Leelanau Energy Announces Over $30,000 In Energize Leelanau Grant Awards

A local nonprofit striving to convert its legacy building into an efficient, modernized, and fully solar-powered headquarters. A brand-new sustainable hub for a local distillery, complete with solar panels, a green roof, and other eco-friendly features. An Empire family whose brand-new home will be powered and heated exclusively by electricity – much of it produced by an on-site solar array. These are three of the eight local renewable energy projects that the grassroots group Leelanau Energy is helping fund as part of its inaugural Energize Leelanau Challenge.

In June, the Leelanau Ticker broke the news about Leelanau Energy’s Energize Leelanau project, an initiative aimed at helping local communities “look inward and think creatively on how to implement local solutions for a clean energy future.” With over $30,000 in grant money up for grabs, Leelanau Energy challenged local households, businesses, schools, houses of worship, nonprofits, and governmental entities to “conceive, plan, and implement projects that will improve energy efficiency and/or install new renewable energy on the Leelanau peninsula.”

Leelanau Energy has now exclusively shared the eight winners of the Energize Leelanau Challenge with the Leelanau Ticker. Grant recipients include four nonprofit organizations, two for-profit businesses, and two local households, with each grantee receiving between $1,000 and $10,000. Leelanau Energy Board President Joe DeFors describes the grantee list as “a beautiful cross-section of Leelanau,” with each recipient representing a different way of investing in renewable and sustainable energy. He’s hopeful that the eight projects will help generate visibility and education around clean energy in Leelanau – perhaps inspiring a new class of sustainability champions in the future.

All told, the Energize Leelanau grants will distribute $37,500 to fund the proliferation of clean energy in Leelanau County. Read on for details about the grant recipients and their projects.

Nonprofits

The Inland Seas Education Association (ISEA) will receive a $5,000 grant to replace one of the main entrances of its Suttons Bay headquarters. That entrance “is housed within a completely non-insulated wall,” per the nonprofit organization’s Energize Leelanau application, and therefore leads to significant energy waste due to heat loss. ISEA’s building is the old Northern Lumber Company mill, and is “well over 100 years old,” according to Executive Director Fred Sitkins. Over the years, the organization has done considerable work to renovate that facility and install new features to make it more energy-efficient – namely, an on-site solar array that covers 100 percent of the facility’s electricity needs. “But we’ve been growing as a staff, so we’re consuming more energy than we did in the past and we’ve been focusing on other areas where we can become more energy-efficient,” Sitkins tells the Leelanau Ticker.

Habitat for Humanity is getting a $5,000 grant for Maple City Crossing, a small development of three duplexes that will house six lower-income families. The project is using “very high standards for construction,” per DeFors, including energy-efficient building envelope design, electrical mini-split heat pumps, and efficient appliances. “Frankly, our contribution is just one small piece of an over-a-million-dollar project,” DeFors notes of the grant. “But we wanted to be a part of it symbolically, because the entire development is going to be an example of how high-efficiency homes are a way to assist households that have economic challenges. We all know that utility bills are one of the biggest expenses for anybody to remain in households. Every bit we can drop the bill helps.”

Saving Birds Thru Habitat will receive $3,700 for the installation of a new solar array at its Omena Discovery Center. That array “will replace all the energy used at their educational site,” DeFors says, including not just power for the building, but also for “water pumps and water circulation in a pond system that they use to demonstrate the best habitat for birds.” DeFors adds that Saving Birds Thru Habitat hosts over 100 programs each year at the Omena site, making the project “a chance for a lot of people to see a successful solar operation.”

Grand Traverse Lighthouse Museum in Northport will get a $1,000 grant for the replacement of external incandescent lights with more efficient LED lighting. DeFors says the project “interfaces with Leelanau Energy’s Dark Sky Committee,” which is supportive of widespread LED adoption to minimize light pollution in the county.

For-profit businesses

Lake Leelanau’s Northern Latitudes Distillery is getting a $10,000 grant for the construction of a brand-new distillery and tasting room building. The business has been leasing at 112 East Philip Street for 10 years, but company growth and a desire to “incorporate as many sustainable practices as possible” has led owners Mandy and Mark Moseler to plot a new production facility and tasting room. Located at 7159 E Duck Lake Road in Lake Leelanau, that project has approval from the Leland Township Planning Commission and will likely move forward next spring. The major goal of the project, beyond giving the Moselers their own facility, is to incorporate features that will allow Northern Latitudes Distillery “to generate, as much as feasible, our own energy needs.” Those features will include solar panels, a geothermal heat pump system, publicly-accessible EV charging stations, a carbon-capture system for sequestering the carbon dioxide produced from distillery fermentations, and a green roof to minimize stormwater runoff.

New Bohemian Café is also receiving a $10,000 grant, which it will put toward energy efficiency upgrades of its Northport building. DeFors says the restaurant already has an all-electric building, but faces “very expensive utilities” that amount to a big portion of its overhead cost. “Their first priority is to use passive solar for water heating,” DeFors says. “Later, they want to meet all their electricity needs with solar.” The Leelanau Energy grant will support the water heating upgrade, which New Bohemian Café expects “will put a huge dent in their utility bill,” per DeFors.

Private residences

The Nilsson/Riebe family will receive a $1,000 grant for the construction of a new home near Armstrong Lake in Empire. Wife-and-husband duo Laura Nilsson and Josh Riebe wanted to build a house that could incorporate energy efficiencies without drastically increasing building cost. To that end, the family opted for a modular home build, which Nilsson wrote in her application helped drop the estimated cost the project to “approximately $460,000,” compared to the Leelanau County median home cost of “over $600,000.” The grant money will go toward an on-site 8-kilowatt solar array and a solar battery backup, which Nilsson says is intended to supply all or most of the power for the property. The household also won’t use natural gas or propane for heat, relying instead on a trio of electrical mini-split systems. Other eco-conscious features include an induction stove, a heat pump dryer for laundry, and a clean wood-burning stove for backup heat. “We want to show that it is possible to build an affordable and sustainable home in Leelanau County,” Nilsson says.

Similarly, Harold and Lisa May – a pair of scientific researchers who DeFors says “are super into the technical aspects” of clean energy – are getting a $1,000 grant for their new home, also in Empire. The goal of that project, DeFors says, is to build something that is “as de-carbonized as possible.” Sustainable components will include roof-mounted solar panels with a battery backup, electric heat pumps for heating and cooling, charging stations for the couple’s electric vehicles, and more. “This project is a great example of putting together all of these energy-efficient technologies in one household,” DeFors says.

Pictured: Top left, Energize Leelanau Project Director Dan Worth, Fred Sitkins, and Joe DeFors at Inland Seas; bottom left, Worth with Mark and Mandy Moseler at Northern Latitudes Distillery; right, Laura Nilsson and her daughter Julia in front of their new home