SOLAQUA: Sundog Solar
by Ross Rice
It’s a very ambitious plan, that’s for damn sure.
I mean, check this out: a large complex just outside of Chatham (near the Taconic) that would house a restaurant/pub, art gallery, retail space, theater, and an outdoor plaza with a stage—interconnected with incubator businesses, a fully equipped foundry for metal works, ceramics, and glass-blowing, manufacturing space for solar-ready home building components, and a biofuel/hydrogen vehicle conversion station. All of this adjacent to 180 acres with locally-produced modular homes, and all buildings powered by solar, hydroelectric, and hydrogen….with the goal of zero power costs and zero carbon footprint. A self-sustaining eco-community of creative people and entrepreneurs, enjoying the liberation from oil, coal, and nuclear power needs. Pretty ambitious, all right.
You got a better idea?
Big plans like these take time, though. And yes, money. And yes, people who get the plan and make it work. But first you had really better have a bona fide visionary. Like Jody Rael.
When I pull in to the address of Solaqua provided by Mr. Rael, I find myself at the north end of an aging array of buildings, clearly an old mill of some kind, sitting atop Stonykill Creek, which runs along Rte. 295 just northeast of Chatham. Huh. Smack dab in the parking area, a prominent cluster of sturdy-looking solar arrays point in a southerly direction, in front of a medium-sized warehouse, where bright orange and green colored banners announce the presence and contact information of SunDog Solar. But the sign in front of the warehouse reads Kling Magnetics. Hmm. I walk into the lobby which, frankly, has a college dorm type feel, a stationary bicycle (more like a velocipede) festooned with mini-lites sits idle by the door. Just up some stairs—ah yes, a door with logos. This must be the place.
Upon entering the office area, something just looks a little weird, and it takes me a good couple of minutes to figure it out: there are magnets stuck all over almost every wall. As someone with a home office, this concept is totally working for me.
Jody Rael invites me into the conference room. I am instantly reminded of a theatre professor I once knew: older, wiser, north-to-south cranial hair migration and compact, with an avuncular charm, a vitality and energy—a look in his eye that said he knew something he knew everybody else wanted to know, and is glad to finally be asked.
OK, I’m asking. What the heck is going on here? Where’s all the cool stuff from the website? What is the plan here, and is it in effect? And how did you get that stuff to stick to the walls?
Very patiently, and undoubtedly with no small amount of practice, Jody Rael explains to me his grand idea. Something called: Solaqua.
Jody’s father Sol Rael had a good business in the City back in the day as a major manufacturer of magnetic photo albums, and developing the magnetic playing card in 1966. Quite often, weekends were spent upstate in Columbia County, instilling an appreciation of the area in young Jody. Magnets were always a passion, so it was no surprise that Jody found himself in the family business. But there were major problems. Korean companies were flooding the market with dirt-cheap photo albums, undercutting American companies to the point of elimination. You know the story.
An old family friend and ex-salesman cornered Jody at a trade show, and counseled dropping the photo album stuff, concentrating on the magnet business, and moving upstate. Sounded good to Jody, who remembered good times up north, so he bugged his dad about it whenever he could. One day Sol called in Jody to tell him: I want you to run the magnet business, and move it upstate. Jody smiled. Great idea, Dad…glad you thought of it…
So in 1984, Jody was looking around Columbia County, and became very interested in a particular piece of property just outside of Chatham. A warehouse that was at the north end of Columbia Box Board paper mill, where newspaper and cardboard went in one end, and came out paperboard and chipboard the other. The warehouse was steam-heated underground by the mill, was the perfect size, and there was a good deal on the lease.
The very building we’re sitting in now.
But the deal didn’t go through. Columbia Box Board was in sales negotiations with York Paper for the whole property, and York let it be known they wouldn’t honor the lease if the deal went through, so Jody set up shop in Hudson instead. The York deal fell apart, and Columbia contiued on at the mill property.
Fast-forward to twelve years later, the owners of the mill suddenly announced that they were closing. In two weeks. This was a bit of a surprise, as the mill had been pretty active, operating 24/7, with a lot of work making game boards for Massachusetts’ Parker Brothers. Apparently, necessary growth for the mill was difficult due to the site being somewhat squeezed between the road and the active railroad line, so they wanted out quickly. Still interested in that just-right warehouse space, Jody inquired about subdividing it off, but was told it was the whole mill or nothing. Two years later, Jody got the whole thing, including 200 acres of land on both sides of the railroad track. Kling Magnetics moved into the long-coveted space in 1996, but there was also this whole ex-recycled paper mill and a bunch of land. OK, what the hell can be done with all that?
What to do, indeed. Well, how about something big? Solaqua Power and Art: a sun and water powered art and technology center and self-sustaining community, with multi-use venues onsite. A larger vision emerged from the necessity of making use of this space, but we are talking about what once was a functioning paper mill, albeit a small recycling one. Part of the property consists of filled-in holding tanks used by the mill. Trace amounts of PCB’s were found in early sediment tests, but the property’s sellers were held to rigorous qualifications before the deal went through, passing Phase Three remediation. Jody also got some word that the environmental lawyer for the mill was interested in purchasing the property, making a tangible offer. Oh, was he now? That, plus the knowledge that most pollutants had already been washed downstream over the years, gave Jody confidence in the deal and that the land was environmentally viable.
