(Nov. 2) – Air Force Academy leaders yesterday dug into their goal to attain net-zero energy consumption by 2015.

The Academy, located in Colorado Springs, Colo., broke ground on a huge new solar array at the southern edge of the Air Force base. The array will cover 30 acres and produce six megawatts of power, enough during its peak production to provide 15 percent of the base’s energy, said Gabriel Romero, spokesman for Colorado Springs Utilities.

“That’s considerable when you look at the size of the base,” Romero said.

The project is the first of its size in the Colorado Springs area. Romero said the publicly owned utility company has several residential and even a school district solar project.

“But this is our first utility-scale project,” he said.

The utility company got involved when Air Force Academy officials approached it last year for help. The Academy received an $18.3 million federal grant from the government to install renewable energy. Academy administrators wanted to create a partnership with the local utility and to form a new relationship with a private solar company.

Neither the Air Force Academy nor the utility company was eligible for federal tax incentives. But a private company can receive up to 30 percent of the project cost in tax credits for projects that break ground this year.

“This was a little difficult,” Romero said, “just because we wanted to maximize the money. The Air Force Academy easily could have put the project out to bid and installed it on their own, but they would have ended up with less, and they would have had to take care of it themselves.”

SunPower and Colorado Springs Utilities will jointly own and maintain this project for the Air Force Academy, according to a press release about the groundbreaking.

Story continues here.

Pictured: No, that's not the Air Force Academy's new six megawatt system. This modest array powers the tent for the groundbreaking.