Business

Feds Help Jackson Brewer Go Solar

Wyoming Public Radio | By Rebecca Huntington

Published June 11, 2015 at 10:52 AM MDT

U.S. Department of Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack toured Snake River Brewing in Jackson yesterday. His department's Rural Energy for America Program - called REAP for short - gave the brewery a $13,000 grant to put solar panels on its roof.

Vilsack says that REAP shows how government can give small businesses a hand.

"Here's a place where the government is making a difference. You might have done this at some point in time, but you would not have done it now but for the REAP grant."

The Brewery's Chris Erickson agrees.

“The REAP grant is really the thing that motivated us to pull the trigger. I mean we were this close and when that part came in we were just like now it is a no-brainer.”

The solar installation is expected to save the brewery about $2,000 a year on its utility bill. The Agriculture Department has granted nearly half a million dollars to Wyoming businesses under the program to install renewable energy or improve energy efficiencies.

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Rebecca Huntington

A multi-media journalist, Rebecca Huntington is a regular contributor to Wyoming Public Radio. She has reported on a variety of topics ranging from the National Parks, wildlife, environment, health care, education and business. She recently co-wrote the one-hour, high-definition documentary, The Stagecoach Bar: An American Crossroads, which premiered in 2012. She also works at another hub for community interactions, the Teton County Library where she is a Communications and Digital Media Specialist. She reported for daily and weekly newspapers in Montana, Idaho, Washington, Oregon and Wyoming for more than a decade before becoming a multi-media journalist. She completed a Ted Scripps Fellowship in Environmental Journalism at the University of Colorado in 2002. She has written and produced video news stories for the PBS series This American Land (thisamericanland.org) and for Assignment Earth, broadcast on Yahoo! News and NBC affiliates. In 2009, she traveled to Guatemala to produce a series of videos on sustainable agriculture, tourism and forestry and to Peru to report on the impacts of extractive industries on local communities.

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