Salt Lake County pitches sweeping solar initiative

Salt Lake County is all about sunshine for lighting libraries, juicing the jail and even powering Salt Palace conventions. Trouble is, that vision for speckling government rooftops with solar panels would cost tens of millions of dollars -- money the county, quite frankly, would have difficulty raising during these particularly perilous economic times. But County Mayor Peter Corroon unveiled plans Monday to move forward anyway with the state's largest solar-power initiative and to let private enterprise pick up the tab. "It's really a way to invest in solar panels with little or no cost and conserve energy," explained Corroon at a news conference staged in front of Clark Planetarium's solar-power exhibit. Here's the strategy: The county would bid out the rooftops of more than 50 government buildings to a solar-power provider, which would install the arrays at its own cost and then sell the electricity at a fixed rate back to the county. If successful, the county could draw 25 percent to 30 percent of its energy from the sun at a cost that Chief Administrative Officer Doug Willmore described as equivalent to what the county pays now. And the county, he added, won't have to cough up an estimated $72 million for equipment and installation....