Pinedale OFFline
Pinedale, Wyoming 

Pinedale goes Off Grid

In a move to make Pinedale the first town in the country to be totally energy independent, the Pinedale town fathers approved a motion Tuesday night to make the Town energy self-sufficient and go completely off the outside power grid. The key will be to disperse the energy collectors across all the buildings in the Town rather than trying to consolidate it into an expensive-to-run-and-operate central distribution system. Each home and business will be encouraged to equip their buildings with devices to make them energy independent. The power company has been asked to remove all the unsightly overhead power lines.

Years earlier, the Town worked cooperatively with several of the natural gas companies to have gas wells drilled under Town property to give them a continuous ready supply of natural gas which is projected to power the Town’s water and sewer systems for decades. Now they want to facilitate and encourage Pinedalians to become energy self-sufficient so the entire town won’t go in the dark and come to a standstill as happens when the outside grid outages occur.

“If one place goes down, it will only impact that one isolated location, rather than the entire town losing power,” the Mayor explained. “We’ll use natural gas, solar and wind, of course, but we’ll also be testing some innovative cutting edge new technologies.”

One of the new innovations will be to embed high-tech pressure sensitive piezoelectric matting material across the road surface of Pine Street/US 191 so that every vehicle that drives across it helps to generate electrical current into a localized energy grid for Main Street power needs. Ridley’s grocery store will be the first private business to have their parking lot retrofitted with the special matting to provide energy for their facility. “An added benefit from the matting is that the the road surfaces will be ice free all winter due to the heat generated from the matting and traffic,” a store spokesperson said. The School District and local brew pub will be closely watching the success of that project to see how well it works to take advantage of their own high-volume parking lot traffic as well to generate their own electricity.

Another novel idea to be implemented was inspired by a recent winning Pinedale Middle School Science Fair project on ways to put “fugitive light pollution” to beneficial use. Businesses and homes along Pinedale’s main street, near the Pinedale ball fields, and near the new elementary school will be the first to be outfitted with night light collectors that will capture night-time light from nearby street lights and from passing vehicle headlights. What would otherwise be wasted bright night light will be recovered as it shines onto highly sensitive solar dishes and is reflected into special light-magnification tubes on nearby buildings. The tubes contain a special polymer that converts the light into both heat and electricity to provide a night-time heat and light source for those buildings.

The Town is partnering with the Pinedale Aquatic Center and Pinedale Anticline and Jonah Field energy companies to host an “Energy Independence Fair” at the PAC in August to allow residents to meet with vendors who can help them get their buildings set up for independent power self-sufficiency. Twenty-eight companies have already expressed interest in bringing their energy independence products to showcase at the Pinedale EI Fair.

“We expect the homes, businesses, and all Town government buildings to be completely off the national power grid and become energy self-sufficient for their heat and power needs by 2015,” the Mayor said.