Independent Power

30 Days to 30 🎉

Day 13/30: South of the Border

In 2010, Kyocera engaged Independent Power to install a solar array on the roof of their solar panel manufacturing plant using their own refurbished and blemished modules. About 103 kW (512 panels) that were all made downstairs.

It was our first commercial project in Mexico and, at the time, the largest solar installation in the country. It offset a small slice of the factory's load and won an Environmental Stewardship Award from the Mexico Business Center. Kyocera later used the experience as the reason to hand us their Diego Garcia work.

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Day 12/30: An island in the middle of the Indian Ocean

Diego Garcia is a coral atoll in the middle of the Indian Ocean, about a thousand miles south of India. It is a U.S. Navy base, and it is one of the strangest places we have ever put solar panels. There is no grid. Every gallon of diesel arrives by ship.

We have been going back there since 2010, when Kyocera got out of the systems business and told the Navy to call us. Since then we have designed, sourced and inspected three solar systems on the island, the last one big enough to need 10,000 panels and a spare crate in case the ocean got any ideas. Everything we ship there has to survive salt air, 90 percent humidity and 133 mile per hour winds, so most of the engineering is really about corrosion. The panels are the easy part.

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Day 11/30: The lowest solar array in the world

Furnace Creek in Death Valley sits about 300 feet below sea level and has hit 138 degrees. Xanterra, who runs the resort there, had a ten year old 1 MW single axis tracking system that was failing.

In 2018, Independent Power redesigned it from scratch. We pulled the old Sharp modules and two 500 kW central inverters and put 5,656 SunPower panels and 27 Delta string inverters in the same footprint. Two megawatts and it is still the biggest system we have ever built. We are fairly sure it is the lowest and hottest solar array anywhere.

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Day 10/30: Our highest install

The Trail Ridge Store sits at 11,798 feet on Trail Ridge at Rocky Mountain National Park, the highest continuous paved road in the country. There is no power line up there. For decades, National Park Service diesel generators ran the store and the visitor center next door, 24 hours a day, all summer.

We had our kickoff meeting on June 4, 2018 with a snowbank still leaning against the building. Then we took the whole roof off. Sweet Roofing put new cedar shakes on and we put 153 SunPower panels on top of them (55 kW) plus a third array bolted to the south wall under the windows. The electronics live in a 20 foot shipping container we call the Power Conex: 135 kWh of batteries, ten charge controllers and nine Outback inverters that Tony stacked into a three-phase system. We built and tested the whole container in the shop in Boulder, trucked it up the road and set it behind the store on July 19.

It covers close to all of the store's power and saves about 5,500 gallons of diesel a season. Larimer County gave an Environmental Stewardship Award for it in 2020. Highest commercial solar system in the United States, as far as anyone can tell. The elk did not seem to care.

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Day 9/30: Opening Day at Coors Field

On Opening Day 2007 the Colorado Rockies took the field with a solar array on the roof of the Rockpile. Independent Power built it in two weeks. Four days before the opener it snowed on the panels!

46 SunPower panels, 9.89 kW, sized to cover what the Rockpile LED board burns in a season. Tony designed the tilt so no glare would reach the batter's box, which is the kind of thing you only think about once. The Rockies and Xcel Energy paid for it together, and on Earth Day the team unveiled it against the Padres with a live monitor in the walkway underneath so fans could watch it produce during the game.

It was the first solar array running at a Major League ballpark. Governor Ritter used the press release to tell the rest of baseball and the NFL to catch up. Some of them eventually did.

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Day 8/30: The most outrageous job we ever took

In 2008 the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers asked whether solar could cut the diesel burned at guard towers around an Afghan National Army base outside Kabul. Diesel there cost two to three dollars a gallon at the pump and up to fifteen times that by the time it was trucked in under guard.

Independent Power designed five off-grid systems, packed them into shipping containers in Bozeman and sent them over. Kyocera panels, AGM batteries, Outback inverters, and Tony's own pole mount design, which was fabricated in country. One of the five got a guyless tilt-down wind tower built in Montana and a 3 kW Kestrel turbine. Data loggers sent performance back home by satellite for a while.

Tony and Steve Edwards flew to Kabul to teach the local crew (goat herders and a doctor, as Tony tells it) how to build them. It was the first time the Corps of Engineers used renewables at a forward operating base to reduce diesel. First international project in company history (but not the last...).

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Day 7/30: Our first commercial rooftops

Our first commercial customer was the State of Montana. In October 2001, we put 2.4 kW on the roof of the Capitol boiler plant in Helena, tilted up at 45 degrees so it would clear the snow. Two years later, we set up a booth under the Capitol dome for Earth Day and educated folks about the system and solar. The Bozeman Food Co-op came next in 2002, so if you bought kale there in 2003, some of it was rung up on sunshine. In fact, you can still read about the system and see the meter as you enter the Co-op today.

The one everybody in Bozeman remembers is the Arby's on Main Street. We measured the roof in a foot of snow in December 2006 and put 116 panels on it. The owner used the federal tax credit, depreciation and the Montana tax credit to make the numbers work. People still ask us about it.

In Colorado, the first commercial system went on a new apartment building at 1155 Canyon in Boulder in February 2007, about 30 kW of SunPower modules on a residential apartment building.

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Day 6/30: Colorado gets an office

After the first long-distance install, Tony kept getting calls from the Front Range. In 2006, Independent Power finally opened a Colorado location and became a SunPower dealer the same year. The first full year of Colorado work included a home in Golden in June and our first SunPower array in Lafayette that summer.

The next summer we teamed up with Namaste Solar on the Boulder County Courthouse, 46 SunPower panels on a flat roof above the Pearl Street Mall. Two early industry participants partnered on one historic roof, enabling the county to save money for taxpayers over thirty years.

Twenty years on, our Colorado shop on is the bigger of our two offices but Montana is still where the story started.

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Day 5/30: Our first Colorado customer!

In August 2005, Tony sent a proposal for a 1.67 kW solar system to a house on 10th Street in Boulder. The customer was Will Toor, who was the mayor of Boulder at the time, and is now Executive Director of the Colorado Energy Office. We were still a Montana company but were interested in expanding to Colorado. Tony's sister Tina handled the Boulder end.

The system was mostly installed in the fall that year but was not completed and energized until January 1, 2006, so Will could claim the brand new 30 percent federal tax credit. Likely one of the very first in the country! The system was designed with Kyocera modules and a Sunny Boy inverter.

In 2009 we came back and added a second array. This spring, twenty years later, we replaced the inverter. Will is still a customer and we are very grateful to continue serving him!

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Day 4/30: Wind and solar together

In 1997, we put up our first wind turbine in Montana. For the next several years, if you called Independent Power about an off-grid house, there was a good chance Tony would talk you into wind (or even hydro!) to go along with the solar system. "Wind and solar are the ultimate combination to minimize generator reliance." - Tony Boniface. Montana wind blows hardest in the winter when the sun is lowest so they were very complementary. In fact, we had a wind turbine in our company logo until 2022.

Tony's favorites from that era: Whitney Lake in the Madison Valley (Bergey 1.5 kW turbine and a Siemens ground mount). Van Stratton in Clarkston (a World Power 3 kW turbine, a Siemens pole mount, and later a second turbine on a tilt-down, guyless tower we built ourselves). Ridgeway up near Bozeman Pass. Freeman and Larimer out at Pipestone. In a lot of those houses we did the wiring too.

Those tilt-down towers eventually turned into the Power Tower, solar and wind on one structure which Tony invented.