Skull Valley home getting solar panels

A national environmental foundation is hoping to make Skull Valley, once slated to house a nuclear repository, a model for renewable energy.

Honor the Earth is installing a solar-electric array at the home of Margene Bullcreek, who led opposition to the Skull Valley Band of Goshute Indians' agreement with Private Fuel Storage to temporarily store up to 44,000 tons of spent nuclear fuel on the reservation 50 miles west of Salt Lake City.

"We're hoping this is a replicable model that does get replicated on other people's homes," said Yana Garcia, pilot project coordinator for the foundation's Energy Justice Campaign. "It's also a national model across Native America."

Bullcreek's home was chosen because of her efforts to stymie the PFS deal, Garcia said, and the environmental group plans to offset Bullcreek's energy costs. The project also includes education on solar energy in Skull Valley, and Garcia said the hope is to similarly equip other homes there.

Bullcreek hopes the project will help heal the yearslong division among members of the small band over the nuclear deal.

But she admits, "We're not getting as many supporters as I'd like to see."

The band and PFS recently filed a lawsuit challenging Department of Interior rulings that killed the deal last year.

"We are still for it," said Chairman Lawrence Bear of the PFS deal, which many in the band saw as a lucrative economic development project. "A lot of politicians say it's dead. It's not dead."

Bear said he didn't know anything about the solar project or whether it would benefit the small band.

"Margene didn't even talk to us about that," he said. "She didn't go through the proper channels."

Bullcreek called Bear's comments more of the same, as she has accused tribal leaders of punishing her opposition to the project by fabricating rules that have prevented her from improving her home.

Now, Bullcreek hopes her home will become a model that is used on other homes on the reservation, and elsewhere.

"They can encourage people to go solar, rather than make radioactive waste," she said.

The 10-foot-by-10-foot solar array will consist of two rows of five solar panels, mounted atop a pole, producing up to 1.8 kilowatts each day, said Johnny Weiss, executive director of the Colorado-based nonprofit Solar Energy International, a partner in the project.