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The Mysterious Greenhouse Project, Part One |
Bill Hudson | 4/16/09
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Checking my email the other day, I found a simple but colorful invitation to attend a "ribbon-cutting" ceremony at Centennial Park, in downtown Pagosa Springs.
The ceremony was to be held Thursday, April 16 — that’s today — at noon, the invitation said. But it didn’t say much more than that, except to state, rather ambitiously, "Opening in September." Continued...
My wife Clarissa and I spent several lunch hours in Centennial Park last summer. Clarissa loved to stop by Pagosa Baking Company and pick up a couple of their Portobello mushroom sandwiches with a side of Quinoa salad. We’d ride our bikes down to Centennial Park and eat lunch at one of the picnic tables, listening to the San Juan River and discussing the day’s business. Across the river, heavy machinery was preparing the site for a new 29-room hotel the Springs Resort was about to build.
We rarely saw anyone in the park during those lunches. Occasionally, we’d see a fisherman casting on the other side of the willows. Once in a while, a local resident would stroll by, perhaps taking a pet dog for his daily walk.
 At the west end of the park, just past the geothermal water outlet, a small group of downtown gardeners had created a “community garden,” a dozen or so modest little individual garden plots delineated by round river rocks and sprouting a mix of flowers and vegetables. A small shed held some gardening tools, and rarely we’d see one of the community gardeners tending their plot.
Clarissa and I had tried our hand at gardening in years past, in our own back yard a few blocks away from Centennial Park. We’d found the effort extremely challenging. Pagosa Springs has some of the most pleasant weather in the Southwest – for human beings. But vegetables don’t always fare well in outdoor gardens here. Our short growing season, with its late start and deadly nighttime frosts at either end of the season, discourages many potential gardeners. One year, we lost almost everything in the garden to a frost on July 3. Most years, our tomato plants were killed by frost before the fruit had a chance to fully ripen.
We learned to eat fried green tomatoes.
The colorful email that arrived last weekend was sent out by Kathy Keyes, the owner of the Pagosa Baking Company. As I mentioned, the invite didn’t say much, just the time and place of the ribbon-cutting hosted by the “Geothermal Greenhouse Partnership,” of which Keyes is a member. And it also included some curiously Oriental-looking symbols, and five words:
Solar.
Community.
Greenhouse.
Permaculture.
Geothermal.
Then, a few days later, Keyes sent us a short press release:
The Geothermal Greenhouse Partnership will hold the Ground Breaking Ceremony for the Geothermal Greenhouse Project at noon on Thursday April 16, 2009 in Pagosa Springs’s Centennial Park. Mayor Aragon and members of the Geothermal Greenhouse Partnership committee will make a presentation about this community project, and introduce all our local partners.
This community project will be a showcase for the alternative energy resources of our community and the viability of putting those resources to commercial use; provide a local source of fresh, organic produce to local businesses and residents; provide an educational resource for regional schools and adult groups on topics of alternative energy, renewable resources and organic permaculture; and serve as an economic driver for our rural community by being a tourist attraction and an attraction for other alternative energy and permaculture-related businesses.
Ross Aragon, Pagosa’s mayor, has been promoting the idea of a geothermal greenhouse for at least the past year. Last summer, when the Springs Resort began seriously pushing the Town Council to increase the amount of geothermal water provided to the resort from the Town’s PS-5 geothermal well, Town Council member Angela Atkinson had urged the Town to clarify its intentions for a geothermal greenhouse before making a final decision on the Springs Resort proposal.
Acting Town Manager Tamra Allen had suggested, then, that a geothermal greenhouse project might use as much as 100 gallons per minute — a sizable portion of the Town’s 450 GPM geothermal water right.
As it panned out, the Springs Resort pulled their request for more water about the same time that the Town Council approved a very vague resolution referencing Aragon’s greenhouse project. The Council passed a resolution, dedicating 100 GPM of the Town’s geothermal water to be used for some type of geothermal greenhouse operation in downtown Pagosa — probably in Centennial Park, where the Town’s well is located.
The water the Springs Resort had been asking for in its negotiations had been so-called “waste water” from the Town’s municipal geothermal heating system, a wintertime hot water delivery system that serves numerous downtown businesses and government buildings, including three schools. The resort wanted the water, after it finished running through the Town’s heat exchanger, because it still had considerable heat value — coming out as “waste water” at about 120 degrees — and of course, it still contained all the “therapeutic healing minerals” for which the Pagosa Hot Spring is famous.
A geothermal greenhouse, on the other hand, would not need the sulphur-smelling minerals from the Town’s waste water — it would need only the water’s heat value.
And it would need the heat value only during the wintertime, during the months when our local motels and resorts experience a slowdown in tourist traffic.
Typically, greenhouses are built to collect their own solar heat during the milder parts of the year — and many greenhouses never use any kind of supplemental heat, because they are not normally used during the winter months. In fact, some greenhouse experts recommend shutting down a greenhouse during the winter, to allow nature’s natural freezing process to kill off insects and other pests — and their eggs.
No greenhouse should need supplemental heat in the summer months — rather, they normally need an efficient cooling system to combat overheating.
So it’s not clear exactly what the Town Council had in mind when it dedicated 100 GPM of its geothermal water to a geothermal greenhouse project.
Maybe I would find out more, if I attended the ribbon-cutting ceremony in Centennial Park today?
But from what I had heard during interviews with a couple of the Partnership members — with project manager Tamra Allen and with Kathy Keyes — a lot of the project details were far from finalized, in spite of today’s ribbon-cutting ceremony.
Maybe no one — not even the project organizers — really knew yet what this project might eventually mean to Pagosa Springs, or how, exactly, it would utilize the Town’s geothermal water.
Even less clear, perhaps, was how the project would utilize — and serve — the "Community."
Read Part Two... |
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