors are willing to adopt technologies that have been available for some time but never put into place because of greed and resistance to moving away from fossil fuels, he said.

The group is convinced the solar panel idea will work here, even though direct sunlight can be sparse during a Flathead Valley winter.

The group headed by Fischlowitz, Edelen and his wife, Eryn Edelen, plan to go with photovoltaic solar, a system that collects energy when the sun is shining and stores it in batteries when it's not.

The panels can be manufactured in the Flathead, they maintain, where the rail system solves a whole list of transportation and shipping concerns.

But these issues and more are being worked out.

Working out of FischWorks Green Building Design Center on West Second Street in Whitefish, where Stephanie Weaver handles communications and marketing and keeps tabs on the array of contractors who collectively use it as their showroom, the group drew nearly 40 interested people to an initial meeting on Jan. 22.

Fifteen were interested enough to get together a second time a week later and start committing to handle a range of start-up duties for the fledgling company.

It's an encouraging sign.

"When you have the right idea at the right time, you don't have to work at it," Edelen said.

"It snowballs," Eryn Edelen agreed.

Great Northern Solar will need solar engineers, people with experience in manufacturing, business-minded accountants, marketing specialists, public officials to act as a liaison, Web developers, legal eagles, administrators, researchers who know something about timing and building site development and the like.

"We can't take all this on ourselves," Fischlowitz said. "This is bigger than us - and we have our own companies to run."

Each partner who gets involved now will use vouchers to track their time and resource input as they work out their parts of the business development each week. As the contingent seeking grants and investigating how to tap into money from Obama's American Reinvestment and Recovery Plan succeeds, the vouchers will be paid.

For now, though, they're doing it simply because they feel it's the right thing.

The physics of electrical resistance will make it impractical to transmit electricity over great distances, so power generation could become a local economy-booster. And clean sources of energy are expected to begin to replace polluting fossil fuels. Proposed carbon taxes are designed to bring the cost of clean energy on par with fossil fuels.

Great Northern Solar's goal is to displace petroleum with electricity.

The plan to manufacture solar panels in the Flathead was an accidental outcome of discovering how low the current supply of panels is.

"Our initial plan was to install solar panels but nobody was making them," Eryn Edelen said. "It's too costly now to make sense."

"But when we get the smart grid and the carbon tax," her husband said, "it will pencil."

This industry will create wealth here, he said. But there's a caveat.

"Gone are the days of greed," he said. The new culture of doing the right thing rather than working to accumulate money is being applied stringently in this start-up.

"This is not a matter of making people wealthy. I want the Flathead Valley to have money coming in from the outside on a continuing basis."

And he wants to give his kids a reason to stay here.

"And make it a habitable place to be," Fischlowitz added. "We bear the responsibility, as humans on this planet, that we have to heal the earth. That's where all our actions grow from."

It will happen, they're convinced, because of the proposed smart grid - and their solar panels will be geared into production when that comes into being.

"Don't underestimate the magnitude of what is about to happen," Edelen cautioned.

The change will ripple through all sectors and change the basic patterns of daily commerce and lifestyles.

"It's going to be the transformation of the horse and cart to the automobile," Eryn Edelen said.

"This will happen," her husband insisted. "You can choose to be a part of it, or wish you had later."

Reporter Nancy Kimball may be reached at 758-4483 or by e-mail at nkimball@dailyinterlake.com