Inland Power & Light Co, the Spokane-based electric cooperative, is seeking Leadership in Environmental and Energy Design (LEED) gold certification for its new headquarters building on the West Plains, but that's not the only energy-conservation story at the new structure.

Inland also has set up displays of wind-power, solar-power, and computerized-battery—or "distributed-storage"—equipment at the north end of the building, largely as a demonstration area for its members with green aspirations who might want to generate some of their own renewable energy.

Inland Power, the state's largest electric co-op, has more than 37,000 customers, located largely in rural areas. Its service area stretches across 13 counties of Eastern Washington and North Idaho, and its customer base is more than 90 percent residential.

The demonstration equipment it has installed at its headquarters includes a 40-foot-tall wind turbine capable of generating about 2.5 kilowatts of power, a 30-foot-by-six-foot, solar-panel array that can produce up to about 2.24 kilowatts, and a prototype energy-storage unit about the size of an old horizontal-style food freezer. That prototype, developed by Liberty Lake-based startup Demand Energy Networks, is able to store about 1 kilowatt of electrical power and can be programmed for when to store it and when to release it, says Richard Damiano, Inland Power's chief engineer.

"We chose those sizes because those are very typical sizes to what the customers install" when they decide they want to produce some of their own power, Damiano says.

About 40 Inland Power customers currently generate some of their own electricity with one or more of those technologies and the adoption rate is beginning to accelerate—now approaching one customer a month—due partly to a sharp decline in the cost of solar equipment over the last couple of years, he says.

Though it still takes years to recoup the cost of renewable-energy equipment, state and federal incentives have made such investments more attractive, Damiano says, adding, "Everything is working toward the point in time that these things become economically viable."

Inland Power wants to use its renewable-energy display—located in an easily accessible, unfenced area next to its parking lot—partly to enlighten its members about the advantages and drawbacks of each technology, and is using the energy produced by the display units in its headquarters building, Damiano says. The co-op, though, also is evaluating the equipment from a "proof-of-concept" perspective, he says, to gauge the potential for deploying the technologies on a larger scale.

A wind turbine of the size displayed there would cost a consumer about $25,000 to install, and the solar-panel array would cost about $20,000, Damiano says. Demand Energy provided the energy-storage unit to Inland Power at no charge as a demo, and also supplied one to Avista Corp., of Spokane, Damiano says, adding that the two-year-old Liberty Lake company has said it intends to begin commercializing its products this year.

Dave Curry, co-founder, president, and CEO of Demand Energy, whose top officers include several former Itron Inc. and World Wide Packets Inc. executives, couldn't be reached for comment. However, the company's Web site says it "has several patents pending for technologies that will allow energy providers to manage their electricity inventory to a degree never before possible."

Demand Energy's main product, called the Demand Shifter, is "a distributed, flexible energy storage device, to and from which utility resource managers can dispatch load based on availability and need," the Web site says. The device is designed to absorb wind and solar energy during peak production periods and to discharge it on command back to the grid during peak demand periods, since those periods typically don't align, the company says. It says it will offer the Demand Shifter "in several configurations, from 5kW residential units up to 110kW commercial and industrial models, or combinations of units linked together to achieve any desired capacity."

The storage technology includes a battery, linked to a re-generation subsystem powering a rotating motor assembly that transforms into an induction generator to send power back onto the grid as programmed, the Web site says.

Inland Power's Damiano and Energy Services Manager John Francisco say they're excited by the storage technology and consider it to have strong commercial potential. They add, though, that the co-op's intent with the renewable-energy demonstration isn't to recommend any particular vendors, but rather just to showcase the technologies.

The co-op plans in coming months to use advanced metering equipment to add a real-time display to its Web site showing exactly how much power the wind and solar units are producing at any point in time, along with a history showing prior energy production, they say.

Inland Power offers what's called a net metering program and also participates in Washington state's renewable incentive payment program. Net metering enables the co-op's members to use their own generation to offset their consumption over a billing period, essentially by allowing their electric meters to turn backwards when they generate more electricity than they use.

Through the state program, homeowners with renewable on-site power systems certified by the state Department of Revenue can earn various per kilowatt-hour incentive payments for metered generation, up to $5,000 annually per household.

As an electric cooperative, Inland Power is continuing to seek and acquire additional renewable-energy resources. It announced in December, for example, that it had signed a power purchase agreement with Barr-Tech LLC that gives it rights to all renewable energy to be generated from a biomass-fueled generation system located at the Barr Regional Bio-Industrial Park, near Sprague, Wash.

Inland Power is a "full requirements" customer of the Bonneville Power Administration, meaning that BPA, which markets more than a third of the electricity consumed in the Pacific Northwest, provides all of the co-op's power requirements at cost-based rates.

The power is produced at 31 federal dams owned and operated by the U.S. Corps of Engineers and the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation and one nuclear plant, and BPA sells it to more than 140 Northwest utilities. BPA also buys power from seven wind projects that are connected to its high-voltage transmission system.

As Inland Power looks at how to meet future power needs, one of its key considerations will be how to comply with an initiative passed by Washington voters four years that requires larger utilities in the state to obtain at least 15 percent of their power from certain renewable resources by 2020.

Inland Power last year began participating in a nonfederal power pool, called the Northwest Energy Services Cooperative, to meet some of its future energy needs and to help it comply with the state initiative. Inland Power's CEO, Kris Mikkelsen, has said she doesn't anticipate the co-op will have a problem meeting a 3 percent intermediate threshold in 2012, but foresees a "real crunch" in complying with a 9 percent mandate scheduled to take effect in 2016.