An employee works on equipment at Abound Solar's Longmont production facility. Courtesy photo | Abound Solar

President Barack Obama has recently announced a federal loan guarantee to Abound Solar, a Loveland-based company that has a manufacturing facility in Longmont.

The company, which employs 360 people in Colorado and manufactures thin film solar panels, will nearly double its employee base in the state, Abound Solar spokesman Mark Chen said.

He said it’s not yet clear exactly how the new jobs will break down between Abound Solar’s Longmont production facility, its headquarters in Loveland and its research lab in Fort Collins.

But he said Longmont would most likely be the biggest beneficiary since the bulk of production is done in the city. The company will be able to add two production lines to the one it already has in Longmont as a result of the loan guarantee, Chen said.

The White House said the project marks the first time this new manufacturing technology for Cadmium-Telluride panels will be deployed commercially anywhere in the world.

It will produce photovoltaic panels using an innovative process in which thin films of Cadmium-Telluride are deposited onto the glass panels, according to the White House. The technology reduces overall product costs.

Abound Solar is a member of PV Cycle, an organization dedicated to creating “truly sustainable energy solutions that take into consideration the environmental impacts of all stages of the product life cycle, from raw material sourcing through end-of-life collection and recycling.”

Learn more about the Abound Solar expansion in Longmont and the federal loan guarantee at the Camera.

-Hannah Gentry

A drilling rig tower in Garfield County, which ranked second in the number of spills reported to the state | Denver Post

While it pales in comparison to the environmental devastation caused by the BP oil spill in the Gulf, oil is spilling in Colorado, too.

The Colorado spill is really spills — thousands of them that have spilled millions of gallons over the last 2.5 years.

From a story in this week’s Denver Post:

Oil and gas companies have reported almost 1,000 spills to Colorado regulators over the past 2 1/2 years, totaling 5.2 million gallons of drilling liquids and oil.

They ranged from small oil leaks from half-closed valves to thousands of barrels of tainted water that escaped from pits.

It’s far from the volume of oil now shooting into the Gulf of Mexico, but a Denver Post analysis of state spill reports shows that even far from offshore, drilling for oil can regularly create unintended messes.

Read the full story at DenverPost.com.

Bighorn sheep herd seen at the inaugural Georgetown Bighorn Sheep Festival, held Sat. Nov. 11, 2006 | Denver Post

Colorado’s native bighorn sheep population is declining (down about 10 percent from 2001 to 2009), and biologists are scrambling to find a way to bolster the breed.

The problems, according to an article in the Denver Post, include construction, disease, traffic, other live stock — and mountain goats, a nonnative species that was originally reintroduced outside of Salida.

Read more about the struggles facing bighorn sheep at DenverPost.com.

Bobby Kenney, of Simple Solar, hauls a solar panel up a ladder to install on the roof of the Boulder Friends meeting house in Boulder on Monday | Paul Aiken

The world of solar is about to open up to a whole new group of Coloradans thanks to a bill that is on the way to the governor’s desk to be signed.

People with shady roofs, renters, condo owners and even folks with too-small roofs (or even no roofs, like farmers who want to offset their irrigation pumps) will soon be able to buy a share of solar panels that are installed in nearby “community solar gardens.”

People who buy into the gardens will get all the same benefits as people who slapped the PV panels directly on their roofs, which means they can get rebates and incentive payments as well as have the electricity produced by the solar panels credited directly to their energy bill.

Solar gardens could be sprouting as soon as next fall, according to the bill sponsor, Claire Levy, a Boulder Democrat.

Learn more at DailyCamera.com.

Boulder-based Berlin Flooring recently replaced flooring at the Chautauqua Ranger Cottage with Colorado beetle-kill pine wood. Other groups have had a hard time finding contractors who use local beetle-kill pine wood. (Nicholas Duckworth )

More than 40,000 acres of forest in Boulder County have been devastated by pine beetles — and more than 1.5 million acres across the state.

That’s a lot of dead trees. And, it seems,  a lot of people are interested in using wood from beetle-kill trees for flooring, furniture and paneling. But as it turns out, it’s easier (and cheaper) to get beetle-kill wood — which has a pleasant blue stain — from other Western states with larger existing lumber industries than from Colorado.

