closely connected Nevada community wants power it can count on
Burning Man jump-off point plans microgrid with Energizing Rural Communities prize
FUNDING SOURCE
Bipartisan Infrastructure law
partner organization
Resource Rural
Gerlach, Nevada, proclaims itself the “potluck capital of the world.” There are lots of community events, like a chili cookoff each October. Every Friday the 13th is an excuse for a garage bar pub crawl around town. “Population: wanted (sometimes),” reads the town sign.
Gerlach gets that population (sometimes). Once a year, this town of 130 people is the jumping-off point for 80,000 who come to the Black Rock Desert for the counterculture Burning Man festival.
That festival first brought many town residents to Gerlach, including Tina Walters, who moved her business distributing role-playing game (RPG) books from the San Francisco Bay area in 2006. “It’s very fun,” Walters said of Gerlach. “We all work really hard to stay here.”
People who live in Gerlach travel 200 miles round trip to Reno, Nevada every time they need groceries or have a doctor’s appointment. Medical emergencies are in the hands of the fire department—a team Walters describes as “very good” at keeping the community safe.
“We’re 100 miles from anything, and our power isn’t that stable,” Walters said. As chair of the Gerlach Empire Citizens Advisory Board, Walters is trying to build a more reliable and sustainable energy future in Gerlach.
In the last year, Gerlach has moved one step closer to climate resilience with the help of a $100,000 Energizing Rural Communities Prize. Plans include a microgrid to power the community center through blackouts.
An independent energy source with battery storage at the community center would allow safe medicine storage and cell phone charging during long power outages. Residents could warm up or cool off when the power goes out. Outages usually happen on the hottest and coldest days of the year, when the risks are greatest for residents. Gerlach has seen a number of power outages lasting more than 12 hours in the past year.
“Typically when the power goes out, one of the bars stays open,” Walters said. It’s a place to gather together. “We bring out the flashlights and, someone’s got a Bluetooth speaker,” she said.
The community center is currently cooled with a “swamp cooler,” because the grid isn’t stable enough to support regular air conditioning or a heat pump, said Russell Bierle, public works supervisor of Gerlach’s General Improvement District.
Bierle said that the size of the festival also challenges the infrastructure of the tiny community, especially in late September when staff members comb the desert for debris. The town’s water filtration and wastewater facilities are nearing capacity. The limited housing stock in town gets bought up by Burners for storage.
As the tiny jumping-off point to a huge event, Gerlach inherits unique energy and resource challenges. The prize helped the town inventory its energy use and evaluate the potential for wind, solar, and geothermal energy generation. That geothermal potential—and the risks of industrial geothermal to her small community—are what pushed Walters to get involved in energy sustainability in the first place.
Litigation has since halted the large geothermal project that would have been built in Gerlach’s backyard. Residents feared the plant would be loud and destabilize homes and businesses. The town sits atop hot springs, and many of its downtown buildings are already sinking.
Walters hopes the town can develop solar power generation in the future and avoid geothermal generation. “I want to lean away from that,” she said. “I think those are bad words around here.”
When you’re 100 miles from anywhere, you have to be self-reliant. “We have our own resources,” Walters said. “We want to use our resources for us.”
The Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, commonly called the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, was passed by Congress and signed into law by President Biden in 2021. The law will invest billions of dollars in federal funding into rural infrastructure, disaster assistance, high-speed internet, and more.