With space no longer a problem, it was time to get some money into the project. First of all, Kling Magnetics was the main business engine, with the ability to magnetize just about anything, including paint (hence the magnets on the office walls) and flexible thin steel plates. On the day I visit, Jody takes me on the floor where several people are operating cutters, laminators, and packaging devices, all magnetic objects, including the playing cards. The entire 20,000 square feet warehouse is heated by vegetable oil he’s collected for the last year and a half, and used to fire a 500,000 BTU boiler that sends hot water through the original steam system. Kling hums along nicely. . . let’s face it, people never get tired of magnetic stuff.
Jody then worked on the “sol” part of Solaqua, starting SunDog Solar for retailing and installing solar PV (photovoltaic) arrays, solar hot water systems and bio-spray foam insulation. Jody had been working with solar since the seventies, even designing and building a solar powered PA system, called the “GEM Car,” that he takes around to fairs and events around the area, and at present is parked in the corner of the warehouse. Built onto a futuristic looking electric car, it sports solar panels built into the vertically opening doors. Once raised and exposed to sunlight, they power a 200-watt Bose system within, with help from a small cluster of batteries. Not big enough for a mondo rock show, but still pretty cool. (It’s available to rent, too.)
As well as providing the latest in PV, SunDog has also gotten funding from NYSERDA (New York State Research and Development Authority) to do some comparative testing between standard PV flat plate collectors and evacuated tube panels. According to Jody, the evacuated tubes, if they prove to be as efficient and easy to use as flat plates, will reduce costs significantly. He points out an evacuated tube array on the roof, with adjacent tank for hot water. It’s been working fine all winter, even with the tank outdoors.
So, two viable incubator businesses, one addressing the independent power precept—what next? Well, part of the land is up for sale as a land trust, priced below market value, with the proceeds hopefully funding the mill reconstruction. Jody has had the concrete tested by the Troy Architectural Program (TAP) in the main processing buildings, and after the stabilization report, local experts are helping to restore the buildings to usable standards. A call to artists is still in the works, and the word is out for glass, metal, and ceramic artists for space and use of the planned foundry.
Jody wants people to see burning hydrogen at work in his on-site forge and foundry, “so that people see, and get a feeling: whoa, that’s burning hydrogen! People say ‘hydrogen economy, that’s a joke’, well, what do you think we have now? Anything we burn now: wood, coal, oil—the energy comes from hydrogen.”
Jody has big plans for a hydrogen converter, to use the excess power generated that the grid won’t pay for from his arrays. Apparently the net metering laws in NY State won’t let the meter run backward for commercial ventures. You can probably thank the utilities lobby for that.
Jody already has difficulty with the well-connected utilities. “[They] look at my 12 kilowatts as competition, and if more people put up 12 kilowatts, then how are they going to justify building those three power plants that they want you to supply 18 billion dollars of tax deferment for? Or better yet, to build more nuclear plants, since they’re so ‘green’ and ‘sustainable.’” (Maximum sarcasm here.)
Citing the new German model for power self-sustenance, Jody points out, “If you put in your solar system (in Germany), the utility pays you the first year five times the amount you would have to have paid for the electricity had you bought it, with a sliding scale downwards over time. You pay for your system in about five years. After that, you’re on par with the system, and they pay you. You’re being paid by your government to produce electricity!
“We’ve known we’ve had this technology all through this industrial age that de-couples people from the meter and the monthly bill. And that the government and the industry wants a meter on your house, they want you to pay every month, put 50,80,100 dollars in your tank every week. The idea that you could be gathering sunlight and storing it as hydrogen, and you own it; you’re the power producer—it’s terrifying to them! It’s inevitable, and it’s what they don’t want to have happen.”
Don’t count on their stopping Jody. Slowly, but inexorably, the grand plan that is Solaqua moves forward. The goal of having it in full swing in 2009 is achievable. The town of Chatham fully embraces the project, unlike recent and upcoming potential development projects in Rosendale, Pine Plains, and Belleayre. The community concept over subdivision appeals to all involved, and Solaqua executive director Cherie Miller Schwartz will be presenting a plan before the Chatham town planning board this summer concentrating on plans for renovating warehouses on either end of the mill property, around 9,000 square feet of space to be utilized for events and the creation of the foundry. A $50,000 grant from the USDA is earmarked for powering one of the buildings. It’s painstaking, but little by little, real progress is made.
After leaving the future Solaqua complex, I have to admit: OK, I was a little disappointed at first to see that the grand Solaqua plan still had a ways to go. But I’m impressed with Jody’s determination and long-range planning. This site has great potential, and here is a group of people with an amazing vision: a place where people who create things of human and artistic value can flourish in an eco-friendly environment, without buying and selling into the non-sustainable lifestyle constantly being foisted on the unsuspecting public by the energy industries. When Jody Rael points it out, I can see it: the restaurant/brew pub, the outdoor plaza, the theater, the shops, the hydrogen hot foundry with smiths and glass-blowers, the potential community being offered, certainly unlike any community ever even considered these days. I see it very clearly, thank you. . . and yes, I support this idea. Why not?
Well, you gotta start somewhere. You got a better idea?
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