From the Daily Camera:

Compared to Canada and other states with more established lumber industries, Colorado has smaller mills, fewer logging arterial roads and skinnier diameter trees. Canada beats the market in price and quantity for many reasons, including subsidy programs, according to the Washington, D.C.-based Coalition for Fair Lumber Imports.

The end result for Colorado is a smaller variety of finished beetle-kill wood products, higher prices and fewer finishing capabilities — like kiln-dried as opposed to air-dried. Many contractors demand kiln-dried beetle-kill wood for its resiliency.

About 90 percent of the wood used in Colorado is imported from other Western states, according to a study by researchers at Colorado State University. The Colorado State Forest Service organizes the Colorado Wood Utilization and Marketing Program — which helps develop and expand in-state wood products businesses — and Colorado Forest Products, which brands and markets wood that is at least 50 percent Colorado sourced.

Read more about the challenges of getting beetle-kill wood from Colorado at DailyCamera.com.

HEY, GUYS! | flickr user tarksiala

OK, so camels seem pretty out of place here. But that’s the idea:

If you’ve been playing in the outdoors in parts of Colorado — or just about anywhere in the Southwest — you might have seen this little fellow known as Tamarisk.

A species of Tamarix at home in Israel (Wikimedia Commons image)

Well, it’s not actually from around here either and it causes all kinds of trouble. So one Colorado woman has a wacky strategy for fighting it off: she thinks you might do well to rent her camels, which have acquired a taste for the scrubby little invader. People in California have been cutting back dry fauna with goats for some time now, so why not try a camel up here? From Lisa Song of High Country News we get this:

The invasive tamarisk is notoriously hard to kill. First introduced from Eurasia to the U.S. in the 1800s, it spread relentlessly across the West, choking up rivers and out-competing native plants (for a history of the tamarisk, see Paul Larmer’s 1998 article “Tackling Tamarisk”). Tamarisk has survived chainsaws, fire and chemical herbicides. In 2001, scientists released the foreign Diorabda beetle to control the plant's spread. Since then, the leaf-eating beetles have attacked thousands of acres of tamarisk (see Michelle Nijhuis' 2007 story Beetle Warfare).

Repp (the rancher with the camels) estimates that 10 camels could destroy half an acre of tamarisk in 2 days. That’s small-scale compared to tamarisk beetles, which can spread over a hundred miles in two years. So for full riparian restoration, stick with the beetle. But if you want to clear the odd tamarisk patch off your pasture, it might be easier to rent a camel.

(Read the rest of their post for a fun description of what our camel-reliant future might look like.)

In addition to screwing up the salt content of the soil around it (by increasing it) and therefore making it tougher for native plants to grow, Discover Moab points out that Tamarisk’s negative effects include:

narrowing and channelizing streams and rivers;

displacing native vegetation such as cottonwoods, willows, and adjacent dryland plant communities;

providing poor habitat for livestock, wild animals, and birds: the foliage and flowers of tamarisk provide little food value for native wildlife species that depend on nutrient-rich native plant resources;

increasing wildfire hazards;

limiting human and animal use of the waterways

Chemicals? Machines? Beetles? Camels?

Maybe I don’t know which is the best choice to fight some Tamarisk back, but I do know which one is the funniest.

(Related fun fact: I believe I coined both the terms “goatscaping” and “goatsploitation.”)

UPDATE: the much-smarter-than-me Laura Snider has pointed out that camels used to live in Boulder County!

Lion Lake No. 1 in Rocky Mountain National Park’s Wild Basin, with Mount Alice and Chiefs Head Peak standing tall in the distance. Photo by Broomfield Enterprise.

In the future, there may be fewer snow-capped peaks to gaze at in Rocky Mountain National Park.

The meadows on the west side of the park may change as the climate warms and dries, making them less hospitable to moose and pine martens, and aspens across the park may disappear along with the plants that call the tundra home.

These are the dire predictions of a report released yesterday by the Rocky Mountain Climate Organization and the Natural Resources Defense Council, which called climate change “the greatest threat ever” to national parks.

The report, called National Parks in Peril, listed the 25 parks most at risk of climate change and included two in Colorado: RMNP and Mesa Verde.

