Planting seeds for our energy future by Eric Eriksen
Every spring, I watch the farmers of the San Luis Valley do something that takes real faith — they plant. They prepare the soil, drop seeds into the ground and then wait. No guarantees. No certainty about rain or frost or market prices. Just a belief, rooted in experience and good judgment, that the work they do today will bring a harvest worth having. After a few years in this Valley, I’ve come to deeply respect that kind of patient, purposeful optimism.
This summer, your co-op planted some seeds of our own.
On June 2, 2026, SLVREC submitted a 106-page proposal to Tri-State Generation and Transmission as part of their BYOR — Bring Your Own Resource — program. Think of BYOR as an opportunity for member cooperatives like ours to stop just buying power from someone else and instead own a piece of where that power comes from. It’s the difference between renting and owning.
The project we’re proposing is the Valley Range Energy Park, a 125-megawatt solar facility paired with a 62.5-megawatt battery energy storage system (BESS) located near Cortez, Colo. And here’s what I’m especially proud of: SLVREC didn’t do this alone. We partnered with three neighboring cooperatives to put this proposal together. Four co-ops— one coalition— working the way neighbors in this Valley have always worked— together— creating econ-omic scale to deliver member value.
SLVREC’s slice of this project is 28 megawatts of solar and just over 18 megawatts of battery storage. This equates to 40 percent of our energy supply. If Tri-State awards us this project and it reaches commercial operation by December 2029 as planned, the benefit to our members is real and lasting — approximately $573,051 in additional revenue per year for 20 years. When measured against our 2025 operating revenue, that translates to roughly a 1.55 percent reduction in rates each year. On a $100 monthly bill, that’s about $18.50 back in your pocket every year, for two decades.
The net present value of this opportunity — what economists call the worth of that future income stream in today’s dollars — is $6,572,855. That’s real money working for the 8,000+ member-owners of this cooperative.
I want to clearly set expectations, as I always try to: this isn’t a done deal, and these numbers are speculative. We submitted our best work to Tri-State, and now we wait for their feedback and hopefully approval. But I believe in the strength of this proposal, the quality of our partners at Accelergen Energy, our contracted developer, and the vision behind it. We’ve planted the seed carefully. Now we tend it. We’ll keep you updated.
The future is bright for San Luis Valley Rural Electric Cooperative members — and proposals like this one are exactly why I believe that.
Feel free to stop in to say hi, write me at EEriksen@slvrec.com or call anytime at 719-852-6330. I always look forward to hearing from you.