The Corrales Winery sits just north of Albuquerque in Corrales, New Mexico. Started in only 2000, the winery is one of the youngest in the region, but its owner, Keith Johnstone, has been interested in wine and its long traditions for years. Almost as long as he has been looking into solar power.
Keith took an interest in solar power roughly 40 years ago, when it was first making its big entrance in the wake of the oil shocks of the 1970s. Keith noted that wine making still relies on the same natural processes as it has for millenia, a connection to the earth that he suggests might serve to draw vineyards to solar power.
In general, New Mexico has been slow to adopt solar power given the amount of sunshine it receives. In 2009, the Solar Energy Industries Association reports that the state was not even among the top 10 for new solar installations.
In large part this is because New Mexico offers relatively low electricity rates in comparison to many other states across the country. The U.S. Energy Information Administration reports that in 2009 the state saw only the 33rd highest average prices, paying around 10.02 cents per kilowatt-hour for residential customers and 8.4 cents per kilowatt-hour for businesses like the Corrales Winery.
The U.S. as a whole, meanwhile, was averaging 11.51 cents per kilowatt-hour for residential consumers and 10.17 cents per kilowatt-hour for commercial users, and states in the northeast could reach as much as double that.
But New Mexico was unaccustomed to these kinds of prices. From 1999 through 2007, commercial electricity rates rose less than 2 percent from 7.52 cents per kilowatt-hour to 7.66 cents per kilowatt-hour. Then in the the space of one year in 2008, rates rose more than 13 percent, as energy prices spiked around the globe.
By early 2010, Keith had grown tired of these price hikes, only expecting them to get worse. Hoping to bring this growing cost under control, he turned to Albuquerque-based New Mexico and Arizona solar installer Clean Switch. The company quickly reviewed Keith's energy needs and they settled upon a 30-panel solar installation capable of producing as much as 6.9 kilowatts at any given time. When the system was finished in April, Keith was said to be the 742nd person to install solar panels in the state.
"I just can’t believe that in a state with a population close to 2 million, especially in New Mexico where the sun shines pretty much 95 percent of the time, that more people aren’t doing it," Keith said, according to Clean Energy Authority.
However, with rates rising people are beginning to catch on to the possibilities of solar. The SEIA reports that in 2010, New Mexico moved up to the seventh most added solar capacity with 42.6 megawatts of new installations. Most of this came from utility-scale installations, but a growing number of commercial and residential solar installations have also been added.
Clean Switch went back to talk to Keith a year after his installation was finished to see if he was still excited about the system. After only one year, the system had produced roughly 12 megawatt-hours of electricity, earning more than $1,500 from the local utility PNM, which pays residents for solar energy production, in addition to saving more than $1,300 in electricity bills. With more than $16,000 taken off the initial $40,000 price of the system in state and federal tax rebates, Keith expects that his system could pay for itself in as little as six years, and still keep providing free energy for another 20.
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The Corrales Winery sits just north of Albuquerque in Corrales, New Mexico. Started in only 2000, the winery is one of the youngest in the region, but its owner, Keith Johnstone, has been interested in wine and its long traditions for years. Almost as long as he has been looking into solar power.