From the report’s Colorado fact sheet:

Mesa Verde is vulnerable to a loss of water, more downpours and floods, a loss of plant communities, a loss of wildlife, and a loss of cultural resources. Rocky Mountain is vulnerable to a loss of ice and snow, a loss of water, more downpours and floods, a loss of plant communities, a loss of wildlife, more crowding, a loss of fishing, and more air pollution. Other parks in Colorado, including Black Canyon of the Gunnison National Park, Great Sand Dunes National Park and Preserve, and Dinosaur National Monument, face similar vulnerabilities.

Many of these impacts are already happening, as human activities—the emission of heat-trapping gases—are now changing the climate. To preserve our national parks for ourselves and future generations, we need to both stop changing the climate and take actions to preserve the resources and values that make our parks special.

Read the full report.

Colorado aspens in full fall colors | Photo by Mark Leffingwell

Foresters are still puzzling over why aspens in the Rocky Mountains are dying, a phenomenon that scientists are calling “sudden aspen decline,” or SAD.

But whatever the reason — many are blaming the added stresses of climate change — the situation doesn’t look good.

In Colorado, the number of acres with sick aspens — which drop their leaves, are ravaged by insects and can’t reproduce — has quadrupled between 2006 and 2008 to more than 850 acres, according to an article published by Reuters.

From Reuters:

“What we think will happen is that aspen will disappear in some areas and there will not be anything we can do about it,” said SAD expert Wayne Shepperd of Colorado State University.

A study by scientists with the federal Rocky Mountain Research Station in Moscow, Idaho presented just such a scenario. It predicted the near total disappearance of aspen in the Rocky Mountain region by 2090.

The research, to be published in Forest Ecology and Management, links ailing aspen to global climate change and concludes that up to 41 percent of Western forests would be unable to support aspen by 2030. That figure would rise to 75 percent by 2060 and as much as 94 percent in 2090.

Read the full story at www.reuters.com, check out information from the U.S. Forest Service about sudden aspen decline, or learn about what Boulder County is doing to preserve aspen stands after the jump.

For years, Boulder County has been trying to protect local aspen stands by having volunteers cut away small pines and spruce  — mimicking a healthy fire cycle by removing trees that would eventually crowd out the aspens.

From DailyCamera.com:

Aspens are relatively short-lived trees — an aspen that lives 150 years is ancient — that grow quickly and love sun, making them the ideal pioneers to re-vegetate land after a forest fire. Once a forest has burned, the aspen roots, which were protected from the blaze by the earth, send up “suckers,” genetically identical shoots.

Lodgepole pines also require fire to regenerate. The heat from the flames melts the wax sealing their cones and allows the seeds to fall onto the ground and germinate. Shade-loving lodgepoles grow slowly, but live longer than aspens.

They take advantage of the shadows provided by the spindly aspens and slowly gather strength until they can overtake them, usually 75 to 100 years after the fire. In a healthy forest, a fire will burn through the conifers and the cycle will repeat itself, allowing younger stands of aspen to flourish again.

Read the full story at DailyCamera.com, or check out the next county-sponsored volunteer day to revitalize aspen stands, which is scheduled for Sept. 23, at BoulderCounty.org.

Read more posts about forest health on BigGreenBoulder:

Beetle-killed trees threaten Colorado power grid

Battle over toxic beetle killer is on in Estes Park

This map provided by the National Weather Service shows the smoke drifting into Colorado at 9 a.m. on Tuesday. The arrows were added by local meteorologist Matt Kelsch.

The hazy skies smudging views of the Flatirons in Boulder are the result of wildfires burning to the West, including the massive fire in Southern California that has charred 122,000 acres.

“It’s the California fires, but also fires in Utah and Colorado,” said local meteorologist Matt Kelsch. “It’s all kind of mixed together in the plume of smoke.”

The winds above the mountains are coming directly from the West, said Kelsch, carrying the smoke thousands of miles.

“How long the smoke is around depends on how long the winds continue,” Kelsch said. “A rainstorm would wash it out, but right now, there’s just a very small chance of rain. We’re probably going to see these smoky conditions for awhile.”

About a hundred people showed up Wednesday to collect water samples from streams, rivers and lakes scattered throughout Rocky Mountain National Park for the second annual WaterBlitz.

When the samples are tested, scientists at the University of Colorado hope to learn how beetle-killed trees and global warming might be affecting the park.

Read more about the WaterBlitz at DailyCamera.com or check out the video above.