USGS Multimedia Gallery: (Video)--Sacred Power Benefits from Recovery Act Funding

Hi, I’m Benjamin Tuggle with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and I’m the regional director for the Southwest Region. The Recovery Act has not only allowed us to provide stimulus during these very difficult economic times, but it has also provided an opportunity for our agency to embrace green energy projects. Two projects that I would like to talk to you very briefly about are two projects that are happening at our National Wildlife Refuge systems here in New Mexico. One refuge is the Bosque Del Apache National Wildlife Refuge. The other is the Sevilleta National Wildlife Refuge. We’re particularly pleased, also, to be able to provide a contract to a minority business for one of our Recovery Act projects. That minority owned business is Sacred Power. Sacred Power will be providing the installation for the photovoltaic cells. I invite you now to meet David Melton, who is the CEO for Sacred Power. He will talk to you a little bit about how this project is working at these two refuges.

My name is David S. Melton, I’m President and CEO of Sacred Power Corporation. We’ve been Sacred Power since 2001, so we’re getting pretty close to a decade in business. We got the award, $350,000+ for Sevilleta area / Bosque Del Apache, to put renewable energy systems in that location. 15,000 watts D.C. electricity photovoltaic array that’s installed on one of the facilities, so it is grid-tied – supplementing the grid that’s coming from the co-op. The idea is to reduce the draw from the electric company, generating your own power. That’s contract number 15 since 2004 that we’ve been doing business with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife. We are native-owned, we call ourselves the largest Native American renewable energy system integration manufacturing company in the country. That’s kind of an internal joke, because basically, we’re the only one of that type of business that’s doing that kind of work -- renewable energy system integration. We’ll probably have at least 15 people touch this work; the guys in the shop that are doing the assemble, the purchasing guys that are ordering the parts, the engineers that are doing the design, the program managers that are leading the team, the technicians that are actually doing the attachments and the wiring, and the engineers at the end when they do the final commissioning. So that’s a pretty good slew of people that owe their work to the Recovery Act money. Any time we see the wind blowing, or the sun shining, and we’re not getting and maximizing its gift to us, we’re thinking that we’re wasting it. We don’t like to waste. We envision a time when every roof on every house in America – every building in America – has some type of solar, electric, photovoltaic, solar thermal; in the rural areas, wind turbines where they’re allowed; and use what we call the strengths of the father to protect the gifts of the mother. That’s really where it comes from, that the gift is there from our creator, and it’s just there for the taking. The natives talk about seven generations. I can think of how that is: you have four in the front and three in the back, and we’re in the middle. And we have millions of people living here in the Desert Southwest, so we need to be thinking today about our future. So we’re trying to do our little part for the future.