In Colorado and beyond, community ‘barn raising’ helps tribes build solar

Energy News Network: Dozens of workers and volunteers will meet this month in a hayfield outside a tiny town on the southwestern tip of Colorado. There, they will unpack and install 3,500 solar panels, mounting them on a forest of steel pipes already sticking out of the ground.

The resulting solar array in Towaoc (pronounced toy-yak) will bring power to the 2,100 people living nearby. It will give the Ute Mountain Ute Tribe — one of three Ute Indian tribes in the southwestern United States — enough renewable energy to begin the first phase of a dream they’ve been developing for 10 years.

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